Treasury Chief Urges Clinton to Address Urban Ills

Reflecting a welling undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration’s quiescent urban policy, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin urged President Clinton on Thursday to tackle the subject head-on with a major speech addressing the social and economic ills challenging the nation’s cities.

Although his call reflects the thinking of several others in Clinton’s first-term Cabinet, Rubin is the most senior official to address the issue publicly. His comments stand in contrast with the much-heralded move toward centrist policies that Clinton has set as his second-term course.

“I wish he’d give an urban speech. Will he do it? I don’t know,” the Treasury secretary said in a luncheon interview with editors and reporters of The Times’ Washington bureau.

Rubin’s seeming frustration with the apparent reluctance of the White House to focus public attention on urban America was echoed by his similar frustration with corporate America over its failure to do much more than talk about urban problems.

Rubin, an investment banker before joining the administration, said that he has urged greater efforts to help the nation’s inner cities in speeches and informal talks to such mainstays of the U.S. financial establishment as the Business Roundtable. Chief executive officers often agree that new measures are needed, he said.

But, he said, when they return to their boardrooms, little is done to pursue these expressions of support--to a large degree, he added, because problems of cities do not hit home among industry’s chieftains.

“I think,” he said in a call for widespread cooperation in an urban agenda, “there should be an enormous national coalescence.”

Rubin did not suggest a policy course different from that which Clinton has followed. And in his hourlong discussion, there was no suggestion that the fiscal 1998 budget on which Clinton is making final decisions will contain sharp departures from the administration’s established spending patterns. The budget will be presented to Congress the first week in February.

But inherent in Rubin’s call for greater attention to urban issues is the idea that with it would come a national debate that could spur greater action.