Playing Hardball

By and large, their scouting report hasn’t changed. Should Clinton win the Democratic nomination, he’ll encounter other elements of Bush’s fall strategy. “Jobs, family and peace,” themes framed by campaign chairman Robert Teeter, will color campaign speeches. Congress-bashing will intensify. Bush will set the tone with a speech or prime-time press conference after lawmakers flout his March 20 deadline for passage of his economic-recovery package. A careful regimen of “presidential” activity-foreign trips, a possible new round of arms talks, some repackaged domestic proposals-will reinforce Bush’s aura of incumbency and reassure moderates put off by his ragged primary campaign against Patrick Buchanan. But stripped to its essentials, Bush’s plan to retain the White House rests on two expectations: economic recovery and a critical mass of voter doubt about Clinton’s character.

Despite Clinton’s string of decisive Super Tuesday victories over Paul Tsongas, Bush strategists are convinced he is in the midst of a slow, irreversible bleed. They believe that lingering questions about marital infidelity and draft avoidance (combined with reports last week of a 1978 real- estate partnership with the owner of a failing savings and loan that was represented before state regulators by Hillary Clinton’s law firm) will eventually overwhelm him. “Clinton has three bullet holes in him now,” says one of Bush’s top advisers. " He may be one heck of an able politician. But if you think he can come back from this, you belong in Hollywood. It only happens in the movies."

Is the White House relying too much on a Clinton meltdown? Even with his current character baggage, he would bring formidable assets to a fall campaign. He may not be the Southerner Bush advisers feared, but he’s still a Southerner–the only type of Democrat to have won the presidency since 1960. His Arkansas roots may reassure voters outside the region as well, by signaling his centrism to Democrats who believe the party has been overly indulgent of African-Americans and special-interest groups. Clinton’s 11-year gubernatorial record–which includes tax increases–is a target, but it will be difficult for the GOP to pigeonhole him as a liberal. “It’s hard to run a Willie Horton ad against a guy who allows capital punishment in his state,” says Bush New Hampshire adviser Tom Rath. And while Clinton is well wired with the Beltway establishment, he’s not a creature of Congress, which buys him immunity from anti-incumbent rage.

Almost as important is a battle-hardened campaign staff skilled at damage control. When bad press hits, Clinton’s people mobilize with SWAT-team speed. “It seems like they have a file drawer full of stuff to fax out the moment a story hits,” says Tsongas aide Andy Paven. Clinton’s resilience worries even some Bush aides. “Do you remember Jason in ‘Friday the 13th’?” one adviser asks. “At the end of each movie he looks dead, but in the sequel he gets up and is still holding the knife.”

On the campaign trail, Clinton is everything Bush is not: sure-footed, engaging, utterly absorbed in the game. He can also manipulate the symbols of popular culture with more authenticity. When he was photographed lifting a pool cue recently, Bubbas around the country knew they were looking at a guy who had hung out in a pool hall before. His saxophone, which he’s played for years, has a cross-racial appeal, evoking both marching bands and smoky jazz clubs. Clinton’s down-home comfort makes Bush’s 1988 rent-a-symbols, pork rinds and country music, look especially hollow. Nuances like that aren’t just grist for copy-hungry journalists: in presidential polities, visual cues matter. The late Lee Atwater took one look at Michael Dukakis in 1988, vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in his Lacoste shirt, chinos and Top-Siders without socks, and knew Reagan Democrats would never bite.

These assets give Clinton a legitimate shot at capturing the swing Democrats who have delivered the White House to the GOP for the last three elections. The middle-class mother lode resides in the suburban subdivisions of the New South and the ethnic Catholic enclaves of the Midwest and Northeast. A generation ago these were solid Democratic streets, and last week Clinton was trying to win them back. “Somebody’s got to come back to the so-called Reagan Democratic area and say, ‘Look, I’ll give you your values back. I’ll help you build the middle class back’,” Clinton said at Macomb County Community College in suburban Detroit. Then he made the appeal to racial harmony that is at the core of his campaign: a plea for disaffected whites to find common cause with blacks in the fight for economic justice. “But you’ve got to say, ‘OK, let’s do it for everybody in this country. Let’s forget about race and be one nation again’.”

Other Republicans are warning the White House it’s in for a tough race. Richard Nixon cautions that Bush should not be lulled by his 1988 landslide. In a memo late last month to GOP consultant Roger Stone, Nixon noted that a swing of just 566,000 votes in 11 closely contested states–including California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois–would have given Dukakis enough electoral votes to win. Nixon predicted that the GOP’s Southern base would ensure Bush another comfortable plurality in the popular vote this fall–even with a Southerner as the Democratic nominee. But he said Bush could still lose the Electoral College if Clinton takes California and the up-for-grabs states in the Northeast and Midwest. Bush strategists consider the no-South scenario a marginal one. " We’d like to see the Democrats try it, " says one top adviser. “We certainly won’t.”

For a campaign whose candidate currently has a 39 percent approval rating, the Bush camp sounds pretty confident. They have their reasons. Clinton’s “sweep” of the South on Super Tuesday was more like a light dusting. He got the Bubba vote, but not much of it showed up. Turnout was as low as 21 percent in Mississippi. For the first time, Republicans voted in larger numbers than Democrats in some Southern states. The black vote was down substantially as well, and exit polls showed persistent voter concern about Clinton. “Super Tuesday wasn’t really an endorsement of Bill Clinton as much as it was a message of Democratic weakness,” says Atlanta pollster Claibourne Darden.

The White House will be happy to nurse those doubts about Clinton. Character questions will be left to surrogates like Dan Quayle and cabinet members. Bush will focus on Clintons record in Arkansas. As in 1988, he’ll be backstopped by a brigade of opposition research specialists–“the 35 excellent nerds,” as Atwater called them. Led by aide David Tell, the Bush " OPO" (as the researchers are known in the trade) has read every public document issued during Clinton’s tenure as governor and state attorney general. To help exploit any openings, Bush has asked 1988 negative-ad maestro Roger Ailes to rejoin the campaign.

In the days before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton polltaker Stan Greenberg predicted that Democratic foes would try to " Muskie-ize" Clinton–force him to crack under continued character assaults. It hasn’t worked. But the pressure seems to be taking a private toll. The man staffers call “Elvis” is beginning to look like The King in his final years, putting on 20-30 pounds since the campaign started. And despite his outward confidence, he has developed a private brittleness about the scrutiny, joking bitterly about journalists who have “crawled my ass” in search of stories to write. When the GOP starts its crawl toward November, Clinton may look back on these weeks as the good old days.

title: “Playing Hardball” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-24” author: “Seth Phillips”

title: “Playing Hardball” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Violet Tabor”

Bill Clinton wants the world, or at least Capitol Hill, to think that he is a tough guy. He took office with his reputation preceding him: as a politician who folds too soon, who cares more about getting a deal than sticking to principles. Compromise, of course, is the essence of governing. When Jimmy Carter refused to compromise on a plan to cut federal water projects in his first months, he was vilified as highhanded and naive in the ways of Washington. But Clinton has shaved on so many issues that the temptation is to say, regardless of the merits: there he goes again.

To get his economic-stimulus package past a Republican filibuster in the Senate, the president will have to compromise. But not too much-or he will alienate liberals in the House. The result could be what Bill Clinton was elected to overcome: more government gridlock. The White House is not exactly seized by an air of crisis-it would be hard for the president’s twenty- and thirtysomething staff to work any harder than they already do. But there is less talk now of the Clinton “juggernaut”-and more worry about the dicey legislative struggles that lie ahead.

For Clinton, the battle over the stimulus package is a true test. The legislation in itself is not so important. Administration rhetoric notwithstanding, it probably won’t have much effect on the economy. But the skirmish may tell much about Clinton’s chances of winning far bigger battles down the road, over raising taxes and reforming the nation’s health care. Already, the public is beginning to have some doubts. A NEWSWEEK Poll shows Clinton’s approval rating dropped 8 points in two weeks, to 49 percent-the first major poll to show the president with a rate of less than 50 percent.

Clinton got himself into this jam in part by a misplaced sense of confidence. Certain thathe could bypass the Republicans with a Democrats-only strategy, he was surprised that the GOP would stage a filibuster so early in his presidency. He knew he didn’t have the numbers in the Senate to shut down debate. (It takes 60 votes to get “cloture,” and there are only 57 Democrats.) But after an election that clearly signaled public displeasure with gridlock, he thought he had the psychological edge.

He failed to realize how much the Republicans resent Sen. Robert Byrd, the imperious chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee who used parliamentary tricks to shut off GOP amendments. Clinton was also unable to impose discipline on his own troops. After he punished defecting Democratic Sen. Richard Shelby by relocating more than 9O NASA jobs out of Alabama, Shelby kept voting Republican-and became a folk hero at home for standing up to the president.

As the filibuster dragged on, Clinton lost control of the public “spin game”-a cardinal sin for a White House that prides itself on focus and control over the president’s image. Clinton was distracted by his Vancouver summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin as well as by the illness and, last week, the death, of his father-in-law, Hugh Rodham. Without Clinton’s personal salesmanship, Republicans successfully cast the bill as pork-barrel spending that would boost the deficit. Clinton finally retaliated, reaching into his campaign grab bag of populist themes. The Senate has a swimming pool, he noted at a photo op. Do only politicians and the rich have the right to swim? By the weekend, smugness had returned to the White House war room. Watching reports on CNN, a top aide noted that the network flashed “Jobs Bill” on the screen each time the impasse was discussed. “We’ll take it,” he smiled, knowing a debate framed by jobs was one Clinton could win.

The Republicans can’t stall forever. NEWSWEEK’s Poll shows a majority (59 percent) believe Clinton’s stimulus plan is necessary, and 57 percent think Congress should pass the legislation. Eventually, both sides will give a little and a whittled-down stimulus bill will pass. But that’s just the first hurdle. Another leg of Clintonomics–a $21 billion investment tax credit-is looking wobbly. Business, which might be counted on to boost any tax break, has shown little interest. Most industry leaders would prefer that Clinton back off his plan to raise the corporate tax rate from 34 to 36 percent. Many lawmakers say the investment tax credit, designed to spur industry to buy new equipment, would wind up as just another loophole.

Hanging over these machinations is the shadow of Ross Perot. Clinton doesn’t want to look like the consummate politician that he is. No president gets everything he asks for, not even Ronald Reagan in his wildly successful first year. But how Clinton handles this early skirmishing with Congress will establish who’s in control on Capitol Hill. And how much he gives away will be an omen for how hard he will fight for the rest of his program.

..MR.-

How Is President Clinton handling his job?

49% Approve 36% Disapprove

Should Congress pass Clinton’s spending package to create jobs?

57% Yes 30% No

Should there be a federal law making it a crime to block or attack an abortion clinic?

63% Yes 30% No

How much has Clinton compromised on these issues?

Gays in the military 38% Too much 35% About right Admitting Haitian refugees 43% Too much 27% About right His economic plan 22% Too much 42% About right

For this NEWSWEEK Poll, Princeton Survey Research interviewed 750 adults by telephone April 8-9. The margin of error is /- 4 percentage points, Some “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. ..MR0-

PHOTO: Less than perfect pitch: Throwing out the first ball of the season (PAUL J.RICHARDS-AFP)

CAVE-INS AND COMPROMISES: CLINTON’S REALITY TESTS

Clinton waffled on a campaign pledge to end the Pentagon ban on gays and lesbians with a stroke of the pen, setting up congressional hearings instead.

Clinton planned to charge mining companies and ranchers more for using federal land. Key Western Democratic senators changed his tune.

Clinton hopes to please New Englanders by taxing home heating oil as if it were low-or-taxed natural gas. For Midwestern voters, he’s exempted ethanol altogether.

Final action is months away, but Clinton has bowed to pressure from civil-service unions to trim $2 billion to $4 billion from planned savings from federal pay.

title: “Playing Hardball” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “Jennifer Vazquez”

title: “Playing Hardball” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-31” author: “Debra Hodges”

Once the votes were counted last Wednesday, Chavez the civilian democrat re-emerged. Gracious in victory–the “yes” vote was 71 percent–Chavez changed into a business suit and told a national TV audience, “I am here with open arms and an open heart of faith and optimism about the Venezuela that we shall build together.” Ever since his election last year, the former star pitcher of the Venezuelan Army baseball team has been a political switch hitter. One moment his tough talk echoes the strongmen of Latin America’s woeful past–and reminds listeners that he spent time in jail for plotting a 1992 coup. The next moment he’s a populist, promising to do the people’s work and clean up Venezuela’s deeply corrupt political culture. The real Chavez still hasn’t stood up. Still, his energy, unmistakable charisma and enthusiasm for bold ideas–the new Constitution will also modify the country’s name–has made Chavez the most compelling Latin American leader since Fidel Castro. He is NEWSWEEK’s Latin American of the year.

The reviews of Chavez have been all over the place. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa scorned the flamboyant, name-dropping Chavez as a “laughable personage” and blamed his rise to power on the dismal performance of Venezuela’s recent presidents. But the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez saw him in a different light. “I was struck by the inspiration that I had traveled and talked… with two opposite men,” Garcia Marquez remarked after he flew with Chavez from Havana to Caracas. “One whom good luck had given the opportunity to save his nation. And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just another despot.” That Jekyll-and-Hyde quality remains undiminished. The same man who quotes the poetry of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda by heart can bully his detractors in ways that evoke comparisons with Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Ten months into the Chavez era of Venezuelan history, the inner tension between the simpatico president in the baseball pinstripes and the blustering comandante in the camouflage fatigues plays itself out on an almost daily basis.

There is, however, one thing about Chavez that his friends and foes agree on: he likes power and intends to hold onto it. Now he has a mandate to do so. In four consecutive elections and referendums over 12 months, he sought and received overwhelming public support for his so-called peace-ful revolution. The constitutional referendum was essentially a plebiscite on the first year of the Chavez presidency. As early as next February, Venezuelans will troop back to the polls for another round of presidential and congressional elections. If, as expected, Chavez and his allies coast to another victory over a demoralized, no-name opposition, he will govern Venezuela with a rubber-stamp legislature and a reorganized armed forces under his unsupervised control. Critics warn of a secret agenda to transform one of Latin America’s most enduring democracies into a thinly disguised authoritarian regime. “We are heading toward catastrophe,” says Jorge Olavarria, a longtime congressman and former Chavez adviser who broke with the president soon after he took office in February. “This Constitution will set us back 100 years, and the military will become the armed wing of a political movement.”

To date, Chavez has avoided anything approaching outright oppression. That may reflect a candid recognition that he has a past to live down: this is the same man who made his political debut as a renegade lieutenant colonel trying to blast his way into power in a bloody military coup. Six years later, he achieved that goal peacefully at the ballot box by railing against two corrupt political parties that had ruled Venezuela since the late 1950s. Successive leaders of those parties took turns raiding the national coffers–to the point where four out of five Venezuelans now live below the poverty line in a country that, 20 years ago, had the highest standard of living in Latin America. Yet none of those politicians has been jailed, neither of the parties has been outlawed and no anti-Chavez newspapers have been shut down.

Chavez does have a dark side. It was on full display during the referendum campaign. He belittled some of his critics as “ignorant,” “degenerate” or just plain “corrupt.” In the classic discourse of Argentina’s Juan Domingo Peron and other Latin American caudillos of a bygone era, Chavez questioned his opponents’ patriotism. And when a Roman Catholic cardinal accused Chavez of dividing the country with a hatemongering campaign, the president retorted that some clerics could use the services of an exorcist.

Yet not even his staunchest critics can impugn the democratic foundation of Chavez’s power. His national approval ratings have never dipped below 65 percent, even though Venezuela is staggering through its worst recession since governments began tracking economic trends in the 1920s. His looks and folksy style don’t hurt him: in the eyes of most Venezuelans, Chavez’s passion for baseball and his brown-skinned, moon-shaped face stamp him as a man of the people. “He’s the guy on the white horse,” says Robert Bottome, editor of the weekly newsletter VenEconomy. “People believe that if they get rid of the corrupt bastards, all their problems will be solved. That’s the Chavez message, and it gets through.”

It isn’t difficult to understand Chavez’s street-level appeal. As the president choppered into the city of Valencia in search of “yes” votes last week, uniformed soldiers in a working-class neighborhood were distributing fresh fruits and vegetables at cut-rate prices at an outdoor “people’s market.” Such government-sponsored markets have become familiar hallmarks of Chavez’s Plan Bolivar 2000, which has put tens of thousands of soldiers to work delivering basic social services and rebuilding Venezuela’s collapsing infrastructure. Amparo de Guerrero did not vote for Chavez in last year’s presidential election, but, as she waited in line to buy tomatoes and onions at a third of the usual cost, she pronounced herself a true believer in El Comandante. “Sure, he’s using these markets for a political purpose,” said the 33-year-old seamstress. “But there’s been so much corruption, and everybody wants a change.”

It’s still unclear what kind of change Chavez means to bring about. A series of impetuous gestures and statements has aroused concern in the United States and elsewhere that Chavez is a closet revolutionary. In one of his first headline-grabbing stunts, he invited both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Kaddafi to an upcoming meeting of oil-producing countries in Caracas. He infuriated officials in Bogota when he cultivated ties with Colombia’s two leftist guerrilla movements and volunteered his services as a mediator in that country’s long-running civil war. Last month he dumbfounded his countrymen with his excessive praise for Castro during a summit in Havana. “Venezuela is going in the same direction [and] toward the same sea as the Cuban people,” Chavez said, “a sea of happiness, true social justice and peace.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration bit its tongue. That may reflect a sober assessment among U.S. officials that Chavez has no plans to import Castro’s failed socialist policies. He has instead announced plans to retain Venezuela’s mixed-economy model that gives the state a dominant role in the all-important oil industry. He has also ruled out any wholesale privatization of the country’s state-owned companies for the time being. But the rest of the economy will stay in private hands–and as long as the United States continues to buy up three fourths of Venezuela’s annual oil exports, Chavez’s deeds will never match his occasional pro-Castro outburst.

The Chavez phenomenon has yet to produce any similar political upheaval beyond Venezuela’s borders. Voters in Argentina and Uruguay backed the candidates of traditional political parties in recent presidential elections, and Chileans will follow their example in a runoff vote scheduled for next month. But Chavez’s crushing defeats of Venezuela’s mainstream parties show that tens of millions of Latin America’s have-nots are ready for a new breed of leader. Hard times throughout the region have soured many voters on free-market economic models and the democratically elected governments that eagerly embraced them. “There is disenchantment throughout the Americas with political parties, and Chavez was one of the first to tap into that,” says Eduardo Gamarra, the director of the Latin American-Caribbean Center at Miami’s Florida International University. “Some people are seeing the Chavez model as something they’d like to emulate.”

At the same time, Chavez is learning that popularity at the polls often doesn’t translate into confidence in the boardroom. Leaders of Venezue-la’s leading private-sector business group publicly urged voters to reject the new Constitution. Chavez’s talk of opposing “savage neoliberalism” has not endeared him to prospective foreign and domestic investors. Quite the contrary: an estimated $4 billion left the country in capital flight this year, and the investment-banking firm Warburg Dillon Read recently warned of a “very real risk” that government policies in Venezuela may veer “sharply to the left” in the coming year.

Sooner or later, President Chavez will have to start delivering on his promises to clean house and recapture Venezuela’s prosperity of the oil-boom era. The crackdown on corruption has already begun in earnest. Last week a committee of the pro-Chavez Constituent Assembly suspended 88 judges and magistrates and sacked an additional 42 from the bench on charges ranging from nepotism to bribe taking (one criminal-court judge was found to have carried out more than $1 million worth of bank transactions over a three-month period).

But the stagnant economy will not lend itself to a quick fix. Unemployment continues to hover around 20 percent, and Venezuela’s gross domestic product will shrink by an estimated 8 percent this year. The worst effects of the slump will be cushioned by the recent sharp rise in world oil prices, and a surge in public-sector spending will produce modest economic growth in the new year. Still, analysts warn that the trend may be short-lived, and a drop in the price of crude could jolt the economy. “It will be a very dangerous year for Chavez,” cautions Jose Antonio Gil Yepes, president of the Caracas market-research firm Datanalisis. “Public spending will create the impression of an improvement, but if it’s not accompanied by economic reform he will have to pay the piper in 2001.”

Already there are signs that Chavez’s popularity may have peaked. Most Venezuelans didn’t bother to vote in last week’s referendum–and the number who approved the new Constitution fell short of the 80 percent that Chavez had been seeking. A recent Datanalisis survey of focus groups in Caracas also uncovered public-opinion trends that could trouble the Chavez camp. Most participants described Chavez as an authoritarian who had largely failed to curb a soaring crime rate or create new jobs and housing. A solid majority also said that Chavez should work harder, cut back on his foreign trips and, perhaps most wounding of all, spend less time playing baseball.

There was no time for baseball last week. Torrential rain and devastating mudslides killed at least 200 and left more than 150,000 Venezuelans homeless. Chavez’s response? He got back into his combat fatigues and took charge of the government’s relief efforts, doing what he says the people elected him to do: making war on the country’s problems.