MISSOURI COMMENTARY: BILL CLINTON HAS OPPORTUNITY IN FOUR YEARS TO DETERMINE ULTIMATE LEGACY

The 1996 election campaign will not go down in the history books in any positive or defining sense. The rhetoric was less than inspiring. The TV ads at all levels were nauseatingly repetitive, insultingly accusatory, and mostly ugly. The stench of excessive money was everywhere.

We boast about being the greatest democracy on earth, but we can hardly brag about how we conduct our elections. We are a great democracy despite this dark side of our political culture.

In the 1996 campaign, Clinton espoused a series of pleasant, targeted, incremental measures that would have an impact on the margins of the governmental process. All well and good for the moderate image he successfully sought to create. Clinton's reputation as a political tactician is established by the success of his recrafting of his political philosophy and by his party's ability to transform Newt Gingrich, the hero of 1994, into the villain of 1996.

Is this enough of a legacy to satisfy Clinton or does he see history on the horizon?

There are three dominant issues before the nation.

Medicare. Both parties fundamentally agree that Medicare is in serious difficulty. The Republicans wanted to couple Medicare reform with a huge tax cut heavily towards the wealthy. That strategy, along with shutting down the government, dug the Republican grave. The Democrats wanted to do a more modest bit of Medicare containment, but not so much as to offend the senior citizens.

The only way out is for both parties to hold hands and share the burden and the blame. The political device is to hide behind the protective cover of a presidential/congressional commission so distinguished in composition as to give its recommendations great weight.

Social Security. Likewise for the most revered program ever created by the federal government.

The Social Security crisis is not so imminent as that of Medicare. Yet the inevitability of trouble is just as clear and just as worrisome. Comparatively mild adjustments made now will forestall harsher remedies in the next century. If Medicare reform requires the cover of a commission, then Social Security reform needs it all the more.

Campaign Spending Reform. It has been clear for some time that there would be no substantial public support for reforming our atrocious election habits until we encountered an election giving off a memorable odor. Maybe 1996 is just that election.

It isn't just the foreign money being dumped into our elections. it isn't just the millions in "soft" money being thrown over the transom. It isn't just the union dues being spent in vast amounts. It's all of these things and more. American elections are the most money-drenched in the free world.

Some of the evils so evident in the 1996 campaign can be corrected by legislation. The the politics of campaign reform is enormously dicey. What one party sees as an evil, the other party may view as a necessity for political survival.

Again we need the cover of another commission plus something else. We know that thorough campaign spending reform will require a Constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court ruled 20 years ago that the Constitutional protection of free speech limited Congress' authority to put curbs on campaign spending (although regulation of the type currently in existence with the obvious shortcomings) is permissible. In other words, in the final analysis, under the Constitution as it is now interpreted, money talks. So while we should try to tidy up the process as much as is possible by legislation, we also have to begin the much more unpredictable process of passing a constitutional amendment.

President Clinton can decide his own political legacy in the second term. He can continue to work at the margins. Maybe that's about all he believes he can do faced with a Republican Congress. Maybe that's the comfortable and moderate thing to do.

Or maybe he can summon loftier aims. Clinton will not carve a niche in history for recommending the wearing of school uniforms. He could go down in history as the president who rescued Medicare and Social Security and the president who began the clean up of American politics. He has two years to produce. History also tells us that the final two years of an eight-year presidency are almost too sad to contemplate.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.