Clinton: the roadside view

National Review, March 30, 1992 by Richard Brookhiser

IN MID JANUARY, Bill Clinton was lord of all he surveyed. Two months later, he was scrambling for victories, outside the South if he could manage them, though any victories, even in his back yard, would suit him fine. I wrote, when Clinton was up, of his smug half-smile, like that worn by Captain Kirk at the start of Star Trek episodes. By now, the Klingons had arrived.

On the eve of Junior Tuesday, the Maryland, Georgia, and Colorado primaries on March 3, Clinton debated his foes at a Beltway campus of the University of Maryland. It was their third debate in two days; Clinton's voice was rough as a grater, and the bags under his eyes looked like mime's makeup. He opened by hammering Paul Tsongas and his call for selective capital-gains tax cuts: "We don't need the best President Wall Street ever had." Clinton offered the signature pledge of all his speeches, his version of the social contract. As President, Clinton said, "I owe you": investment in schools; national standards for high-school tests; a two-year post-high-school apprenticeship program; a college education for anyone willing to give two years of voluntary service as a teacher, social worker, or cop. In return, at least in Arkansas, high-school dropouts would continue to lose their driver's licenses, and parents who didn't show up at parent-teacher conferences could be fined. "We can do something," Clinton insisted.

At his next stop, a rally at an off-campus bar, he varied the pledge, saying that he owed "a fine economic policy," in addition to an education package. What he wanted in return, he told the beer-drinking lacrosse players, was for them to say, "'I believe in the possibilities of our country again.' Let's get our country back." He was not done for the night, for he drove into Baltimore, where he presented championship game jerseys to a high-school basketball team. The crowd cheered them, not him. You know you're in a place that's really America," he said later, "when people care more who the center is than who the candidate is." After that, he addressed a gathering of supporters in a restaurant in Little Italy and spoke of the excitement of governing. "The thing I disagree with most about George Bush," he told this crowd, "is 'the vision thing.' Where there is no vision, the people perish. [Thank you, Reverend Jackson.] Children are being shot in school by people with no vision. People are out of work because there is no vision" in the White House. "I want government to be fun again." Still he was not done, for he went to a bar owned by a state senator-coddies and jumbo Polish on the menu, a video poker game along the wall-where he greeted the patrons and played a game of eight-ball. Clinton won when his opponent scratched.

"I hate to win that way," Clinton remarked next morning, "but I took it." He was standing at a metro stop in Prince Georges County, a black suburb of Washington. (Throughout the South and the near-South, Clinton played up black voters, black supporters, black backdrops.) Between handshakes, he fired at Tsongas again. "Not because he's pro-growth. I'm prog-rowth." Clinton favors tax credits for investments he deems worthy. But he argued that an "Eighties-style capital-gains tax cut" would benefit only those who play the market, giving something for nothing."

At his first stop in Georgia, a medical school in Macon, he wove health care into the many clauses of his contract. "If we don't take care of people, we'll be too sick to take advantage of the best economic policy." But the solemn center of the day came outside Atlanta, in a correctional facility on the back side of Stone Mountain. The road to the camp ran past an Assembly of God Church, a Confederate cemetery, a magnolia, and a yard containing a Christmas-candle lawn ornament and three cars up on blocks. Inside the camp was another typical Georgia sight, the puckered face and sloped brow of Senator Sam Nunn. Clinton had come to look at none of these things, but at young first offenders, who were being punished for their crimes-drug and alcohol. offenses, mostly-with a taste of boot camp. Seventy young men in white uniforms drilled on a basketball court, singing as they marched: "Took me here and shaved my head/Taught me how to make my bed." Clinton has pushed a similar program in Arkansas, and is proud of its recidivism rates. "We can't afford to keep these men on asphalt behind this fence," he said at Stone Mountain. We need them working, earning, raising children.... We can change the future by lifting up people and putting them first for a change."

He ended the day at a fine rally in Columbus, featuring Miss Columbus, pom-pom girls, and an amputee with a chestful of decorations singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." "What all this comes down to," Clinton shouted, "is whether you believe we all go up or down together.... We've had 12 years of do your own thing, take care of yourself, and it's like to killed us.... We're all in this together."

In two days, he picked up two bad vibes: the first in the Italian restaurant, where a tipsy woman at the bar joked that she was one of his girlfriends; the second just before the game of eight-ball, when a young man in a pony tail shook Clinton's hand and introduced himself as "John-a Vietnam veteran."