Clinton Pledges to Lead From ‘Dynamic Center’

President Clinton, offering a sweeping preview Wednesday of his second-term priorities, pledged to govern from the “vital, dynamic center” and declared that getting a bipartisan deal to balance the federal budget is his “first task” for 1997.

In his first major political address since his reelection last month, Clinton pointed to reform of Medicare and Medicaid, improvements in the public schools and the creation of jobs for former welfare recipients as among his paramount concerns for the next four years.

Symbolically, Clinton chose an annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist-oriented think tank that he helped form in 1985, as the forum to assure Americans of his intention to remain in the center of the political spectrum during his second term.

Indeed, the president’s remarks represented a strikingly clear digest of the key goals that he laid out during his presidential campaign--itself an exercise in seizing the political center.

He reiterated a phrase that he first used to great effect in his State of the Union address last January--”The era of big government is over.” But he added: “The era of big challenges is not,” citing a “rare and fleeting moment of opportunity” for the nation to work together on the budget, education, welfare and other matters.

“All our political leaders say: ‘We will work together.’ The public wants us to work together. And our progress demands that we work together,” Clinton said. “The issue is not what is liberal or conservative but what will move us forward together.”

Though his embrace of the political middle has been dismissed by some critics as mere opportunism, Clinton stoutly defended such an approach to dealing with the nation’s problems. The “vital” center, he said, is “not the lukewarm midpoint between overheated liberalism and chilly conservatism but instead a place where throughout our history people of goodwill have tried to forge new approaches to new challenges.”

Touching on issues ranging from foreign policy to the Family and Medical Leave Act, Clinton’s speech served as an advance version of themes he is expected to dwell on in his inaugural address and State of the Union message early next year.

“I stand ready to forge a coalition of the center--a broad consensus for creative and consistent and unflinching action,” the president told the decidedly friendly crowd of moderate Democrats at a hotel in Washington. “And I invite people of goodwill of all parties--or no party--to join in this endeavor.”

Describing a bipartisan balanced-budget deal as his first goal for next year, Clinton linked that job to fixing the Medicare and Medicaid, which have skyrocketed in cost.

During this year’s campaign, Clinton and other Democratic candidates put a decidedly different focus on the health care issue, warning continually that a GOP-led White House would join Republicans in Congress in targeting Medicare and Medicaid for severe cuts. Republicans, in turn, complained that Clinton and his party were misrepresenting their position and engaging in scare tactics.

“I am determined to work with Congress” to achieve a balanced-budget plan that reflects “our values,” the president said Wednesday, adding that part of the task will be to reform Medicare and Medicaid “so they continue to meet the promise to our parents and our children, and continue to expand health care step by step to children in working families who don’t have it.”

Second on the priority list, he said, will be to give young Americans “the best education in the world.” A key to achieving that goal, Clinton said, would be the establishment of national standards--which he took pains to distinguish from “federal government” standards.

“We must dramatically reform our public schools, demanding high standards and accountability from every teacher and every student, promoting reforms like public choice, school choice and charter schools in every state,” the president said.

“I am for local control,” he continued. “I am not for federal government national standards but I am for national standards of excellence--and a means of measuring it so we know what our children are learning.”

Clinton said another principal aim will be to “bring the underclass into the American mainstream.” And he described the welfare reform legislation that he signed earlier this year as just one move in that direction.

The new welfare law, which grants states much more control over welfare policy and imposes work requirements for beneficiaries, “is just the next step, not the end of the road,” Clinton said, adding that the nation now has “a moral obligation” to make welfare reform succeed by providing jobs for those who need them.

Clinton said that he would ask Congress to approve extra money for cities with severe unemployment. But he contended that the more important course for welfare reform is to be found in new projects like one in Kansas City, Mo., in which the state government helps subsidize private employers for the cost of hiring former welfare recipients.

Employers should ask themselves, “ ‘If I were to get this sort of help, shouldn’t I stretch and put somebody on and give them a chance to move into the American mainstream’? “ Clinton said.

The array of other objectives Clinton touched upon Wednesday included campaign finance reform, fighting “gangs and guns” on the streets and expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, a personal favorite of the president and one that seemed to pay large political dividends in his reelection campaign.

Clinton said that the family leave law should be expanded “in a very limited way” to accommodate parents taking children to doctor checkups or going to parent-teacher conferences.

Clinton also said that he supports greater use of “flex time” and giving employees the option of being compensated for overtime work in the form of extra time at home with their families.

Turning to the sticky matter of campaign finance reform, the president repeated his support for a bill that bogged down in Congress earlier this year that would provide new restrictions on donations.

“There simply is too much money in our politics. It takes too much time to raise. And inevitably it raises too many questions,” Clinton said.

The president generally ignored the campaign finance reform issue during his reelection campaign, broaching it only after a series of revelations on illegal or questionable fund-raising by the Democratic National Committee from sources linked to foreign interests.

In his speech, Clinton also said that the nation must support ways to use technology and science to improve ordinary people’s lives, including hooking up all public schools and libraries to the Internet global computer network and finding continued uses for national laboratories. And he said that an array of foreign-policy matters would continue to occupy his attention.

“We must complete the unfinished business of the Cold War,” Clinton said, pointing to the goal of an undivided Europe with an expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organization, stability in Asia and peace and democracy “from Bosnia to the Middle East to Africa.”

Yet for all the territory covered in the speech, the overarching theme was Clinton’s commitment to operate within the political middle ground.

Clinton on Wednesday recalled his speech to the Democratic Leadership Council a year ago when a budget fight with the GOP-led Congress was about to explode in a government shutdown.

“That day, I said the great question before us was, can the center hold? Well, today the clamor of political conflict has subsided, a new landscape is taking shape. The answer is clear: The center can hold, the center has held and the American people are demanding that it continue to do so,” Clinton said.