Abortion Feud Highlights Gore Tightrope

For all his high-octane efforts to break away from the Clinton White House, an abortion-funding dispute seems to have defined the limits of Vice President Al Gore’s distancing strategy.

Gore disagrees with President Clinton’s recent compromise in which the White House said it will cut funding for international family planning groups that provide abortion counseling in exchange for conservative Republican support to pay nearly $1 billion in U.S. dues to the United Nations.

But despite the most high-profile policy break with Clinton since starting his presidential campaign, Gore aides said the vice president has no intention of trying to block the accord.

“Clinton is still the president,” as one senior Gore aide put it Tuesday.

During internal negotiations leading to the budget agreement, Gore aired his views, according to administration sources.

“People at all levels knew his position on this,” said one official.

Having lost that battle, a top Gore strategist said, “he’s not going to go out and bang on the president on this.”

But that, in turn, could cost Gore politically. Indeed, some women’s groups, whose support he very much needs, urged Gore on Tuesday to do more.

“He should say this is a deal that should not go forward, that should not be concluded,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

The Gore strategist stressed that if the vice president wins the White House, he would work to thwart future efforts to reduce funding for international family planning organizations.

“Al Gore believes that it was outrageous that the Republicans would use the U.N. dues issue to impose their anti-choice views on the world,” the aide said.

During a forum with employees at Microsoft Corp. on Monday in Redmond, Wash., the vice president discussed his disagreement with Clinton.

“I do not favor bargaining away any critical policy aspect of a woman’s right to choose,” he said.

Gore’s public disagreement with the president demonstrated his attempts to separate from the White House. But it also underscored the daunting balancing act that Gore confronts in his own presidential bid.

The abortion controversy surfaced in recent days as the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress neared final agreement on a budget for fiscal 2000.

In order to win congressional funding of $926 million for current and past dues to the U.N., Clinton agreed to a law that for the first time bans U.S. funding to family planning organizations that counsel abortion around the world. A State Department arm, the Agency for International Development, had budgeted $385 million to such organizations.

The bill also provides a waiver, however, that would eventually allow Clinton to restore all but 3.5% of the international family planning funds. The waiver provides political cover for Clinton to claim a minimal impact from his compromise while still giving Republicans a victory in passing the first U.S. ban on international abortion counseling funds.

At Microsoft, Gore said the compromise “is not one that I like. But facing the situation the president faced, it is understandable to me he made the decision he did.”

Gore went on to say that if he were president, he would “immediately” sign such a waiver--as he predicted that Clinton would do.

The vice president also stressed that it was the conservative Republicans in Congress who forced Clinton into the dilemma in the first place. The U.S. faced the loss of its vote in the U.N. General Assembly if some of the tardy and current dues were not paid by the end of this year.

Gore’s position did not satisfy his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who is also an abortion rights supporter. Bradley flatly denounced the abortion funding compromise and said Clinton could have done more to head off the GOP provision to begin with.

Still, not all women’s groups were critical or dissatisfied with Gore’s position. “As vice president, he has to follow the president’s lead. It’s what you’d expect,” said Karen Johnson, a senior official at the National Organization for Women. “But that doesn’t mean that if he becomes president we wouldn’t expect more of him.”

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the administration is hardly “happy about this agreement,” adding: “The tentative agreement that has been reached is the best possible under terrible circumstances.”