Promise, Vision and Hope

When The Crimson endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis for president in 1988, we talked about the issues. When we endorsed former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, we did the same. And in 1980, we refused to endorse Jimmy Carter because his positions on the issues added up to an abdication of the liberal principles we held dear.

This year, we believe Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is right on the issues. From the economy to international affairs to the environment and beyond, we think Clinton is right. And we've spent much ink and paper over the last few weeks trying to show you why. At the very least, we have identified the elements of the near-complete failure that has been the Bush presidency.

But for the first time in our collective memory, Clinton offers more than just the right positions. In a nation that has changed, The Crimson has changed and college students across America have changed. In Bill Clinton, we are offered an explicit recognition of this change, a mantra he invokes incessantly. More broadly, in Bill Clinton, we are offered a promise, a vision and, yes, a hope for the future.

Clinton's promise, although the Bush campaign would have you believe the opposite, lies in his character. His upbringing, while draped in schmaltzy music and image at the New York convention, shouldn't be ignored. While it would be simplistic to base one's vote upon candidates' childhood experiences, we believe Clinton's triumph over a broken and sometimes violent home evinces his understanding of ordinary people and the strength of his convictions: in short, the content of his character.

Clinton's intellect promises a commitment more to his policy ideas than to his party and its pressure groups. Clinton is as versed in public policy as any Kennedy School professor, and has attracted perhaps the most talented group of policy geeks ever to serve in a campaign.

While President Bush has collapsed time and again in the face of Republican special interests, Clinton has stood up to established interests in Arkansas, be they business executives or union officials, when they oppose his policy ideas.

He passed sweeping educational reforms in the face of the National Education Association and took on, with limited success, the health care lobby in the state. He hasn't always been successful. He has sometimes compromised when he shouldn't have. But Arkansans are indeed better off now than they were 14 years ago.

An important part of Clinton's promise lies in his ability to build a political coalition. While it's become fashionable to trash politics and politicians, we shouldn't forget that these are the vital means to our ends. Dukakis may have made a decent president, but we'll never know because he was an atrocious politician, uncomfortable in any matters that dealt with his own character.

But politics isn't just a means to policy. As Clinton has shown, it can be a means of pulling the country together. Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater taught Bush the politics of division, wedge issues and smear. But when times are tough, the nation will coalesce only around a message of promise. Clinton rejected the hatred of rap singer Sister Souljah but stands poised to garner a larger percentage of Black voters than even Mondale. He rejected the redistributionalism of the left but has drawn some of its most prominent intellectuals to his ranks. His rhetoric, at base, inspires inclusion.

If Clinton's promise deals with his character, his feelings, his formative intellectual and social experiences, his vision involves the dry wonkery he's spent his adult life practicing professionally.

Clinton is committed to an active government, a government that plays a role in solving the problems of health care, urban America, education, racial division. The Republicans have spent 12 years trashing government's role in these and other matters while quietly watching the size of the government increase. Ideologically opposed to its reform (except for active government proponents like Jack Kemp) and politically frightened of cutting the spending they rail against, the Republicans have supervised a nation in decline, with deficits and corruption swelling simultaneously.

By contrast, Clinton says he wants to make government work. Like a giddy student, Clinton offers detailed plans for nearly everything. Tax incentives for businesses to invest in technology, not higher corporate salaries. Job retraining programs to give the unemployed skills, not welfare checks. A reconstructed infrastructure that will make this country attractive to businesses seeking world-class communication and transportation--businesses that will create jobs. A reinvented educational system that recognizes the skills needed to compete in the modern world economy. A universal health care system that regulates costs but doesn't involve full government control. A government and supreme court that works to protect a woman's right to choose.

And in international relations, Clinton's vision promotes democracy and punishes tyranny, two simple commitments that President Bush has, for both political and ideological reasons, rarely put into practice. While we credit him with remarkable management of certain foreign policies, Bush's own lack of vision has marred his ability to achieve a coherent set of ends.

This brings us to Clinton's hope. If his vision is about policy, his hope lies in politics. Clinton's victory tomorrow would end one of the worst problems of American governance in this half century--divided government.

Especially during the Bush presidency, Congress and the president have worked against each other, preventing much of anything from being passed. The most important legislation passed during the Bush years--the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Clean Air Act and 1990 budget deal--passed only after months of wrangling. Since passage, each one has been undermined by the Bush administration, whether through Dan Quayle's Council on Competitiveness or, in the case of the budget deal, Bush's own disavowal.

Bush, and Reagan before him, assiduously avoided dealing with the deficit by blaming a spendthrift Congress. Even as they assailed tax-and-spend Democrats, they submitted budget after budget with huge deficits and contributed to the current economic malaise.

In the last three and a half years, Bush has vetoed more bills than any president before, and Congress has responded by blocking Bush initiatives from passage or even consideration.

We realize that the last Democratic president worked as poorly with Congress. But Clinton offers the hope that a president and Congress could work together to achieve common goals. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Clinton hasn't run against Congress, and many members have campaigned with him in their districts--unusual for the last few Democratic nominees.

In addition, Clinton wouldn't have Congress to blame for the deficit, and members of Congress wouldn't want to blame a Democratic president for it. We explained last month why the deficit shouldn't be attacked with intensity until after recovery is fully under way (and why it isn't as bad as Ross Perot would have it anyway). But once unemployment and wages improve, the next president should work for spending cuts and tax hikes to shrink the deficit, if only because it makes Americans nervous about needed government spending and needed consumer spending.

We have every reason to think Clinton will do this. First of all, as we said, he won't want to blame a Democratic Congress. More important, he will want to avoid the drag on the economy that the deficit has been over the last three years. President Bush, by fudging budget numbers and playing the blame game, ignored the debt and deficit begun by his predecessor. Now he is in deep trouble, unwilling to fight the deficit because such action would damage the economy even further and unable politically to wait for the recovery that will allow deficit-fighting. Clinton will learn the lesson.

Finally, Clinton's hope for the future draws on both the promise of his character and the vision of his policies. He will build coalitions around workable programs. He will combine his passion and speech-making with the competence Dukakis promised. He will be, in a phrase that the cynics have driven to oxymoronism, a good politician.

Perhaps five or six years ago--and certainly 20 years ago--The Crimson would not have endorsed Bill Clinton, citing his approval of the death penalty and refusal to endorse widespread redistribution, among other things, as the sources of his inadequacy.

The death penalty still bothers most of us. But if economic growth and the expansion of cultural freedoms made our predecessors more idealistic, economic stagnation and the divisive politics of Reaganism have made the current generation of college-age students less so.

We still worry about job loss, educational decay, a society in which over half of America's male middle schoolers believe it's okay to force sex on a woman they are dating. We still worry about the poor. We still worry about crumbling public schools. We still worry about racial division, urban blight and anti-gay attitudes.

And now we worry about paying the bills, too. We worry about finding jobs for ourselves and good public schools for our children. We worry about the long-term economic stability of the nation and its ability to finance the programs we want. We worry about crime and drugs. We worry about the development of a partially welfare-dependent society and the lack of personal responsibility on the part of many Americans.

In the end, it is Bill Clinton who seems to understand these worries best. We hope he doesn't fudge the truth, as he has sometimes in this campaign and as Bush has throughout his presidency. But, at base, we know we share Clinton's principles.

A President Clinton won't bring utopia. Four years from now, every day won't be sunny, every street won't be free of crime, every home won't be prosperous.

But our lives will be better. And electing William Jefferson Clinton is the way to ensure that.