Clinton Paints His Reelection Agenda in Small Strokes

Ed Sijowski, a 77-year-old retired locomotive engineer, came to hear President Clinton speak in this Pittsburgh suburb this week because he is worried about the future, particularly about paying medical bills for himself and his wife, Grace.

“I’d sure like to hear more about what’s going to happen to Medicare,” Sijowski said.

But typical of his stump appearances, Clinton in his 40-minute talk had little to say about Medicare’s future, except to warn that the election of his Republican challenger, Bob Dole, would mean “even bigger cuts” in the program than the ones he vetoed during last winter’s budget standoff.

Rather, the focus of Clinton’s speech at Robert Morris College here was a proposal for inflation-indexed Treasury bonds, the latest in a series of small-bore proposals for the nation’s problems that make up the foundation of his campaign for reelection.

That strategy right now seems likely to gain Clinton another term in the Oval Office. But his campaign approach is doing little to develop a mandate from voters for handling the profound dilemmas the next president, whoever he is, is certain to confront in the coming four years.

Items such as what to do about the budget squeeze over Medicare and other retirement programs as the nation’s population ages have been almost completely absent from Clinton’s campaign agenda.

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“The little bits of things he’s talked about don’t constitute an agenda,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Jones. “The agenda will remain what the Republicans developed in the 1994 election.”

Liberals who complain that Clinton has failed to follow up on his 1992 campaign promises to rebuild the economy and improve living standards regretfully agree. “Even if he wakes up after the election and decides these are serious problems, where he is going to get support for doing anything about them?” asks Ruy Teixeira, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

Clinton may also be inhibiting his own freedom of action by the themes he is stressing in his campaign. On entitlements, for example, Clinton has seized on the negative public reaction to the plans by congressional Republicans to curb Medicare growth. But the president already has proposed some of his own efforts to restrict the growth in Medicare spending, and analysts of both parties believe that whoever is inaugurated in January will have to push even harder on that front.

“The president is using the entitlement issue to bolster his position by stressing the idea that Republicans would make unacceptably deep cuts in certain entitlement programs, particularly Medicare,” said Robert Reischauer, former head of the Congressional Budget office and now a Brookings Institution senior fellow.

“That puts him in a difficult position to then present the American people with some of the tough decisions that will have to be made in the next four years on entitlements.”

To be sure, a president’s prime task in a campaign is to get reelected. Taking on issues like entitlement spending is not normally a way to win votes.

“Political figures in a democracy don’t achieve success by jumping off cliffs,” said American Enterprise Institute analyst Norman Ornstein.

And even those who see a lack of cohesion and substance in Clinton’s rhetoric acknowledge the political effectiveness of his minimalist style.

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“He identifies problems that ordinary folks see in the schools and on television in regard to crime and that sort of thing in a way you are surprised a president even knows about,” said Jones. What it all adds up to is “a new source of influence and image” for candidate Clinton.

Clinton himself concedes the importance of substantive agendas in determining success or failure in presidential second terms. In an interview this week on PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” Clinton said that some second term presidencies “haven’t worked out so well . . . because the presidents ran for reelection and got reelected because they’re satisfied with the job they’ve done, but they didn’t have an agenda.”

In Clinton’s case, his agenda has been limited and defined by political circumstances, particularly the defeat of his sweeping health reform proposal, which was the centerpiece of his first-term domestic agenda, and his consequent commitment to achieving a balanced budget within seven years.

“It’s pretty obvious he is trying to avoid huge proposals about how to use government” to avoid being tagged as a liberal by Dole, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University government professor and author of “Boomerang,” a book on Clinton’s attempt at health reform.

While critics scoff at Clinton’s collection of small-scale ideas, the president’s senior advisor, George Stephanopoulos, claims that each of the proposals falls under the broad rubric of three fundamental principles: opportunity, responsibility and community. The overall idea, Stephanopoulos argues, is to “provide opportunity for everyone by demanding responsibility from everyone” and so strengthen the community.

Stephanopolous admits the present rhetoric represents a comedown from the bold vision the president painted in the 1992 campaign, when he called for spending $220 billion to revive the economy. “We couldn’t do everything we wanted as quickly as we wanted,” he said. “But they still are our goals. And we are doing as much as we can to reach them within the context of balancing the budget.”

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Skocpol argues that Clinton deserves credit for trying to make the best of a difficult time for political leaders.

Specifically, she contends that Clinton’s recommendations for tax breaks to help pay the cost of college “would have an important impact on families of average means or less.”

“He is trying to talk about doing things in areas where Americans do want a role for government but trying to do it in a very gingerly fashion so as not to terrify everybody or promise things he can’t deliver,” she said.