Clinton Sees Kosovo Tied to Littleton

When President Clinton visits victims and survivors of the Columbine High School massacre today, America’s consoler in chief will be doing more than grieving with residents of Littleton, Colo.

Eager to recast his legacy from the White House sex scandal and the impeachment imbroglio that it inspired, Clinton will be on a political mission.

To Clinton, the violence in Littleton that took 15 lives, including the two gunmen, and the war in Kosovo offer a new platform--and a chance to leave a very different kind of legacy.

In recent days, Clinton--sounding almost utopian--has begun telling people that his most cherished goal as president is to eradicate the hatred that humans harbor for one another.

And with growing certitude he claims a direct link between the school shootings and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

Both, the president says, were inspired by “darkness of the heart, the fear of the other.”

That is why, Clinton explains, he is waging a war in the Balkans and crusading at home to restrict handgun access and combat violence in American culture.

And if he were to meet his maker right now, the president told Democratic donors in Las Vegas one night this week, his dying wish would be to eliminate “the most primitive impulse in human society.”

The president’s epiphanies on the Columbine High School massacre and the Balkans conflict grew out of long conversations with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton--who will join him in Littleton today--as well as Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper.

Clinton spoke publicly and at length about Littleton and Kosovo during a four-day fund-raising journey in the West, including Los Angeles, that ended Monday. The events netted Democrats more than $3 million for the battle next year over control of Congress.

The president started connecting Kosovo and Littleton in Seattle on Friday, at a $200,000 luncheon at the Rainier Club--the first of six fund-raisers on his recent Western swing.

Future generations, he said, are threatened by “the oldest problem of human society, which is that we have a hard time getting along with people who are different from us--because we’re afraid of them. And, once we get our crowd together, it’s easy for somebody to stir us up and turn our fear into hatred. And once we start hating somebody, then it’s easy for somebody else to come along and turn our hatred into violence.”

Elaborating later that night at a $500,000 fund-raiser in Portola Valley, Calif., the president said:

“In both cases, there at least is some evidence that part of the problem was one group of people looking down on another group of people and getting to where they hated them and then getting to where they thought it was legitimate to take them out.”

Clinton laced his fund-raising remarks with talk of other unmet goals. But the president time and again returned to the Balkans and America’s violent streak.

He said that the air campaign to stop the ethnic cleansing by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces is “morally the right thing to do” because “when there is no limit to what you can do to somebody else who’s different from you, life quickly becomes unbearable.”

Clinton’s most provocative comments came Sunday night in Las Vegas.

Addressing several dozen donors in the home of Dr. Elias Ghanem, the president imagined awakening in the middle of the night to see before him God, who tells him:

“‘I’m sorry, but you’ve already had a heck of a good life and I’m not going to let you do all these things. But I will let you do one thing for the next 18 months--you only get to do one thing.”

Clinton said he would respond:

“I would like to build a stronger sense of community for America and I would like to do something to advance a sense of common community around the world.”

He concluded: “How we deal with this [the Littleton massacre] . . . will have a lot to say about whether we’re really going to build one community. . . . How we respond to Kosovo will determine what kind of world we’re going to live in.”

The president’s latest quest to influence history’s view of his presidency has its skeptics.

“Clinton will certainly be remembered, as was Reagan, as a president who had the rhetorical ability to comfort a nation in distress,” said University of Virginia political scientist Larry E. Sabato. “But is that the stuff of which history is made? Certainly not.”

Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton advisor and White House aide, disputed Sabato’s assessment.

If the president can bring about new handgun restrictions and reduce the violence and hatred in the United States and around the world, he will have gone a long way toward building a new legacy, said Begala.