TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/083192/08319923.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 11KB | 235 lines

                                                                                THE U.S. CAMPAIGN, Page 28

Here Come the Big Guns


After the rhetorical rumbling in Houston, the G.O.P. readies
a fierce assault on four policy fronts. Clinton prepares a
counterattack, but may be vulnerable on some points

By STANLEY W. CLOUD HOUSTON -- With reporting by Michael Duffy/
Houston and Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro/Little Rock


    A George Bush operative told a group of reporters at the
G.O.P. convention four years ago that "a presidential campaign
is just like a war." The take-no-prisoners Bush juggernaut
rolled out of New Orleans and three months later routed opponent
Michael Dukakis. Fair warning to Bill Clinton: if you heard a
faint rumble in the background at last week's Republican
Convention, it was the sound of Bush's heavy artillery moving
into place. Stand by for incoming.

    Despite Bush's adroit acceptance speech, his handlers know
that to elevate Bush in the polls, they need to bring down
Clinton -- and fast. With James Baker directing the campaign,
Bush will now begin trying to flush Clinton out of his
comfortable moderate's nest and portray his opponent as just
another tax-and-spend liberal Democrat with neither the
experience nor the ability to deal with the nation's problems.
The Bush team is sure to run a fine-tooth comb over Clinton's
12-year record as what Republicans are calling "the failed
Governor of a small Southern state." And they will revive
questions about his Vietnam War draft status by claiming, as Pat
Buchanan did last week, that Clinton lacks the moral authority
to make military decisions.

    The Republicans won't stop there. Ironically, though
Clinton has been praised for laying out a detailed economic
plan, its very proposals provide some of the ammunition Bush
needs for his late-summer assault on Little Rock. But the
problem with these Republican bombshells is that while many of
them are on target, the arguments tend to be aggressively
hyperbolic and are occasionally contradicted by their own
supporting documents. For one thing, the President faults
Clinton for not favoring a balanced-budget amendment to the
Constitution -- though it was the Reagan and Bush
Administrations that are mainly responsible for the enormous
amounts of red ink in the federal budget.

    Even as Republican speechmakers were taking aim at Clinton
from the podium last week, aides were crisscrossing the sprawl
of Houston to underscore their points over breakfast, lunch,
coffee and cocktails with reporters. Meanwhile, Democratic fax
machines were churning out rebuttals -- including a two-page
reply to Bush's acceptance speech before he had even finished
delivering it. As the volley of stats and cost estimates flying
between both camps increases, the campaign is likely to be
fought in four major policy arenas as well as on the "family
values" front. The key lines of attack:

    SPENDING. Given the Democrats' belief in an activist
government, Clinton is vulnerable on this front. Bush correctly
charged in his Thursday night speech that the Democrats' budget
proposals would add $220 billion in federal spending, not
counting the cost of Clinton's health-reform package. But that
number is spread over four years, and it would go for
potentially politically salable projects such as investing $80
billion to rebuild America's infrastructure or helping to
finance bridges, roads, an intercity rail system and a
nationwide information network.

    But Clinton's vagueness on spending details gives Bush an
opening to brand him an old-fashioned profligate liberal.
"Governor Clinton and Congress know that you have caught on to
their lingo," Bush said in his speech. "They know when they say
`spending,' you say `uh, oh.' So now they have a new word:
`investment.' They want to `invest' $220 billion more of your
money -- but I want you to keep it."

    Nor is the Bush camp the only one to voice reservations
about Clinton's economic plan. The bipartisan Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget has serious objections, especially
about Clinton's claim to be able to halve the federal deficit
over four years. "The numbers do not add up," says a committee
report. Noting that Clinton's plan would over four years produce
reductions of about $4 billion in the growth of such entitlement
programs as Social Security and Medicare, the committee sees
this as a very small drop in a very large bucket. By 1996, notes
the group, "entitlement spending is projected to exceed $900
billion!"

    TAXES. Speaker after speaker in Houston charged that
Clinton has advocated the largest tax increase in history. But
the Republicans themselves could not agree on the size of those
tax hikes: the Bush Administration's Office of Management and
Budget used the figure $220 billion, while Bush and other
speakers, like Congressman Newt Gingrich, cited tax increases
of $150 billion. The issue has tremendous political force,
especially in a time of less than 2% annual economic growth. The
Bush team has charged that Clinton's taxes would force many
small businesses to close and cost many people their jobs.
Moreover, says Jim Cicconi, issues director for the Bush-Quayle
campaign, "the dirty little secret of this plan is that to raise
the revenues they need on the tax side to pay for the programs
they want, they have to drop the ((higher)) tax brackets into
the middle class." But Clinton advisers suggest that the
Arkansas Governor would sooner scale back some of his spending
plans rather than extend his tax-hike proposals to middle-income
AmeriStill, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds
that the Clinton plan, by relying on higher corporate taxes and
a new 36% tax rate for the wealthiest 2% of Americans (families
earning more than $200,000 a year), is politically, as well as
fiscally, unrealistic.

    But are the Republicans correct when they say this would
be the greatest tax increase in history? No. In truth, the
record tax hikes are all Republican products: the Reagan
Administration's 1982 increase ($98 billion over four years) and
the new taxes of 1990 for which Bush now apologizes ($107.6
billion over four years). Clinton's plan would actually increase
taxes about $92 billion over four years -- hardly trivial, but
no blue-ribbon winner.

    So how do the Republicans pump the figure up to $150
billion and beyond? By including as tax increases such items as
Clinton's claim that he can raise $45 billion over four years
by tightening IRS regulations for foreign companies operating
in the U.S., and the $9 billion he projects from cracking down
on tax fraud. These may be unrealistic projections, but they are
not tax increases. Moreover, the Republicans' use of these
figures is inconsistent bordering on hypocritical: on the one
hand, they ridicule the notion that $45 billion could result
from tougher IRS regulations on foreign companies, claiming that
the real figure is closer to $1 billion; yet they include the
full $45 billion among proposed Democratic tax increases.

    MILITARY CUTBACKS. The Bush people went to great lengths
in Houston to portray Clinton as an irresponsible defense
cutter who would slice right through the muscle and into the
bone. In fact, there's not much difference between the two camps
on this issue. Clinton calls for $100 billion in defense cuts
over four years; Bush has proposed $60 billion -- a tiny
distinction when both sides propose to spend more than $1.1
trillion on the military over four years.

    Another major difference has to do with troop levels:
Clinton wants a fighting force of 1.4 million by 1996; Bush aims
for 1.6 million. It is hard to understand the logic behind the
G.O.P.'s claim that the Clinton plan would cost the U.S. a
million defense-industry jobs, especially since the Arkansas
Governor wants to use the military savings to help convert
defense companies into high-technology industries. Clinton's
internal projection of a loss of 300,000 jobs in five years is
probably much closer to the mark.

    HEALTH CARE. Clinton has played into the Republicans'
hands by overselling his vague health-care proposal, which
promises that "affordable, quality health care will be a right,
not a privilege." The Bush forces brand this as an invitation
to "socialized medicine," or as the President put it in his
speech in Houston, "a health-care system with the efficiency of
the House Post Office and the compassion of the KGB."

    The Republicans incorrectly claim that Clinton supports a
"pay or play" plan that would require companies to either
provide their employees with private health-care insurance or
pay a payroll tax for government-sponsored insurance. The
G.O.P. estimates that a payroll tax of at least 7% would be
necessary to cover all those who lack private insurance, and
claims that such a plan would force many small businesses to
close and cost 700,000 jobs.

    Though Clinton now veers skittishly away from pay or play,
he is vulnerable to attacks on this point because his economic
plan contains not so much as a word about the costs of his
health-care proposals. Why? "At the time we announced the plan,"
says Clinton issues aide Atul Gawande, "we didn't have every
detail on the costs and savings ready. But we did want to
establish the principle that we'd dedicate all the savings to
expanded universal coverage."

    The vagueness of the Clinton proposal has allowed the
G.O.P. to lump it together with various congressional plans that
lack, according to Clinton aides, the kind of cost controls that
Clinton himself would insist upon. But the Congressional Budget
Office estimates that the Clinton health-care plan, such as it
is, would require about $80 billion in new taxes. Clinton aides
insist that there will be no payroll tax in their health
proposal, which would be funded instead by direct government
subsidies to cover those who are too poor to afford private
health insurance. But they admit that despite their candidate's
overheated rhetoric, they may have to introduce coverage very
slowly.

    As the President attacks on these four policy fronts, he
will also stress what Republicans call the risk factor, framing
the debate along the partisan lines of whether voters should
trust a relatively unknown Governor of a small Southern state
with both the economic revitalization of the nation and the
conduct of foreign affairs in a still dangerous world. The
answer may determine whether Bush, whose standing in the polls
bounced up to near competitive levels last week following his
precipitous decline, can win in November. If he cannot, he will
be the first elected Republican President to be denied a second
term since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.