President Clinton is concerned that Republican challenger Bob Dole’s proposed 15 percent tax cut may appeal to some swing voters, but he contends it would harm the economy and force even sharper cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment than those he has vetoed.
“We’ve been there before,” Clinton said of Dole’s tax cut plan, calling it “a movement to the past, not to the future” during an interview with the Tribune in his White House dining room before departing for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Clinton said he will counter the tax cut’s appeal by stressing that the country cannot afford it and arguing that the economy has improved markedly since his own 1993 deficit reductions.
The 50-year-old president indicated he will use his convention acceptance speech to sharply contrast his vision and record with that of Dole and congressional Republicans. In offering the likely contours of his fall re-election campaign, he made repeated references to the past and the future in his contest with the 73-year-old Dole, outlining a generational context for the race.
“We should revere the past . . . But we’ve got to build a pathway to the future. Our sole concern ought to be what’s this country going to look like when we start the 21st Century?” he said.
“What’s going to happen when the next term is over? And what will the country look like when our children and our grandchildren are our age? That is really what this election ought to be about.”
As he comes to the city still identified with a lingering stain from the turbulent 1968 Democratic convention, marked by street clashes between Chicago police and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, Clinton said his party “has gone a long way toward burying the ghosts of Chicago.”
Clinton said he recalled the 1968 convention “like it was yesterday” and said he “ached” over what he saw from a hotel room in Shreveport, La. “I hated to see what was happening. It was heartbreaking.”
The president tweaked Dole for calling him a Republican on many key issues, including welfare reform and crime. “They say that every time we (Democrats) do better than they do on an issue that they claim is theirs,” he said.
Defending his decision to sign a Republican-sponsored welfare reform bill that requires work but ends the long-standing federal guarantee of public assistance, Clinton said he will emphasize at the convention that Democrats must focus on the next step of finding jobs for welfare recipients.
“Now whom do the American people trust to devise ways that will help move these folks from welfare to work in ways that are good for their children?” he asked.
And he defended his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, from Republican attacks and specifically from Dole’s indirect criticism of her during the GOP convention earlier this month in San Diego. There, the Republican nominee said it took a family, not a village, to raise a child, a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s book, “It Takes a Village.”
But Clinton focused on Dole’s remarkable recovery from World War II wounds, much of it in his hometown of Russell, Kan., and said, “I certainly think that the village helped him.”
The president said he respected Dole’s service to his country in World War II and noted that “he could have led a bitter life in which nothing productive ever came out of it” after his wounds. “And every American should honor what he made out of his life.
“How many times has he told the story about the people caring for him in the hospital and how this country invested in his health care?” Clinton said. “How many times has he talked about how he went back home to Russell, Kan., and everybody worked to make him whole again?”
Clinton said his wife’s book made the point that “the rest of us have to take our fair share of responsibility for helping us to go forward together. And I think that’s really the story of Sen. Dole’s life.”
The president said he recovered politically from the 1994 congressional elections, in which Republicans captured control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, because people began to see clear differences between himself and Republicans and “what the Republicans really wanted to do with the contract,” a reference to the GOP’s “Contract with America.”
He noted that the Republicans “didn’t talk about their contract, their platform or their leader in their convention,” the last an apparent reference to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).
Clinton’s advisers have indicated that Dole’s proposed 15 percent across-the-board tax cut has appeal with some voters and added they have a harder sell because the president is supporting modest, targeted tax cuts for education and children.
Asked if he was concerned if some swing voters might be attracted to the Dole plan, the president responded, “Sure.”
But, he said, “if we go to the bank and borrow money to give ourselves a tax cut that we can’t afford, that will drive up interest rates and it will force the next Congress and Sen. Dole to make even bigger cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment than the ones I vetoed when the people were with me.”
The president conceded that the Democrats struggled for years after the ’68 convention. He cited the internal divisions caused by the Vietnam War.
Clinton said Democrats were perceived as being more interested in preserving the status quo and the gains of the New Deal than in changing its programs “to reflect the concerns of the middle class.”
As a result, he said, Democrats became vulnerable after the Chicago convention, although they recovered temporarily with Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976.
“Now, though, I believe we have gone a long way toward burying the ghosts of Chicago by showing discipline in the management of the economy, getting good results, by being tough but smart on crime and passing a crime bill and assault weapons ban and putting more people on the streets,” he said.
Clinton said Dole led the fight against the crime bill, including its commitment to put 100,000 more police officers on the streets. “Yet they say because we always talk tough, crime is our issue.” But it is not true, Clinton said.
“Richard Daley was a prosecutor before he was mayor of Chicago. I was attorney general before I was governor, much less the president. Crime is an American issue. It doesn’t belong to the Republican Party.”
When asked about what was the American people’s greatest reservation about him, Clinton said he couldn’t answer the question. But he added that many voters would say “he’s taken an awful lot of criticism. I wonder if any of it’s true?
” `And besides that,’ such voters might say, `I’ve been pretty cynical about politics for a long time now and dare I have real belief and hope?’ “
