Clinton Team Ever Vigilant Aides React Aggressively To Any And All Gop Threats

President Clinton enjoys a huge lead in the opinion polls, the powerful aura of the highest office in the land, and a generally healthy economy.

Yet as he was taking a jog along a misty shore of Lake Michigan during a visit here last Thursday morning, aides were taking nothing for granted. In a sign of the constant vigilance of his re-election effort, they warily scanned the news wires and sounded an alarm indicating incoming fire.

In a speech that morning, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole had just denounced the president for vetoing a ban of certain late-term abortions.

Clinton was quickly alerted, and by noon he was ready with an impassioned counteroffensive, delivered with a reddened face and wagging finger in a news conference from Milwaukee’s City Hall.

The lightning-fast response all but overshadowed Dole’s original charge and offered a taste of the aggressively reactive campaign that Clinton’s team is assembling.

Like a team protecting its lead early in the game, the Clinton strategy is to anticipate Dole’s moves, respond vigorously to each attack, and pre-empt Republican ideas wherever possible.

Days before Dole unveiled his welfare reform proposals, Clinton endorsed almost identical measures.

When Dole pushed for repeal of the 4.3-cent per gallon gas tax, Clinton agreed to go along, so long as Congress passes a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage.

As Republicans assail the federal bureaucracy, Clinton hearkens to the theme which he adopted early this year, that “the era of big government is over.”

“I’m glad that we proved that the Democratic Party is not the party of big government,” he asserted to fellow party members at a $2.3 million political fund-raising dinner last week in Stamford, Conn.

Such declarations leave the president vulnerable to charges of inconstancy as he readjusts and fine tunes positions. In Milwaukee, Clinton bristled at suggestions that he was undergoing election-year revamping.

Yet Clinton has yet to outline a clear picture of what he would do in a second term.

“This election, like all elections, is about the future,” he said last week as he offered only a vague description of a government that would be smaller but more activist.

One of the president’s top political aides, White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, offered no specifics about Clinton’s priorities for the next four years.

“Basically, it is keeping a strong economy” in part by keeping world trade markets open, Ickes told reporters last week, adding that education would also be important.

Lacking a bold new vision, Clinton still holds a key advantage in the potent symbols of the office he occupies.

Dole can visit veterans hospitals, as he has, as a reminder that he was severely injured in World War II and Clinton avoided military service.

But Clinton has the constitutional job of commanderin-chief. On Memorial Day, it will be Clinton who lays the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.