Clinton Sharpens Comparison to Dole

Pursuing a strategy designed to protect his lead in the polls, President Clinton on Monday stuck to safe, apple-pie campaign themes, letting his surrogates hammer back at Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole on the issue of campaign finance.

Targeting the Midwestern battlegrounds of Ohio and Michigan--where voter surveys continue to show him comfortably ahead--the president trumpeted his accomplishments in education, the economy and other areas, painting a dark picture of his rival’s policies for the nation.

Clinton chose a rally at Cuyahoga Community College near Cleveland to describe--in some of the sharpest terms he has yet employed--the difference between his policies and those of Dole.

“Your vote will decide whether we continue to support families, whether we continue to fight crime, whether we really finish the job of reforming welfare,” Clinton told a crowd that braved mud and rainy skies to hear the president.

The president then flew to Detroit to join in a groundbreaking ceremony for an expansion of the area’s airport. Clinton reminded his audience that Detroit’s unemployment rate is half what it was four years ago and that, nationally, 10.5 million new jobs have been created during his tenure in office.

Clinton added: “The thing that I’m proudest of is that the typical family income has gone up $1,600 after inflation in the last two years, in part because more than half of these jobs are in high-wage industries. We have to keep that trend going.”

Clinton’s aides, meanwhile, zinged Dole for what one called a “deathbed conversion” to the cause of campaign finance reform, part of an effort by the Democrats to undercut the issue’s use against the president.

In recent days, Dole, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republicans have highlighted revelations of the financial links between a variety of foreign business interests, the Democratic Party and Clinton. Dole on Sunday called for banning all campaign donations from noncitizens, and has used the issue to question Clinton administration ethics.

Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, said Monday that Clinton has been a “champion” of campaign finance reform and that Dole actively blocked a White House-supported bill that was intended to reduce the influence of special interests in politics. The bill, sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), suffered a major setback in the Senate shortly after Dole’s departure.

Dole’s “conversion to the cause of campaign finance reform this late in the game is certainly a political deathbed conversion,” McCurry told reporters.

Clinton campaign spokesman Joe Lockhart picked up on that theme, comparing Dole’s advocacy of campaign-finance reform to Dr. Jack Kevorkian “giving a lecture on the sanctity of human life.”

The Clinton campaign also distributed a list of 16 foreign-based corporations that it said contributed at least $2.4 million to the GOP in 1995 and this year.

In his remarks at Cuyahoga Community College, Clinton sought to link Dole somewhat more personally with controversial GOP policies than he has done previously in his campaign speeches.

Dole “opposed the creation of the Department of Education, and now he says that he and Speaker Gingrich will eliminate it,” Clinton said. “Just imagine what it would be like in the United States, alone of all the great nations, to start the 21st century with no one in the president’s Cabinet to speak up for the education of our children.”