HOMETOWN EDITOR GREENBERG FINDS AN EMPTY SUIT IN CLINTON

I'm returning today after a three day weekend AOPA (pilots) convention, equipment, and trade show, where I went to seminars to upgrade my pilot skills and equipment knowledge. The first presidential and vice presidential debates have been held ... and I do not know the outcome, but I expect they drew a large viewership.

The following, is from last week's Wall Street Journal and was written by TIM FERGUSON ... the Journal's Business World columnist. It gives a little background on PAUL GREENBERG, who is one of the Pulitzer Prize winning columnists we carry. Greenberg worked a brief period with the Chicago Sun-Times, but preferred and so returned to the State of Arkansas where he is highly respected as one of its outstanding news men.

FOR HOMETOWN EDITOR, CLINTON IS AN EMPTY SUIT "Bill Clinton's hometown editorial writer is one of his sharpest critics. But Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, in sardonic style, puts the prospective election of his governor to the presidency in gentle, if damning, context.

"I don't think it would be the end of Western civilization," he says. "In fact, it would be the culmination of Western civilization in many aspects."

Mr. Greenberg, though he was recruited just this year to a glass office looking out on the newsroom of Arkansas's dominant daily, is still the hinterlands intellectual he was for 30 years at the Pine Bluff Commercial. There, he won a Pulitzer Prize and other recognition far beyond the bounds of that struggling gateway to the Mississippi River Delta.

He is not one to overlook the faults of a nation or a state, which in his world stem from absences of purpose, virtue and honesty. Those are also the bases of his soured relationship with Mr. Clinton, on whom he pinned the "Slick Willie" moniker.

Mr. Greenberg's most direct and repeated complaint is that the governor is duplicitous. "Bill Clinton is a presidential debate" was the headline of his column last Friday. Most acutely, he recalls Mr. Clinton assuring him at a press encounter some months ago that he hadn't said, at the outset of the Persian Gulf War, that he agreed with the arguments of congressional opponents. Mr. Greenberg accepted the claim, assuming his own memory had failed him, until he later checked the clipping file. "I don't think his pulse even increased" as he fibbed, the editorialist remembers. "Clinton is very casual about things. Those of us with guilt complexes would worry ourselves to death."

If Mr. Greenberg is inclined to political punctiliousness, he also wants his elected officials to have spine and soul. Mr. Clinton is short on both, he finds.

"If there is a lodestar to his career, it is the constant search for popularity and re-election, period," he observes. "We may not have seen the dimensions of this emptiness yet in an American president." He chuckles at an item he was handed from the San Jose Mercury News that describes the man's presidential quest as a "journey of self discovery"--the vacuous admiring facuity in 1992.

Mr. Clinton has managed his success, at least since his brief ouster as governor in 1980, by brokering compromises among interest groups, offending the powerless mass of voters with regressive taxation and the like, but consistently satisfying the constituencies he needed to stay on top. "I don't know of a single essential principle that he would hold fast to," says Mr. Greenberg.

Beyond Mr. Clinton's adaptability is his history as a "striver," a resume-builder of the sort that Mr. Greenberg finds in a world of corporate commercialism where people "offer their souls up" for advancement. Although he welcomes the material comforts provided through the marketplace, this commentator is a traditionalist at heart who decries, in the late Walker Percy's phrase, "the bleakness of modernity." For him, Mr. Clinton personifies this void.

"He is a man of the times, a fashionable man," Mr. Greenberg puts it. Mr. Clinton as president would surround himself with "the mod, pragmatic liberal set who look to the usual punditry." At a Clinton cabinet meeting, "I don't get the sense of Jefferson and Madison pulling on George Washington."

Does the governor not have religious beliefs that anchor his character? Mr. Greenberg at first demurs but then offers that Mr. Clinton (though a Baptist) is indicative of "Mild Methodism, activism with the right social messages." His gospel is an easy understanding of sin, and he is "a walking example of cheap grace, in Dietrich Bonhoffer's words."

Some believe that Mr. Clinton, by virtue of his exposure to elite academic and policy-making circles, is broader-gauged than Jimmy Carter. Mr. Greenberg, who did postgraduate study at Columbia University in the early 1960s, disagrees. "Carter growing up in Plains, Ga., had a wider world" than the "thin intellectual milieu" in which Mr. Clinton has traveled, he says. "Living in a small town forces you to go more deeply into other people." By contrast, the larger universe that has been Mr. Clinton's life since about the time he shook John Kennedy's hand at Boys' Nation is a "parish of theory."

For his part, Paul Greenberg is not the toast of all Arkansans, many of whom tire of what they see as his dwelling on the state's problems, including its pockets of prejudice and backwardness. But the editorialist says he has endured no particular pressure to back off from his criticisms of the favorite son. He attributes this to Arkansas' historic allowance for quirky individualism.

Even the governor puts up with the man who's turned so sour on him. And this, too, seems to disappoint Mr. Greenberg. "On a few occasions he may have raised his voice, but I have never felt any rage," he says. "It almost felt as if he were acting."