Clinton Game Plan: Offense Is Best Defense

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  An air of hopeful frenzy has settled on the former newspaper building that serves as Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters, with just 57 days remaining until the election.

Over the last five days, Clinton has accused President Bush of planning to gut Medicare, slash student loans and undermine Social Security. Over the weekend, the Democratic nominee appeared in South Carolina, a Republican bastion in presidential elections for more than a generation, and appropriated a Republican attack line--accusing Bush of being a big spender. He also took Bush to task for the President’s attempts to compare himself to Democratic President Harry S. Truman--who came from behind to win reelection in 1948.

“There’s a big difference between Bush and Truman,” Clinton said. “Bush blames everybody else for his problems and Truman took responsibility for his.”

Politics has a name for that--going on offense. And after a late-August stretch in which Clinton’s effort seemed flat and defensive, the new lines and new punch have cheered campaign aides as much as the reams of data pouring into pollster Stanley B. Greenberg’s computers that show Clinton holding commanding leads in Democratic strongholds while fighting Bush to near draws in such Republican bastions as New Hampshire and Arizona.

But as they try to sustain that offensive, Democratic strategists concede they face tough obstacles.

“George Bush’s biggest political advantage has been that his opponents always underestimate his political skills,” said Clinton strategist James Carville. “I don’t.”

Clinton aides expect weeks of bruising political attacks from Bush and his surrogates. And after a summer in which the Republicans often seemed to lack focus in their attacks, the Democratic camp now sees the incoming fire beginning to concentrate on two chief targets--accusations that Clinton is a “tax and spend” liberal whose proposals will bleed middle-class families, and charges that he is an untrustworthy politician who waffles and straddles and fails to tell the truth to voters either about his own life or his policies.

Fending off those attacks will be difficult, for each is likely to connect with worries about Democrats in general, and Clinton in particular, that many voters already say they have in mind. As if those problems were not enough, Clinton and his aides have other worries:

-- The wave of attention on Clinton’s draft record after a Times story last week reminded Clinton strategists of a major vulnerability that they expect Republicans to exploit in speeches and advertisements over the next two months. In fact, during Clinton’s appearance Sunday in Darlington, S.C., some members of the crowd taunted him as a “draft dodger,” and the Bush campaign’s daily “attack fax” focused on the issue.

-- Clinton continues to perform unevenly--at times delivering the sort of sharply worded speeches that rally supporters and capture time on the evening news, but other times succumbing to the temptation to play it safe and sit on what his strategists fear could rapidly become an eroding lead.

--Within the next few weeks, aides agree, Clinton will have to decide whether to oppose Bush’s North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. So far, he has been able to avoid a decision because the Administration has not published a text of the massive treaty. But once the text becomes available--probably this week--the clock will begin to run.

If Clinton supports the treaty, he will alienate labor unions, particularly in Michigan, where he needs their active support. If he opposes it, he will anger free-trade backers and undermine to some extent his claim of being a “different kind of Democrat,” probably hurting himself in such states as Texas.

-- Despite an apparent arrangement with the Rev. Jesse Jackson over plans for voter registration efforts in black communities, tensions continue between Clinton’s need to reach out to mostly white, middle-class voters and the need to maintain ties with the poor and minorities, who form a key element in the party’s coalition.

-- Disorganization in several key battleground states has forced campaign manager David Wilhelm to dispatch top trouble shooters to Michigan, Missouri and Kentucky in an effort to put statewide campaigns there back on track.

Each of those problems, however, shrinks compared to the fundamental advantage Clinton and his aides see as they wake up on Labor Day and look toward the election eight weeks away:

“Sometimes in politics you have to paddle your canoe, and sometimes you just ride the wave,” said Clinton strategist Paul Begala, attributing the maxim to political consultant David Doak. “In this election, the wave is the economy, and we’re riding it. The other side is going to have to paddle like heck.”

The Democrats will do all they can to make that paddling more difficult. As the last several days have shown, they plan to aggressively question Bush’s record and his leadership.

“Nowhere is it written in the laws or the Constitution of the United States that George Bush is the only one who can ask questions in this election,” Carville said. “We have some questions to ask him as well.”

Chief among those questions, said Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos, “is who is going to pay for George Bush’s promises and who is going to take responsibility for his record?”

Bush has made a number of major commitments in recent weeks--everything from a new across-the-board tax cut to a $10-billion job training program--but has steadily refused to say how he would pay for his initiatives.

Bush strategists argue that voters do not care about the specifics but want to know only about the general direction that Bush or Clinton would take the country. Clinton strategists dispute that, and if Bush will not fill in the blanks in his plans, they will try to do it for him, arguing that the President, in essence, wants to cut taxes for the wealthy and pay for it by slashing programs that benefit the middle class.

“Specificity is once again going to be an issue as we move into the fall,” Stephanopoulos predicts.

As part of what amounts to a three-part strategy for the fall, much of the burden of making that argument will fall on the vice presidential nominee, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore.

The attack will look at other aspects of Bush’s record as well, as Gore signaled Thursday when he suggested in a speech that newly released evidence showed Bush had lied about how much he knew about parts of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration.

In addition, Democrats who think the Republicans alienated many middle-of-the-road voters with often-strident conservative rhetoric at the GOP convention last month plan to do their best to tie Bush to the leaders of his party’s right wing.

Clinton, himself, will try to concentrate, for the next couple of weeks at least, on the second part of the strategy--giving voters a better sense of his own program. The campaign’s research shows that voters have absorbed a fair amount of information about Clinton’s background but know far less about his programs.

Clinton pointed to that plan Saturday, touting his claim of being “different” and saying that “in the coming weeks, there’ll be lots of examples about how we’re going beyond the old Republican/Democrat, liberal/conservative gridlock to create a third way.”

Later this week, Clinton plans to give a speech highlighting his plans for welfare reform, a subject that aides see as key to Clinton’s non-traditional-Democrat self-definition and as a crucial step toward defanging an issue that Republicans repeatedly have used to drive wedges into Democratic coalitions.

Next week, aides envision an event in California built around the plan’s call for new investment in high technology, another step in trying to convince voters that Clinton’s ideas can revive the country’s stalled economy.

As the Democratic candidates fan out across the nation, following their separate missions, the campaign will largely abandon the bus trips that became their favorite campaign mode for the summer--at least for now. The buses succeeded far beyond expectations in seizing the imagination of voters, Clinton aides say, but with the novelty wearing off, they have started to become an impediment to getting out the message. The bus trip itself becomes the story, rather than what Clinton and Gore say, and the trips limit the places the candidates can be.

The final feature of the fall campaign, of course, will be advertising. The Democrats hope to use their ads not only to help lay out Clinton’s program, but to bear the main burden of defending his record as governor--and his personal conduct--against expected GOP attacks.

Already aides have pointed reporters toward statements--captured on film--of Ronald Reagan praising Clinton’s work on welfare and Bush praising his leadership on education reform. Clinton aides suggest that voters are likely to see both of those images often during the fall to counter Republicans’ attempts to cast Clinton as the “failed governor of a small state.”

Trying to lay out one’s own argument while responding to the other side’s attacks is “a classic dilemma,” Carville said. “If you spend your time responding, you’re not talking about the things you want to, but if you don’t respond, the charge has a chance of breaking through.”

At least some senior campaign officials believe Clinton went overboard recently in responding to GOP charges that he had raised taxes 128 times while Arkansas governor.

Carville and other senior aides “were obsessed with 128 taxes,” said one senior Clinton adviser. “Why get into an argument about how many times we raised taxes? That’s the last thing we want to talk about.”

Carville and Stephanopoulos dispute that. Greenberg’s polls, they say, show Clinton gaining 7 points on Bush during the course of the last week on the question of which candidate would handle taxes better. Moreover, they argue, they succeeded in persuading many voters that Bush and his aides had lied about Clinton’s record--a point that could help defend Clinton against the attacks to come.

“Voters respond to information they hear. They can’t respond to information they don’t hear,” Carville said. “You’ll notice,” he added referring to the 128-taxes charge, “we haven’t heard it much since then.”

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