If Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia decides to enter the presidential race, Democratic activists will find him quite a different candidate than most suppose him to be. And, I suspect, Rockefeller will also provide the Democrats with another object lesson in the difficulty of making a late start in the high-stakes race for the White House.
When I caught up with the 54-year-old Rockefeller the other day, he was traveling from breakfast with Maryland party leaders to visit a neighborhood family and child-care center here. It was part of the whirlwind national tour he`s been making to publicize the widely acclaimed report issued last month by the bipartisan National Commission on Children, which he headed.
Along with his earlier work on a national health-care plan-now embodied in a Senate Democratic leadership proposal-the children`s commission has given Rockefeller sudden status as the Democrat with the most appealing domestic program. The publicity burst has caused him to advance his presidential timetable from 1996 to 1992.
If the ”family decision” he and his wife and four children make next month is affirmative, as most expect, he would enter the race with instant name recognition and a personal history as appealing in its own way as that of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In counterpoint to Thomas` Horatio Alger story, Rockefeller is the fabulously rich kid who gave up a promising career as a Japanese-speaking Asia scholar/diplomat to go to a West Virginia mining camp as a Vista volunteer, then stayed on to become a legislator, governor and senator in that poverty-wracked state. Although his formal speeches tend to be stiff and stilted, the 6-foot-6-inch Rockefeller has great charm, an easy smile-and a blessed absence of the pompous ego that afflicts so many senators.
All that, however, does not make him ready for the prime-time demands of a presidential campaign, which could be only weeks away-a fact of which he is well aware. While his top aide, Lane Bailey, is trying (on a part-time basis) to catalog and organize support around the country, Rockefeller himself is cramming with experts on defense, foreign policy and economics.
On the ride up here the other morning, the senator was saying that his votes for the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-cutting amendment and for last year`s budget summit agreement are stands he ”proudly” took. Other liberals may chafe at the restraints they place on domestic spending, but Rockefeller said, ”It`s the discipline we need.”
Then he volunteered the comment that ”for the first time in the past week, talking with economists, I`m beginning to think we might have to look at a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. I always voted against it, but now I have an open mind about it, because we might need it.”
That a man on the brink of a presidential campaign might be wavering on so basic a question of fiscal policy as the balanced-budget amendment may seem surprising. But it is far from the only indicator that Rockefeller has barely begun to examine the implications of past policy positions in the national arena he may be about to enter.
As a West Virginia senator in 1989, Rockefeller was one of only 18 Democrats to support the unsuccessful move to amend the Constitution to outlaw flag-burning. ”I`m very comfortable with my vote on that,” he said. ”To me, flag-burning is not a passive act, it`s an inciteful act, a destructive act . . . .”
I asked Rockefeller about the Pledge of Allegiance issue that President Bush used so effectively against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the 1988 campaign. Bush hammered Dukakis repeatedly for vetoing a bill requiring teachers to lead their students in the Pledge. ”I would not have had a problem signing that legislation,” Rockefeller said.
Then he volunteered this comment: ”And prayer in schools, I`m not offended by that. I want silent prayer, so everybody can pray however they want. I think an Islamic kid, a Jewish kid has to be protected. The principal has to work it out so it`s silent or so generic that it`s offensive to nobody. But that can be done.”
A conservative social and fiscal policy might well combine with his liberal stands on health care and aid to children to give Rockefeller a comfortable centrist image. But when a politician, in the space of a one-hour car ride, volunteers his way onto such treacherous policy mine-fields as school prayer, flag-burning and the balanced-budget amendment, you have to admire his openness-and wonder about his understanding of the electoral volatility of such issues. The interview also suggested that Rockefeller is unrehearsed in explaining his record as governor of West Virginia or in reconciling past votes that served West Virginia`s interests (like
protectionist measures on textiles and shoes) with the broad policies he wants to espouse as a national candidate.
He has time to prepare himself for all that lies ahead-but not much.
