Clinton, Dole At Odds With Themselves

Well, the Republicans and Democrats have had their say - and what have we learned from the convention extravaganzas? The lesson is something of a paradox.

President Clinton talked in soaring rhetoric. But, unlike the founders of this city, he is making nothing but little plans.

Republican challenger Bob Dole spoke less eloquently. But he is inviting the country to take a bold policy gamble, betting on a big tax cut that could reopen massive deficits, in hopes of jolting the economy into faster growth.

But if either man were to win, he might be pretty uncomfortable carrying out the policy of his campaign.

Dole, at 73, is no gambler. It is hard to imagine him rolling the dice for the high stakes his economic plan involves. All his life as a legislator, his has been the voice of caution, questioning those who come forward with what they call sure-fire schemes.

His skepticism about “supply-side economics” in the early 1980s was as much a matter of temperament as it was of intellect. He had been raised in a family where you paid your bills before you bought yourself a treat. The Depression reinforced that lesson. That’s why he argued throughout his career that balanced budgets ought to have priority over tax cuts.

Now he is promising a whopper of a tax cut - and saying that it can be done while still balancing the budget - if only politicians show some backbone. He may be right. But Dole also claims, for campaign purposes, that he will “protect” the Pentagon and the government’s big medical and retirement programs from budget-cutters. That doesn’t add up.

Those who have worked with Dole over the years say they believe he would retool the plan if elected - phasing in the tax cuts more slowly and scaling back the growth of entitlements as much as needed to prevent Draconian cuts in defense and domestic spending.

That measured reduction in tax burdens and the scale of government would be enough to satisfy Dole - for whom the first night in a White House bedroom might well be reward enough for a lifetime of hard labor in public service.

But Clinton is another matter. Many who know him well question whether the program he announced here would really be enough to keep the 50-year-old dynamo content for his final four years in the presidency.

What Clinton put on the table Thursday night was presented in such powerful rhetoric that it almost obscured the minuscule scale of the changes he wants to make. They are, in essence, small appendages to the modest initiatives he launched in his first term.

Family and medical leave legislation, for example, was the first bill Clinton signed into law. It provides limited time off without pay for certain emergencies. A substantial change would be to provide the same leave to low-wage workers - with pay. That would provide an important benefit to many who can’t afford to go without income even for a week. But that is more than Clinton asks. He wants simply to broaden the law to allow time off without pay for doctors’ visits and school conferences.

There are a couple dozen such small steps on the Clinton agenda. Individually, they are politically appealing. But even if all of them were enacted, would they fulfill Clinton’s desire to earn a place in history for himself?

An administration colleague who has known him for more than half his life pointed out to me that in his speeches and conversations, Clinton cites two presidents more than any others - Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them achieved greatness by being forced to deal with crises of enormous scale - the breakup of the Union and the struggle over slavery for Lincoln; the Great Depression and World War II for FDR.

Unless the nation faces such a crisis, this man said, Clinton has to know that he could slip into the history books in league with others who risked little and achieved nothing notable.

That would be at least as much at odds with his character and personality as the big-gamble economic plan is for Dole.

In his biography of the president, “First In His Class,” David Maraniss noted that those around Clinton worried that his behavior became more erratic as his decade as Arkansas governor wound down - with no great challenges. Richard Morris, his now-banished political consultant, told Maraniss that Clinton needed “some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life.”

Clinton solved that problem by running for president. What does he do if he wins his last term in the White House?

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