Subject: (Editorial): Clinton's Baggage 
Date: Published: 7/16/92 (89 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    Clinton's Baggage

    In his acceptance speech tonight, Bill Clinton will look and
 sound free as a bird.  In public appearances, he's been confident,
 healthy, eager to talk, eager to please.  But just off camera, you
 can see the men and women who have to deal with Clinton's baggage.
 In politics, baggage is the concerns, worries, unexploded rumors or
 nagging negatives that dog politicians.  Baggage alone doesn't
 necessarily kill a candidacy.  The danger of baggage is that it
 creates doubts.
    How heavy is Bill Clinton's baggage?  
    Everyone who's read the polls will start with the "character
 issue."  As we watch delegates wearing T-shirts proclaiming "I
 Believe Anita," we wonder whether it's really forbidden to utter the
 name Gennifer Flowers.  Maybe in the long run it's best that the
 prestige press never ran the transcripts of the tapes she offered,
 though the test will be whether the same delicacy pertains to a
 future Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas or Dan Quayle.  This and other
 disconcerting episodes have been submerged by talk of his humble
 origins, but they have not really been answered.  In particular, we
 wonder whether a mature Bill Clinton still feels the same way about
 Vietnam as the young Bill Clinton did.
    There is a second problem labeled Hillary.  Mrs. Clinton was
 appealing in a CNN interview this week, but the problem is not her
 home life but her public life.  Since it is so clear that Governor
 Clinton is a lifelong pol, we look for clues as to what he really
 believes.  His wife's beliefs seem firm and clear.  She is an activist
 lawyer and leading intellectual theorist for the "legal rights"
 movement, which seeks "change" through the courts.  Mrs. Clinton's
 personal interest has been to expand the legal rights of children
 against their parents, an agenda at which voters are entitled to
 take pause.  For that matter, how would a President Clinton stand on
 the broader issue of litigiousness, when, for example, our non-Yalie
 Vice President calls for less of it?  
    None of these personal handbags, though, will burden Mr. Clinton
 as much as the double steamer trunk of a party he starts to carry
 tonight.  Tuesday, hidden behind the All-Star game, some of us saw
 the Not for Primetime Players.  Rep. Pat Schroeder, a liberal icon,
 presided over an evening of Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson.
 President Carter faulted the foreign policy that won the Cold War as
 too tough.  The Rev. Jackson broke new theological ground with the
 observation that Jesus "was the child of a single mother," adding,
 "It was Herod -- the Quayle of his day -- who put no value on the
 family."  An AIDS mother, meanwhile, said that her daughter did not
 "survive the Reagan administration."
    The second party trunk is, as we've already observed, the
 Democratic Congress.  The attitudes on display Tuesday, having
 repeatedly proved a failure in presidential politics, didn't prevail
 in this year's presidential nomination.  But they have consistently
 prevailed in the Congressional caucuses.  The votes of the Democratic
 Leadership Council, Mr. Clinton's base, have kept the Democrats as
 the majority party.  But the caucuses have served to enslave the DLC
 to the liberal agenda.  Nor, as the Carter administration showed, can
 a Democratic president necessarily break this grip.
    The conventional view is that this year the Democratic Party has
 finally changed, that the liberals were delivering their swan songs.
 But this is politics.  No one retires to the crypt voluntarily.
 Liberals still lead virtually every committee of Congress; the key
 staffers are liberals; the liberals give the Democratic Party its
 elan, not to mention a good share of its money.
    Nominee Clinton's target voters, the Reagan Democrats, deserted
 the party over this liberal agenda.  They're patriotic, and don't
 care for the suggestion that America is a force for evil in the
 world.  They think "fairness" is a code word for handouts to the
 poor.  While increasingly accepting of blacks and other minorities,
 they see themselves suffering from quasi-quotas in jobs and
 promotions.  They are pro-family and certainly pro-child, though they
 don't understand what this has to do with the courts.  They currently
 are also very much upset with the pain and uncertainty caused by the
 recession coinciding with the Bush administration, which opens the
 opportunity for the Democrats to win them back.
    In his address tonight, possibly Governor Clinton will deal with
 some of these other concerns.  If the voters this year are volatile
 and angry, it's in large part because they've been paying attention,
 and there are some important aspects of Bill Clinton's candidacy
 that need a lot more clarification.  Though the convention's goal has
 been to avoid disputes, we don't see how it's possible to hide the
 Clinton baggage from the voters indefinitely.
    (See related letter:  "Letters to the Editor:  What's the Matter?  
 Scared of Hillary?  "  -- WSJ Aug. 6, 1992)

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]