For Clinton, everything is a character issue. Once touted as the most “electable " Democrat, his hopes for the White House hinge on whether he can convince voters that he has the honesty and integrity to be president. The “Slick Willie " label, pinned on him years ago in Arkansas, has become shorthand for the uneasiness voters feel about Clinton. The late Lee Atwater, godfather of negative campaigning, believed no candidate was electable with negative poll ratings over 40 percent. Clinton passed that threshold last month.
Clinton has tried to fight back by answering every charge but conceding very little. If he has a role model, it may ironically be Atwater’s old boss, George Bush, whose negatives reached 44 percent in 1988. Bush was derided as a “wimp, " an image he turned around in a series of planned encounters, including a testy confrontation with CBS’s Dan Rather. Clinton strategists cite Ronald Reagan, whose negatives were 46 percent in February 1980. The former president was considered too old, not very bright and trigger-happy. Reagan wiped the slate clean in one debate with Jimmy Carter. But Clinton’s problems are harder to combat because they go to the heart of his trustworthiness. Assessing the bill of particulars:
Four out of five voters say they don’t care about Clinton’s admitted marital problems. Last week a studio audience booed Phil Donahue as he probed for further details of Clinton’s relationship with Gennifer Flowers, who was paid to tell her story in a supermarket tabloid. But focus groups conducted by the Clinton campaign show that voters don’t believe Clinton when he says he did not have an affair with Flowers, which raises a more relevant character issue of whether he lied.
Clinton wouldn’t be in the race if his wife didn’t stand by her man. But Hillary says what she thinks. Last week, in an article in Vanity Fair, she was quoted accusing the Washington “establishment " of covering up for Bush’s rumored marital infidelity. Then she apologized. “Nobody knows better than I do the pain that can be caused by discussing rumors, even in private conversations, and I didn’t mean to be hurtful to anyone, " she said. When Clinton hinted he might name his wife to a cabinet post, she was quickly forced to say she had no interest in an administration job and would devote herself to issues of education and children.
Press accounts have questioned Clinton’s motives in dropping out of ROTC to enter the draft pool-just in time to get a high lottery number that allowed him to avoid Vietnam. The controversy grew deeper at the weekend when the Associated Press reported that Clinton had actually received his induction notice while at Oxford in 1969. A Clinton campaign aide said the draft notice had been “a mistake " and that Clinton’s draft board allowed him to complete the spring term at Oxford, “as was routine. " He then returned to Arkansas and joined the ROTC program. But there was no immediate explanation why Clinton hadn’t disclosed these facts before.
Clinton has been preparing to run for president since he was at least 16 years old and heard the call of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot. In the era of the antipolitician, Clinton’s early commitment to public service is seen as overweening. At 23, in a letter declining his ROTC deferment, Clinton frets about how ducking military service would affect his political future. Clinton says polities is an honorable calling, a hard sell to mad-as-hell voters.
Almost no one cares if Clinton took a few puffs as a young man. But for months, Clinton dodged the question, declaring he “didn’t break any state laws, " then finally admitted last week-under questioning-that he had experimented with marijuana as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Then he added, “I didn’t inhale, " as though that made it all right. The stepson of an abusive alcoholic, Clinton is deathly afraid of addiction. He is also highly allergic. He may have been telling the truth-it just didn’t sound like it.
There has been a steady drip-drip of stories about the Clintons’ alleged financial conflicts. He has been accused of favoring friends with state contracts and protecting business from environmental regulation. Little Rock is a corporate plantation, but there is no evidence that the Clintons profited personally from hobnobbing with business people or political backers. Still, the charges have a cumulative effect, and they feed the notion that there is some really big scandal that could come along to derail Clinton’s candidacy. At almost every stop, Clinton must deal with the nagging questions of reporters and opponents who try to bait him into an outburst or provoke some kind of damaging admission. For Clinton, his future may depend on how well he can run against his past.
