Clinton, Dole See Starkly Divergent Outlook for U.S.

President Clinton and Republican challenger Bob Dole painted starkly different visions of the state of the nation’s present and its path to the future Sunday in the first presidential debate of 1996.

Dole, seeking to justify unseating the incumbent president, portrayed an America of rising drug use, economic stagnation and diminished international stature.

Clinton, inviting voters to give him another term in the White House, depicted his four years in office as a period of falling deficits, rising employment, declining crime rates and growing incomes, saying eight separate times that the country is “better off” than when he took office.

“Four years ago, you took me on faith,” Clinton said. “Now there’s a record.”

The 90-minute exchange in Hartford’s Bushnell Auditorium was marked largely by personal courtesy between the two rivals, interrupted by occasional pre-scripted attack lines.

Dole repeatedly referred to Clinton as a “liberal,” a word he used as invective, and depicted his opponent as a tool of unions and other special interests. Clinton on numerous occasions linked Dole to a Republican budget that, he said, would devastate Medicare and Medicaid, education and environmental programs. Seven times he referred to Dole’s trademark 15% tax-rate cut proposal as a risky “$550-billion scheme” that would wreck the economy.

Dole passed up a chance to open a broad attack on Clinton’s character, as many of his advisors urged him to do. When moderator Jim Lehrer, of the Public Broadcasting System, invited him to comment on his personality differences with the president, Dole declined to respond directly. But several times, he described himself as “a man of my word,” implying that Clinton could not be trusted.

Dole noted that Clinton had promised a middle-class tax cut in 1992 and instead passed what Dole described as the largest tax increase in history.

“So the question is, would you buy a used election promise from my opponent?” Dole said.

Clinton opened the debate by praising Dole’s record of public and military service and generally refrained from personal attacks. But he repeatedly noted that Dole had voted against the creation of the Medicare program in 1965 and had voted against education funding and gun-control initiatives passed by the Democratic Congress.

But more dramatic than any differences on individual issues was the contrast between the overall tone of the candidates’ presentations. Dole tried to smile and toward the end of the debate seemed more at ease, but particularly in the early going, he presented an often-scowling visage that may have reinforced his public image as a somewhat dark and melancholy figure.

Clinton appeared more at ease and, near the end of the debate, called attention to the often-negative campaign that Dole, as the challenger, has had little choice but to wage.

“It is not midnight in America, Senator,” Clinton said. “We are better off than we were four years ago.”

With Clinton maintaining double-digit leads against Dole in all the opinion polls, Dole faced by far the steeper challenge in the debate--needing to find a way to break open a race that, except for a few momentary shifts, has been frozen in place since early spring.

Dole’s advisors, seeing the session as perhaps the former Kansas senator’s last good chance to turn the campaign his way, had been hoping they could find a way to rattle Clinton--perhaps eliciting an outburst of the temper that the president often shows in private, but seldom publicly.

But that did not happen. While Clinton seemed briefly thrown off stride by questions about his campaign contributions from trial lawyers, he deflected a question directly from Dole about possible pardons for Whitewater figures without losing his equanimity.

“There has been no consideration of it, no discussion of it,” Clinton said. “I’ll tell you this: I will not give anyone special treatment, and I will strictly adhere to the law.”

Even Republican aides did not claim that anything had taken place in the debate that would derail Clinton’s reelection train.

“We’re not going to make up 10 or 15 points tonight,” said Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), one of Dole’s debate advisors. “But this will open the way to gains as the public digests this. . . .

Dole will get another chance on Oct. 16 when the two are scheduled to debate a second time, in San Diego.

Vice President Al Gore spoke with Clinton shortly after the debate and then told reporters that the president was “feeling good” about the outcome.

Clinton and Dole both used the debate to repeat rehearsed restatements of the central themes of their campaigns. Clinton had a litany of jobs created, businesses started, gun laws passed and federal spending reduced. He repeatedly hammered away at the Republican Congress, reminding voters of the budget bill he vetoed and of the resulting government shutdowns.

Dole emphasized his desire to cut taxes to reduce the size and reach of government and return power to taxpayers. “I want the government to pinch pennies for a change instead of American families,” he said.

Asked to describe where his and the president’s vision of the role of government differed, Dole answered, “I think the basic difference [is] I trust the people. The president trusts the government. . . . I guess I rely more on the individual.”

Dole waited until an hour and two minutes into the debate to paste the “liberal” label on Clinton, but then he did it with such frequency that Clinton shot back at one point: “You know, this ‘liberal’ charge, that’s what their party always drags out when they get in a tight race. It’s sort of their golden oldie, you know. It’s a record they think they can play that everybody loves to hear. And I just don’t think that dog will hunt this time.”

Clinton worked to avoid engaging Dole directly on most issues, preferring to state his own position without referring directly to Dole’s charges, a strategy he and his aides devised before the debate to make him appear more presidential.

But the candidates engaged--to the extent the format allowed--on several issues, including school choice, drug policy, foreign affairs, the influence of special interests and presidential pardons.

On school choice, Dole espoused vouchers to allow parents to use the money now spent on public schools to send their children to private or parochial schools. He noted that Clinton and Gore sent their children to private schools and said he wanted to make that choice available to all parents.

“Why shouldn’t everybody have that choice,” Dole said.

Clinton said he, too, was for a form of school choice--but not one that would take needed funds and top students away from hard-pressed public school districts.

“What I’m against is Sen. Dole’s plan to take money away from all the children we now help with limited federal funds and help far fewer,” he said.

As part of his attack on the Republican budget plan, Clinton reminded the audience of Democratic charges that the plan would have caused Medicare to “wither on the vine”--a charge that has been a staple of Clinton’s campaign rhetoric and television advertising this year.

Dole was ready, telling viewers his own mother had made him promise to protect Medicare, and admonishing Clinton to “stop scaring the seniors, Mr. President.”

Perhaps in a tacit admission of the political effectiveness of the Democratic charges, however, Dole added, “I think it’s time to have a truce” on the issue.

In response to a question about his tax-cut plan, Dole opened a line of attack that he has used on the stump and surely practiced in his pre-debate rehearsals, accusing Clinton of being in the pocket of trial lawyers.

He said large contributions from trial lawyers led Clinton to veto a Republican-sponsored litigation reform bill that would have limited damage awards in civil lawsuits.

“There’s got to be some end to the frivolous lawsuits and there’s got to be some cap on punitive damages,” Dole said.

After first responding defensively, Clinton turned the question around and accused Dole of being a tool of cigarette-makers and polluters.

“Sen. Dole had some pretty harsh comments about special-interest money,” he said. “But it wasn’t me who opposed what we tried to do to save the lives of children who are subject to tobacco and then went to the tobacco growers and bragged about standing up to the federal government. . . . “

When the questioning turned to foreign policy, Dole picked up where he left off last week, castigating virtually every Clinton administration effort to project American strength abroad as a failure.

He accused the president of submitting American troops to humiliation in Somalia after putting them under United Nations command, of risking the lives of U.S. soldiers in Haiti at a cost of $3 billion, but to no good end, and of failing to gain a meaningful cease-fire in Bosnia despite the presence of American troops there.

Clinton responded that the 18 American troops who were killed in Somalia were under an American commander and that the presence of Americans in that beleaguered African nation had saved “hundreds of thousands of lives.” In Haiti, he said, U.S. forces had sharply reduced political violence there. And in Bosnia, it was a “virtual miracle” that relative peace has prevailed, he said.

Twice in the debate--at the beginning and again near the end--Dole sought to turn his labored speaking style and lack of grace on the stump to his advantage.

In his opening statement, Dole said: “Now, I’m a plain-speaking man, and I learned long ago that your word was your bond.”

Later, after Clinton had delivered yet another recitation of his accomplishments and promised to build his proverbial bridge to the future, Dole looked into the camera and recalled his late brother, “the Great Exaggerator.”

“You know, the president reminds me sometimes of my brother, Kenny, who’s no longer alive,” he said. “Kenny was a great talker . . . so we always had a rule. We divided by six.”

Turning to Clinton, he added, “now, maybe in your case, maybe just two.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Face-Off

President Clinton and Bob Dole squared off in Hartford, Conn., at the first of two debates.

“So the question is, would you buy a used election promise from my opponent?”

--Bob Dole

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“It is not midnight in America, Senator. We are better off than we were four years ago.”

--President Clinton