CLINTON NEEDS REMEDIAL POLITICAL SCIENCE

There are times I believe some of the better students in my Missouri Government class at Southeast Missouri State University would do a better job of running the White House than the Oxford University scholar who now occupies that building. I will admit that running the affairs of the largest democratic government in the world is no small task, but there have been presidents, even in the lifetime of my students, who have demonstrated far more skill in handling both the domestic and foreign problems of the USA than the former governor of the splendid state of Arkansas.

As a matter of fact, Bill Clinton's performance as president, after 14 months in office, is giving his fellow Arkansans a bad name, not to mention a bum rap.

There are several tragedies attached to this below-par performance by admittedly one of the best educated presidents since Thomas Jefferson. First and foremost, the tragedy of despoiled, perhaps destroyed, programs first outlined in the 1992 campaign means that America is unable to solve many of the problems that have bedeviled it for a score or more years.

There is little to no evidence that Bill Clinton, in the time remaining in Washington, will be able to come to grips with some of the more troubling dilemmas of our time. We have a public debt that casts a pall over our national economy, affecting far more of our daily life than we know or suspect. We have a trade deficit that cannot be overcome by the pejorative threat of higher tariffs, and this problem likewise affects our national economy in far more ways than we realize. We have not had an American president since Gerald Ford who was able to present a balanced budget to the Congress, and while the annual deficit is diminishing somewhat at the moment, there are signs it will begin increasing again before this decade is out.

America is guilty of having the worst illegal drug habit in the Free World, a fact that not only impoverishes those who are hooked but one that creates a criminal subculture that fosters crime and makes our streets and neighborhoods unsafe for everyone. We have a homeless population that is a disgrace to our claims of the American dream, becoming instead a nightmare for innocent families whose only home is their automobile or cardboard cartons.

When he was inaugurated 14 months ago, Bill Clinton promised us he would keep his campaign promises, but unfortunately he has been selective in the ones he has chosen. This is not to say that America doesn't need a major overhaul of its health-care system, nor that we don't need to revise a welfare system that fosters dependence rather than independence. We need changes, improvements and reforms in both of these areas, but these alterations cannot be made in weeks or even months. They require careful planning, widespread consultation with all political and economic groups, and a degree of unanimity on the paths to be pursued. If Pearl Harbor had occurred when Clinton was president, one suspects he might have called in his wife, a couple of law school buddies and proceeded to declare war on the Japanese without consulting Congress.

While muddling his most important Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointments, the new president gave top priority to a campaign promise to end discrimination of homosexuals in the armed services. We have yet to understand why Bill Clinton thought this subject should become one of the first orders of business. For a man who survived as many statewide campaigns as Clinton, such a priority remains a political puzzle that defies logical explanation. It only raised still more doubts.

Upon entering the Oval Office, the new president seemed not to recognize that he was in a different political climate than the one that exists in Little Rock or Jefferson City. Instead of placing his personal affairs in a blind trust, as so many of his predecessors had done, he chose to bring into federal service lawyers and friends who were assigned, among other things, the supervision of the Clinton assets. It was a bad move, one predictably designed to cause him grief.

I do not to this day understand the president's culpability in what has become known as Whitewater, and I suspect those who have written at great length about the affair are equally ignorant. But, once again, Clinton displayed poor judgment, choosing to stonewall events, as did Richard Nixon, and then decided to spin facts, as did George Bush, when they came to light. Clinton will never be impeached for anything he did or did not do in the Whitewater affair, but as in so many others cases, he has diminished his ability to solve the nation's problems that remain unattended. The last thing we need at this moment is an impotent, harassed presidency.