Inside Clinton’s Presidential Crystal Ball

Nevermind the polls, President Clinton said. Nevermind the fund-raising and the so-called scandals.

“Nobody has ever done as much for America as vice president as Al Gore has,” the president said Wednesday. So, after the political conventions and after the debates, after the voters focus on who they want to win the presidency, he said, “it’s still more likely than not” that his vice president will emerge the winner.

“In my lifetime, he’s the best-qualified person to serve,” Clinton said of Gore.

Sounding at once defensive and moments later optimistic, Clinton presented in an hourlong White House news conference a lengthy tour of the presidential political horizon over the five months leading up to election day, weaving through the potential political traps of gasoline prices, Cuba, the death penalty in Texas and--in a question about Texas Gov. George W. Bush--whether “command of facts and plain old brainpower” are important when it comes to the presidency.

The president, an inveterate political handicapper, said the presidential race between Gore and Bush has been marked by “amazing volatility” since the primary campaign ended in March. One recent poll found the contest tied. But three others have shown a consistent widening, with Bush leading by 10 percentage points, then 12 points, and, this week, 13 points.

The president placed blame for the recent stunning increase in gasoline prices on a confluence of events: the cut in production by major oil-exporting countries, tight supplies in the United States stemming in part from a broken pipeline and “the modest impact” of clean-air regulations.

Without claiming direct credit, he slipped into his monologue the observation that gasoline prices have come down 8 cents in the Midwest.

He said there was nothing “inherently” wrong with suspending all or part of the federal gasoline tax to ease prices. But then Congress would have to find a way to make up for the lost revenue devoted to highway construction, he said.

What does he think of Bush’s suggestion that, if president, he might be able to persuade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to take action that would lower oil prices, out of loyalty to the United States’ role in the Persian Gulf War?

“We all rate our powers of persuasion differently,” Clinton said, calling Bush’s approach “a simple answer to a complex problem.” He noted that Bush in 1992 had argued for higher energy prices.

Asked whether Bush was correct to allow a controversial execution to proceed in Texas last week, the president said he was unfamiliar with the file in the case, but added: “Those of us who support the death penalty have an extralegal responsibility to assure both that the result is accurate and that the process was fair and constitutional.”

One day after House Republican leaders endorsed a measure that would allow limited sales of food and medicine to Cuba for the first time in four decades, Clinton expressed reservations about the measure. He said he was concerned that its accompanying restrictions on travel to Cuba might undermine “our people-to-people contacts.”

The measure also drew skepticism from some Democratic advocates of lifting the embargo on trade with Cuba; they think the deal did not go far enough to opening commerce with the communist island.

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), sponsor of a far broader bill to relax the embargo, called the agreement brokered by House Republican leaders “a legislative fig leaf” that would have little practical impact because of sharp restrictions on how Cuba could finance the food sales.

Throughout Wednesday’s meeting in the East Room, the subtext was politics.

Clinton praised Gore’s decision to make public the transcript of an interview with Justice Department investigators examining Gore’s role in 1996 fund-raising for the Democratic Party and the president’s reelection campaign.

He took issue with the use of the word “scandal” as applied to his administration in a subsequent question, saying, “Let me remind you that a lot of these other so-called ‘scandals’ were bogus.”

“You all know that the Whitewater thing was bogus from Day One. It had nothing to do with the official conduct of the administration anyway,” he said. It dealt with land deals in which the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton were involved while he was governor of Arkansas.

“So, the word ‘scandal’ has been thrown around here like a clanging teapot for seven years,” the president said.

As for Bush’s intellectual fitness for the presidency, Clinton said of the question: “That’s a dead-bang loser, isn’t it? No matter what I say, I’m in a big hole.”

So, he stepped carefully around it:

The job requirements, he said, are not so much those of generic intelligence as much as of “curiosity and a willingness to learn what you think is important. . . .”

Gore, he said, has spent 20 years working on arms control issues. Looking back at his own experience, as he is wont to do more and more as his term nears its end, Clinton said, “I always felt that I needed to know as much as I could . . . so I’d be in the best position to evaluate the advice I was getting.

“The best is a president that has had broad experience and that knows a lot and that is curious,” he said.

He never did say how that picture fit Bush.

*

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.