A Match With Sharper Edges, a Little Spark

In their final face-to-face encounter before election day, President Clinton and Bob Dole charted a course for a sprint to the finish around competing themes of accomplishment, ideology and ethics.

To a surprising degree for a debate driven by questions from a diverse group of voters, Wednesday night’s encounter offered clear messages and sharp distinctions between two candidates performing at a high level of confidence and skill.

Indeed, each man leaned on the arguments that his side considers their most potent--with Dole emphasizing ideology and character, and Clinton countering with a refrain that might be termed “Good Times and Gingrich.”

From the first question to the last, Dole returned to two themes: carefully but steadily pressing his amplified indictment of Clinton’s ethical record and focusing more forcefully than at any time in weeks on core conservative themes of social and economic issues.

Eleven times, Dole declared that voters could trust him to keep his word--and nine times he questioned whether Clinton could be trusted to do the same. At the same time, with polls showing him continuing to labor to consolidate the conservative base, the Republican nominee praised a series of conservative priorities he has often submerged, from ending affirmative action to writing into the Constitution amendments to permit voluntary school prayer and ban the burning of the flag.

Beneath his specific answers to the assortment of questions, Clinton stressed two themes that aides consider his trump cards: He touted his record over the past four years and incessantly highlighted his opposition to the Republican budget package of 1995. While Dole repeatedly raised the threat that a second Clinton term might turn sharply toward the left, Clinton implicitly raised the threat that a President Dole combined with a GOP Congress might tilt too sharply toward the right.

Compared to the first debate Oct. 6 in Hartford, Conn.--and especially the metronomic encounter between the vice presidential contenders last week--Wednesday’s session featured spirited and comfortable performances from both men. Compared to the often diffuse town-hall-style debate between Clinton, President Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992, this encounter, after a somewhat fuzzy philosophical opening question, had edge, spark and even some light.

Though Clinton aides believed the town hall format would give an advantage to the president, Dole appeared entirely at ease, venturing out from behind the podium in response to the very first question. Throughout, Dole was forceful, confident and usually cogent, only rarely lapsing into the abbreviated insider-shorthand that has sometimes rendered him incomprehensible on the campaign trail. Unfortunately for Dole, he displayed that tendency most often in clipped, elliptical references to some of the ethical allegations against the Clinton administration.

Clinton seemed focused on remaining presidential and above the fray. Perhaps to a dangerous degree, he never directly responded to Dole’s criticism of his ethical record, instead suggesting at several points that such critiques were a distraction. “No attack ever created a job or educated a child or helped a family make ends meet,” Clinton said at one point.

Dole, meanwhile, sought to undermine Clinton’s claim on good times by pointing the credit away from the president. On declining welfare rolls, Dole said governors deserved the laurels; on declining crime rates, he cited New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

In intensifying his criticism of Clinton’s ethics, Dole responded to pounding criticism from many Republicans who accused him of treating the president too lightly in their Hartford debate. Dole took aim at Clinton’s ethics in the first question, and though the diverse nature of the questions made it difficult to sustain the focus, the challenger repeatedly squeezed in references to trust or the administration’s ethical difficulties.

Whether this ultimately pays off remains in doubt.

History does not provide many precedents for judgments about a president’s ethics becoming a central issue in voters’ determinations, experts say. Democrats tried to raise the “sleaze factor” against President Reagan in 1984, citing the long list of administration officials who faced ethics allegations; conversely, Americans unceremoniously turned out of office Presidents Carter and Bush during their reelection bids despite a widespread sense that both were men of upright integrity.

“Character is something we all think about,” said Karlyn Keene, an opinion analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But there are larger judgments that come into play, primarily about performance.”

Yet polls also show that Americans typically prefer Dole over Clinton when asked which one has more integrity and character. Voters who believe Dole’s character superior preferred him over Clinton by more than 3-to-1 in a survey by The Times this summer, while 90% of those who believe Clinton more honest gave him their vote. Those numbers suggest that if Dole can enlarge his lead over Clinton on questions of honesty, he might be able to cut into the president’s consistent lead in the surveys.

But that’s hardly certain. Many analysts believe that by escalating his attacks on Clinton, Dole may frighten away moderate and independent voters already cool to his candidacy. “That will hurt him among women and moderates,” said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Likewise, the enhanced ideological content of Dole’s message Wednesday night also represent a calculated risk. Dole emphasized ideology even more than ethics in the debate.

He forthrightly endorsed the California initiative to ban state affirmative action programs, after avoiding discussion of the issue for months before an appearance Tuesday. He stressed the small-government themes that carried Republicans to the political high ground in 1994, raising the specter of “this all-powerful central government in Washington, D.C., that would in effect confiscate your property.”

He repeatedly criticized what he termed Clinton’s “extreme” 1993 proposal to reconstruct the health care system and warned of the “long arm of the federal government” in the legislation mandating that employers provide workers with unpaid leave for family emergencies. In his closing statement alone, he endorsed four conservative constitutional amendments: term limits, voluntary school prayer, a balanced budget and protection for the flag.

By highlighting these arguments, Dole could remind people why they voted for the GOP Congress in the first place. But after the Democrats’ success over the past year at branding the Republicans as overzealous in their desire to retrench government, Dole’s enhanced ideological voltage (like his ethical assault) also presents the risk of repelling voters in the center.

In fact, even before Wednesday’s debate, one highly placed Republican strategist said Dole’s recent shift in message suggests that his campaign may be subtly changing its emphasis from swing voters toward core conservatives in an effort to reduce the risk of suffering a blowout defeat, even if that reduces the chances of actually catching Clinton.

As on questions of ethics, Clinton rarely responded directly to Dole’s ideological thrusts. The closest he came was during his closing statement, when he argued that more or less government was not the real choice facing voters. Instead, Clinton said, the question was, “Would we be better off--as I believe--working together to give each other the tools we need to make the most of our God-given potential, or are we better off saying you’re on your own?”

Mostly, though, Clinton responded to Dole by drawing voters’ attention back to the GOP budgets of 1995 that he vetoed--or by emphasizing his own accomplishments. With the finish line now in sight, Clinton seemed a man very much willing to stake his fate on voters’ answer to the classic presidential debate question offered by Reagan in 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Though he never reprised those words precisely, Clinton came close when he confidently challenged one questioner: “If you believe that the California economy was better in 1992 than it is today, you should vote for Bob Dole.”