The Long Road
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Lately this phrasing has been dropped. An aide explains, "It sounds like we - want to be all things to all people, and voters just don't believe it." But though the words have changed, the spirit has not. Clinton still tends to promise more than the fine print of his own programs will support. He generally shuns any talk of sacrifice -- despite a pointed invitation from Jim Lehrer, moderating the final TV debate, to do so. His speeches hold out a glittering vision of prosperity and social progress to be attained with no pain for anyone except the privileged elite earning more than $200,000 a year. But a President cannot avoid making decisions that will alienate some people, and the disappointment to some voters who buy his vision of a painless paradise may be intense.
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A somewhat more ambiguous quality might be called either adaptability or slipperiness. During the campaign, it has enabled the candidate to emphasize different parts of his message for different audiences, and occasionally switch signals. Though Clinton chastised Paul Tsongas for suggesting that a middle-class tax cut was the linchpin of the Governor's economic program, Clinton made it sound exactly like that when talking early in the campaign to the hard-pressed voters of New Hampshire. Later, as it became increasingly obvious that the size of the cut he first proposed could not be reconciled with his promises to reduce the deficit, the Arkansan greatly scaled it back.
More recently still, questioners have asked whether the Democrat's ambitious plans for spending on roads, bridges, job training, welfare reform and other worthy projects would not require a middle-class tax increase to finance. While refusing to make any read-my-lips pledge, Clinton asserts that he will instead scale back some of his spending plans if his defense cuts and revenue measures do not bring in as much money as he expects. In short, he will not necessarily be bound by the specifics of his many proposals. That attitude could serve a President well up to a point; it is certainly preferable to a stubborn refusal to change come hell, high water or ruinous deficits. But it could too easily degenerate into a confusing and self-defeating backing and filling.
It even could, at long last, deny Clinton the White House. After getting nowhere with various other lines of attack, Bush has begun, though possibly too late, to score with a new charge: Clinton is a waffler who takes every side of every issue, a spendthrift liberal who will eventually tax the daylights out of the middle class because he cannot finance his ambitious * schemes any other way; altogether, a man who cannot be trusted in the White House. The attack is overstated, but Clinton has virtually invited it by putting forward plans whose numbers do not always add up.
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