Clinton Grabs for Prizes at Safe Pace

In sports, it’s a contradiction in terms to simultaneously run up the score and run out the clock. Yet that appears precisely President Clinton’s intention as the campaign moves into its last days.

On the one hand, aides say that Clinton is consciously trying to run up his score in the electoral college by campaigning in states that Republicans usually count as part of their base.

This week alone he visited Alabama, Georgia and Florida. And he’s due on Sunday in Virginia, which has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only once in the past 44 years. The campaign is even mulling a stop in Indiana, which has backed a Democrat for president only once in the past 60 years.

On the other hand, Clinton is courting these states with a message seemingly designed to minimize the prospect of controversy, debate or engagement with his rivals, the press or anyone else before election day.

Clinton made so little commotion as he toured the South late this week that he might as well have been sitting on an egg, not just a double-digit lead in the national polls over Republican challenger Bob Dole.

On the stump, Clinton planted himself squarely behind such noncontroversial ideas as wiring schools to the Internet, encouraging telecommuting and producing faster supercomputers. He said more about advances in medical research than he did about the partisan battles over Medicare and Medicaid.

At every stop, he praised national unity. And at a noontime rally Friday in downtown Atlanta’s Woodruff Park, where he was joined by R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, Clinton called for more volunteers in the schools, introducing a plan that amounted to a marriage between two policy initiatives he has already proposed and that would result in 100,000 college students in work-study programs being assigned to tutor youngsters.

Only once during his two-day Southern swing did Clinton throw anything that might be considered even a medium-speed brushback at his opponents. His anger flashed Friday when a heckler in Atlanta interrupted his praise of Max Cleland, the Democratic Senate candidate who was disabled in Vietnam. After Clinton praised Cleland’s “sacrifice,” a young man called out something derogatory that caused the president to shift direction.

After first telling his supporters around the man to “relax,” Clinton continued: “Now, the other side, their idea of sacrifice is to take Head Start away from 5-year-olds, college loans away from students, to take the environment away from all of our people and to weaken our future economy for short-term promises.”

But such rhetoric was very much an exception. The last two days, Clinton never mentioned the names Dole or House Speaker Newt Gingrich or, for that matter, the word “Republican”; not until his last stop Friday night, in the Democratic stronghold of Macon, Ga., did he use the word “Democrat.”

Even in a Friday get-out-the-vote conference call with black leaders from 198 cities, he remained resolutely mild, displaying ire only against complacency.

“Don’t be fooled by the polls,” Clinton said. “This turnout question is not an academic question.”

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Nothing seemed to dent Clinton’s determination to present himself as a leader beyond labels, beyond ideology and virtually beyond party.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry brushed aside pointed questions from reporters about irregularities in Democratic National Committee fund-raising--and the whereabouts of John Huang, the DNC fund-raiser at the center of the controversy--with bland, even dismissive, responses.

Asked if Clinton had any reaction to Dole’s escalating criticism of his ethics, McCurry virtually shrugged: Clinton, he said, “has not rendered any comment on it.”

This commitment to conflict-avoidance reached an apotheosis of sorts in Marrero, a gritty suburb of New Orleans where Clinton addressed several hundred supporters who crowded into a sweaty gym Thursday night. Flanked by police officers, Clinton took credit for the 1994 crime bill, which he passed only after fierce internecine conflicts between liberal and conservative Democrats, and later even more intense partisan struggles between the White House and congressional Republicans.

But in Marrero, Clinton presented the bill--and the declining crime rates of the past four years--as a triumph of nonpartisan professionalism over invidious politics.

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Several factors may explain Clinton’s determination to remain so far above the fray. One is his large lead in the polls. As veteran GOP strategist Mark Merritt observes, presidential candidates with the lead usually try to tamp down ideology to hold as broad a base of support as possible.

One senior campaign advisor said Clinton is striking such a nonpartisan tone largely because most of the undecided or loosely committed voters are independents who resist partisan appeals.

Clinton can also afford to wear such velvet gloves because other hands are taking the iron fist to the GOP ticket. For months, ads from Clinton and the Democratic National Committee have pounded Dole and sought to wrap him, as if in barb wire, to Gingrich.

And at Clinton’s rallies, other Democrats eagerly pick up the cudgels the president abjures. On Friday, Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell introduced Clinton as “the Luke Skywalker of American politics” and then added: “We all know who Darth Vader is. Bob Dole is out of touch, out of steam, out of time.”

In this abrupt pivot in tone between the warm-ups and the main act, Clinton’s rallies now resemble a daily miniature of the Democratic National Convention in August, which featured excoriating partisan attacks on the GOP before prime-time, and nonpartisan, often nonpolitical, presentations when the network cameras turned on.

Indeed, this division in tone may embody the paradoxical nature of Clinton’s political recovery. In rebuilding his presidency since the collapse of 1994, Clinton has oscillated between two identities.

Some days he has been a fierce partisan. At other times, he has been a post-partisan pragmatist, who cuts deals with the GOP, provides modest government “tools” to parents and rallies the country to build a “bridge” over divisions.

It’s bridges, not barricades, that Clinton is betting on as he makes his final appeal to voters.