Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305090163
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JILL LAWRENCE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Clinton is getting worse early TV coverage than George Bush and worse early approval ratings than Ronald Reagan. He has made progress toward several goals, but you'd be hard-pressed to notice amid all the talk of failures and gaffes and sellouts.
Consider:
Clinton is well on the way to making free vaccines available to poor and uninsured children. That's definitely an advance from the status quo, but it was depicted last week as a major fallback from his initial bid for universal immunization.
Clinton got the military to stop asking recruits if they're gay - a big step toward his goal of lifting the ban on gay soldiers. But the policy shift got lost in the resulting furor and Clinton's decision to accommodate critics by waiting six months to end the ban.
Clinton took on two powerful interests by proposing an energy tax and higher taxes on Social Security benefits. But those displays of backbone were quickly forgotten when he scrapped grazing fee increases for Western ranchers and scaled back his national service plan to appease veterans.
Clinton's gotten little mileage from congressional passage of his landmark deficit-reduction plan; his unsuccessful push for a relatively minor spending bill in fact brought charges of fiscal irresponsibility from Republicans whose presidents never took the deficit seriously.
"Success . . . is not as noteworthy as failure," Clinton noted ruefully on Friday.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs found that in the first 10 weeks of Clinton's term, comments about him on the three prime-time network news programs were only 42 percent positive. That compares to 62 percent favorable remarks about Bush in his first 10 weeks.
This despite widespread agreement, even among critics, that Clinton has changed the terms of the economic and health-reform debates, done what's feasible to advance his policies by executive order and set a new standard for diversity in federal appointments.
"The perception out here in the heartland is very much of compromises couched as defeat or waffling," said Greg Markus, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "Even when he proposes to do something that is very much in line with what he said he'd do during the campaign, it's portrayed somehow as backpedaling or breaking promises."
If the president is being judged by his compromises rather than his principles, as one adviser told The Washington Post last week, he's hardly blameless.
His miscalculations - telling tasteless, inaccurate jokes at a social dinner, distancing himself from Attorney General Janet Reno in the Waco crisis, failing to cultivate Republican support for his jobs bill - create negative expectations.
Then there are the other kinds of expectations, the ones Clinton created with his raft of campaign promises.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said Clinton speaks in "the same apocalyptic terms" as Lyndon Johnson, who promised to eliminate poverty and make higher education available to all.
"The real world doesn't work that way, and it's even worse for Clinton. Johnson had a lot of money to play with," Sabato said.
Some of Clinton's problems are the inevitable lot of an energetic, activist president. Arithmetic also works against him. He received 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race, meaning a majority of voters are predisposed to be critical.
Democratic loyalists and Clinton himself blame checks, balances and Republicans for some of their problems. "People want things to happen immediately that don't happen immediately," the president, who had promised an explosive start, said last week with newfound patience.
Heeding advice from Congress on pace and possibilities, Clinton is now likely to postpone his health-care reform bill until June and abandon his cherished investment tax credit altogether.
by CNB