Clinton Visits Friendly State to Revive ‘Comeback Kid’

Pop quiz: Which candidate won New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary election in 1992? If your answer is Bill Clinton, you are wrong.

He finished second to Paul E. Tsongas. But that was good enough to revive a Clinton campaign that many thought dead in the wake of scandal. Remember Gennifer Flowers? Remember his self-proclaimed moniker “the comeback kid?” Ever since, New Hampshire has held a special place in Clinton’s political history.

Today is the seventh anniversary of that primary comeback, and Clinton is returning to the state on his first post-impeachment beyond-the-Beltway political outing.

“These are the people who saved him once before. Maybe they can do it again,” said Dick Bennett, president of American Research Group, a New Hampshire polling organization.

Clinton’s overall poll ratings in the state are running behind his popularity across the nation. Nationwide polls have found that about 70% of Americans approve of his performance as president, raising questions about whether he needs any help.

In New Hampshire, according to a survey by Bennett’s group in December, 57% voiced their approval. But among New Hampshire Democrats, 82% approved of the job he had been doing.

“Bill Clinton has a commitment to Democrats in the state because they could have pulled the rug out from under him in 1992 and he wouldn’t have even shown up in the results. He knows it,” Bennett said. “It’s a good, a very friendly place to come.”

In the short run, Clinton’s goals are built around securing support for his programs to shore up the Social Security system and develop greater protections for patients in health maintenance organizations.

On Tuesday, for example, in a satellite-linked address to college campuses across the country, Clinton drew sharp distinctions between his plan’s use of federal budget surpluses to reinforce the retirement system and the Republican idea of using the extra cash to slash taxes by 10% across the board.

But his longer-term goal is securing his personal political legacy. That translates into support for Vice President Al Gore’s own presidential hopes. It explains why, when incumbent Democratic presidents would find little reason to visit a small New England state--a generally Republican one at that--Clinton is returning there in the dead of winter.

But it does not answer this question: Can he do any good for himself or Gore?

“His problem is not with the public. It’s with the Congress. Going to New Hampshire doesn’t affect that,” said a Washington political operative with long experience in primary politics.

Besides, this operative said, with presidential candidates spending much of the year before New Hampshire’s primary election in the state, voters have sufficient time to become familiar with them and rely less and less on endorsements, whether by labor unions or incumbent presidents.

So, Clinton’s clout on behalf of Gore may be limited and, at best, a day spent in the Granite State “is kind of restarting the next 20 months” of the Clinton presidency, the political observer said--but it offers little more than that.

The trip fits squarely into a campaign-like agenda befitting an incumbent president seeking reelection by flaunting the mantle of the presidency. On Friday, one week after his acquittal by the Senate, Clinton will receive Jacques Chirac, the president of France, and will take questions from reporters with a visiting foreign leader at his side--a news conference setting that he has avoided for much of the last year while impeachment issues hung over his White House.

At the end of next week, he will travel west--to Tucson, San Francisco and Los Angeles, spending an extended weekend in Southern California. He will spend several days in Central America in March to view reconstruction in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. He will spend about 15 of the next 25 days on the road.

His first stop today is a public meeting in Dover, N.H. At the end of the day, he is speaking at a state Democratic Party fund-raising dinner in Manchester. Both are conventional stops on the political trail trod by presidential candidates every four years through southern New Hampshire.