Clinton Wins Endorsement of 2,500 Business Leaders

President Clinton sought to counter his challenger’s charge that he is a “liberal” by basking in an organized endorsement from about 2,500 business leaders Monday as the presidential candidates hit the road to capitalize on Sunday night’s debate.

While Bob Dole toured New Jersey, pushing his tax-cut plan, Clinton’s campaign staged a corporate endorsement rally with two purposes in mind--backing up Clinton’s assertion that the country is better off now than when he took office and demonstrating that he is not, as Dole contends, a liberal.

While the words and pictures might cause more traditional members of Clinton’s party to shudder, they supplied exactly what the president was looking for.

“There’s a growing realization by corporate America that Democrat Bill Clinton has been good for American business,” said William T. Esrey, the chairman and chief executive officer of Sprint Corp., who said he voted for President Bush four years ago.

“We share a common view,” said Paul A. Allaire, chairman and CEO of Stamford-based Xerox Corp., who was among 300 business leaders actually present for the event. The rest of the endorsements were delivered in writing. “The president is good for America and good for business.”

Clinton savored the event, which, aides asserted, was the largest number of business executives ever to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate. He had “wondered for years why the Democratic Party should not have at least as much or more support from American business as the other party,” Clinton said.

Dole, for his part, borrowed one of Clinton’s trademarks--boarding a bus for a caravan through a state that his strategists have long believed should be receptive to his tax-cutting message.

In 1993, New Jersey voters gave a come-from-behind victory to Christine Todd Whitman, who ran for governor with a campaign centered on a promise of tax cuts. As a result, Dole aides have seen her campaign as a model for their own.

Traveling with Whitman, Dole harked back to that race and compared Clinton with the man Whitman beat, former Gov. James J. Florio. Clinton “doesn’t want you to have your money,” Dole said. “Florio felt the same way. . . . He’s not around anymore.”

But so far, Dole’s message has not caught on any better in New Jersey than it has elsewhere, and with the presidential election one month away, Clinton has a lead in the mid to low teens in the state--findings from published polls that GOP aides acknowledge match their own.

Some voters who have seen their local property taxes rise to offset declining state aid said they were skeptical whether Dole could deliver a tax cut and eliminate the deficit.

“You just can’t cut taxes and the deficit; I know that from my budget at home,” said Eleanor MacKay, a retired school secretary who attended a rally in Toms River with her husband, Joseph, who favors Dole’s plan to cut income tax rates 15% across the board.

Meanwhile, Dole clearly saw a need to defend his own record on education, a flash point in Sunday’s presidential debate, as well as on entitlement spending. Clinton challenged Dole repeatedly on the subject during the debate, noting votes Dole cast as a senator to cut education spending and insisting that Dole’s budget plan would require further cuts.

“We’re not going to touch Medicare, we’re not going to touch Social Security, we’re not going to touch education--all the things President Clinton talks about,” Dole said. “It’s 3 1/2 weeks before Halloween, Mr. President--he’s [sic] a little early.”

But Dole aides insisted later that the candidate did not mean that he would make education spending immune from budget cutting.

The former Kansas senator mounted other arguments in an apparent effort to show he had a moderate record in Congress.

“I voted about 13,000 times when I was in Congress,” Dole said at one point. “And he’s only found about five votes he doesn’t agree with. So that’s good enough for me. If he can only find five, he’s with me on 13,836.”

Clinton, for his part, did not even mention the debate, but his advisors talked openly about the reasons for the timing of Monday’s event.

“It is no coincidence that this is happening the day after the debate,” said Eli Segal, a longtime Clinton friend who organized the endorsements.

“What better way of taking out the charge of being a liberal than by having the nation’s leading CEOs declare that Bill Clinton is good for business?”

Like the endorsement Clinton received earlier in the campaign from the nation’s largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police, the endorsement of the business executives was a tactic engineered to try to appeal to moderate Republicans and Reagan Democrats who may have voted against Clinton in 1992 and are now wavering.

As he accepted the endorsements of the business leaders, Clinton exacted a pledge from them to help him implement welfare reform.

Clinton signed a GOP version of welfare reform in August, over the protests of many in his party who feared it would be too harsh on children. During his campaign, Clinton has repeatedly defended his decision to sign the measure, which puts the first time limit on cash assistance, and promised to try to improve welfare recipients’ chances of making the transition.

“The private sector in America can prove that I was right to sign that bill, and those who thought I was wrong were wrong,” Clinton said. “The government cannot hire all these people. . . . This has basically got to be a private-sector show.”

After leaving Connecticut, Clinton flew to New Hampshire and then Maine to try to clinch electoral victories in those states for himself and boost the prospects of Democratic congressional candidates.

Both states have long traditions of moderate Republicanism, and Clinton hopes he can woo those moderates, many of whom are already disenchanted with the more conservative brand of GOP philosophy pursued by congressional leaders.

“Part of today’s message . . . is for Republicans who have got that philosophy to feel comfortable with Bill Clinton, because he has been strong for the economy and good for business,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said.

The president appeared particularly ebullient and relaxed in the wake of his first verbal match with Dole.

Addressing the crowd at an early-evening rally in Manchester, N.H., he said: “There may be someone in America who is happier than I am, but I have no idea who that would be.”

Shogren reported from Stamford, Conn., and Richter from Red Bank, N.J.