THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611010026
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 124 lines
The Pilot's news pages have invited voters to regard this season's political candidates as if they were job applicants. It's not a bad idea, but what are voters to do if they'd be reluctant to hire either applicant?
Regrettably, that's the situation that this year's presidential race presents. Both Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are seriously flawed candidates.
Dole has served his country long and well, traveling an inspiring path from wounded hero in World War II to majority leader of the U.S. Senate. In office, he grew from a slashing partisan to an elder statesman. As a legislative manager, he had few peers. No one doubts he would provide the country with a strong defense and a cautious foreign policy.
But the central issue for the next four years will be budget policy, and on that issue Dole has erred. Instead of running on a 35-year record of fiscal conservatism, Dole has based his campaign on an economic theory that doesn't hold water, a budget plan that doesn't add up.
Dole promises to balance the budget while increasing defense spending and making huge tax cuts. There are only two ways to achieve all three. The government could slow dramatically the growth in payments for Social Security, Medicare and other health and pension programs. But voters have shown no taste for such austerity.
The other alternative is to make cuts of up to 40 percent in all other government spending - law enforcement, student loans, national parks, Head Start, environmental protection. Again, voters are unlikely to approve. In short, Dole's campaign is based largely on wishful thinking. And if tax cuts were passed without compensating spending cuts, the deficit would explode and interest rates rise.
That's what happened during the last fling with supply-side economics. Large deficits led to a doubling of the national debt between 1981 and 1987. The libertarian Cato Institute concedes that the debt piled up by supply-side deficits has ``imposed significant repayment costs on future generations.''
The 73-year-old Dole has further upped the ante by choosing a supply-side zealot as running mate. If anything were to happen to a President Dole, the country would be left in the hands of a man unprepared for the highest office and animated by a single fixed idea.
Dole, when repeatedly asked how his economic plan would work, has simply replied: Trust me, my word is good. But that begs the question. For many years, Dole himself expressed well-founded distrust of the supply-side doctrine. So whom should voters trust, the old Dole or the new Dole?
Nor is this the only case of the supposedly trustworthy candidate reversing long-held views. On the campaign trail, he has repudiated years of support for affirmative action and has adopted an uncharacteristic harshness on immigration policy.
Far from showing Dole to be a strong leader, the campaign has revealed a candidate with a dearth of ideas, a willingness to pander to various constituencies within his party and an embarrassing indecisiveness about what case to make for his own election.
President Clinton's has steered a middle course economically. On his watch, the deficit has shrunk 69 percent - from $290 billion in 1992 to $109 billion in 1996. It now accounts for the lowest percent of GDP (1.4 percent) since 1974.
Reducing the deficit has led to an extended period of steady growth coupled with low inflation and low interest rates. Unemployment has reached a 7-year low of 5.7 percent.
If Clinton is re-elected, his proposed path to a balanced budget relies less than Dole's on implausible growth forecasts or the elimination of unidentified waste, fraud and abuse. It calls for more-modest (and therefore more-realistic) tax cuts and curbs on entitlement growth.
A looming issue is the anticipated impact of baby-boomer retirements on Social Security and Medicare. Both candidates have flinched from directly addressing it. Each proposes a bipartisan commission to seek solutions.
In an era of belt-tightening, Dole would spend billions on early deployment of a missile defense. His enthusiasm for the unproven project is misplaced. Under Clinton, $50 billion more has been allocated for military wage increases and quality of life improvements. And by 2002, a Concord Coalition budget comparison concludes, Clinton would be spending more than the Republican Congress proposes on defense - $279 billion.
Clinton's foreign-policy priorities have sometimes been questionable. Though he deserves credit for trying to achieve peaceful outcomes in Haiti and Bosnia, he has devoted too little attention to crucial relations with Russia, China, Europe and Japan. But Bob Dole has done little in this race - or throughout his career - to articulate a strategic vision.
Clinton is scorned as a closet liberal by conservatives and as a turncoat by his own party's left wing. What that adds up to, on a range of issues, is a record of moderation.
He championed welfare reform as a governor and signed it into law as president. He was tough on crime long before winning the White House. Clinton has made a good start toward putting 100,000 more cops on the street and has backed $7.9 billion for prisons. Clinton has promoted the competitiveness of U.S. business through trade agreements and has reduced federal civilian employment per capita to the lowest level since Roosevelt.
Neither candidate takes campaign-finance reform seriously, as evidenced by their own deplorable behavior. Both have talked reform, but neither has made a move to drain the soft-money swamp.
On lesser issues, it's a tossup. A key to future prosperity is an educated work force. Clinton was a leader on the issue as governor. Dole seems indifferent. Dole's commitment to serious tax reform is preferable to Clinton's inclination to tinker. But Clinton has been more inclined than Dole to protect the environment.
If that was all there is to the race, Clinton would get the nod on economic credibility alone. But that's not all there is to the race.
There is a disturbingly long bill of particulars calling into question the president's ethics, judgment and veracity.
There was an ugly hubris to the Travelgate firings and abuse of power in the use of the FBI and IRS against the dismissed employees. The presence of hundreds of FBI files in the White House indicates at best a lack of appreciation for the ease with which government power can be misused, at worst the kind of partisan hardball not seen since Richard Nixon.
Revelations about the cozy relations between business and government in Arkansas aren't pretty, but the attempts to screw a lid on them by the White House have been worse.
All politicians say one thing and do another, but Clinton often says one thing, then another thing, then a third thing. He is less than a straight shooter. And if he makes a mistake, he's not inclined to own up to it. Instead, he denies, stonewalls and revises history.
Voters are left with a dispiriting choice: Dole, whose promised course of action risks a ruinous deepening of the deficit, or Clinton, whose accumulated misdeeds may lead to personal disgrace. But lacking a philosopher king in the race, voters must choose between the available candidates.
Believing the nation would fare better under the policies of a second Clinton administration than those proposed for a Dole administration, the Pilot endorses the president's reelection. The country has prospered during his tenure and the challenger has failed to make a persuasive case for change. But we endorse Clinton with hesitation, deeply concerned that his character defects could mar a second term or prove his undoing.
KEYWORDS: PRESIDENTIAL RACE 1996 ENDORSEMENTS by CNB