Bill Clinton: Front Runner By Default

By MARGARET CARLSON/LITTLE ROCK )

Bill Clinton has the unlined, open face of a man who has had it too easy. True, his father died before he was born, and he grew up poor in the southwest Arkansas town of Hope (pop. 10,000). But Clinton was Hope's Doogie Howser, succeeding at everything he tried, the darling of his teachers and one of the first from the area to go to college. He got his bachelor's degree at Georgetown University, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, then went on to Yale Law School, where he met his wife Hillary. By 1979, 32 years old and back in Arkansas, he was the youngest Governor in the country.

Two years later, Clinton was the youngest ex-Governor in the country. In Pea Ridge and the Ozarks, the voters resented the notion that this whiz kid had returned home to put shoes on everybody and introduce them to book learning. Says Carrick Patterson, former editor of the Arkansas Gazette: "They thought he had gotten too big for his britches." Clinton admits that he took too much for granted. He hiked license-tag fees. The fact that his wife used her maiden name and that the family was not a member of any organized religion did not help either.

By 1982 Hillary Rodham was answering to Hillary Clinton and the family was worshiping regularly at Little Rock's Immanuel Baptist Church. But mostly Clinton was two years older and chastened. He was re-elected, with 55% of the vote.

Are things once again going too smoothly for Clinton? At 45, he has a decade in the statehouse behind him. After Mario Cuomo took himself out of the race for the White House, Clinton became his party's media-anointed front runner. He may soon discover that the worst thing that can happen to a candidate is to be too far ahead too soon. The political press corps, which prides itself on how quickly it can knock the stuffing out of those who would run for President, has gone into a deep swoon over his candidacy, from which it will sooner or later recover. For the moment, reporters seem entranced by Clinton's persona: a good-government geek saved by a self-deprecating sense of humor. As chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that wants to yank the party back to the center, Clinton's idea of a well-spent weekend is one given to working on welfare and education reform. Yet when he was introduced at a forum in New Hampshire as the smartest of the candidates, he quipped, "Isn't that a little like calling Moe the most intelligent of the Three Stooges?"

Last summer, when rumors swirled about Clinton's alleged extramarital affairs, some reporters thought they might have another Gary Hart in their sights. But Clinton smoothly deflected the inevitable "have you ever" question at a Washington breakfast meeting with journalists. With Hillary sitting next to him pushing scrambled eggs around her plate, he said their 16- year marriage, like others, had had its ups and downs, but "we believe in our obligation to each other." So far, an army of reporters has failed to uncover a smoking bimbo.

In the first televised debate among the candidates, Clinton acted as though he were the returning champion on Jeopardy while the others, especially Jerry Brown, behaved as if they were on Let's Make a Deal. Clinton, seated on the end, maintained an air of detachment, speaking only when called upon by quizmaster Tom Brokaw. He managed to squeeze in concern for the middle class about as often as Bob Kerrey referred to his war record.

Unlike many Southern pols, Clinton does not have a Velcro personality, attaching country ways at home, then peeling them away in the fund-raising parlors of Norman Lear and Pamela Harriman. He makes $35,000 a year (supplemented by his wife's salary as a lawyer). He helps his daughter Chelsea, 11, with algebra by fax from the road. He is passionate about crossword puzzles, and golfs and vacations every year with a group of close friends in South Carolina. He has been wearing off-the-rack clothes since the word got out that one of his suits cost $800.

When Clinton is not playing it safe, his personality is a pole away from Michael Dukakis': he looks happy at the risk of seeming insufficiently serious. His version of a campaign handshake ranges from a bear hug to a full body slam. As he plays host at yet another fund raiser and poses for one more picture at a campaign breakfast with a woman dressed as if it's cocktail hour, he can be as ingratiating as a frat-house president during rush week. He told a voter during his last Governor's race, "I was afraid you might be tired of me by now." The farmer replied, "I'm not, but everybody else I know is."

The whole country got a chance to get tired of Clinton in 1988, when he glazed the eyes of the delegates at the Democratic convention by droning on for 33 minutes. The audience broke into cheers when he finally got to "In conclusion . . . " After Johnny Carson joked about what came to be known as "The Speech," Clinton wangled an invitation to appear on the show and play his saxophone (badly).

Now his campaign performances are polished and full of specifics. When Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown in October, there were whoops as he lambasted the greedheads on Wall Street and the drug dealers of Mean Street, and again when he laced into George Bush for dividing the country by using the oldest tactic in the book: "You find the most economically insecure white people, and you scare the living daylights out of them." At a fund raiser for Illinois Democrats, he showed he can make the case that America is wasting much of its young generation. "It's a long, long way in this country from me at the age of six holding my great-granddaddy's hand to a condition where children on the streets of this city don't know who their grandparents are," he said. "If we cannot make common cause with those kids, we cannot keep the American Dream alive for any of us."

As Governor, Clinton has thrown most of his effort into early-childhood intervention and education. Social Security numbers are recorded on birth certificates to help trace deadbeat fathers. He increased teachers' salaries but insisted on a controversial competency exam. Parents who don't show up at teacher meetings are fined $50. Starting in 1993, failing students will not be allowed to get a driver's license. Clinton has expanded Head Start and launched school-based health clinics (where condoms are distributed, much to the outrage of the religious right). While other governors have taken rich states and made them poor, Clinton has taken a poor state and made it a bit richer, without crowing about an "Arkansas Miracle." Over the past decade, per capita income grew 61%. Even so, terrible poverty remains entrenched in Arkansas: the state's incomes are still about 25% below the national average.

As President, Clinton says, he would take much of what he has tried in Arkansas, add money and stir. He would reform welfare, education and health care, funding his programs with reduced defense spending and a 3% savings in administrative costs. He would increase taxes on those earning more than $200,000. He would apply to all corporate executives a variation of the rule devised by Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream: any income above 25 times what the lowest-paid worker in a company earns would be taxed at a higher rate.

On foreign policy, the less said the better -- as is true for all his Democratic rivals. Clinton has shown a little foreign policy leg on trade missions abroad, and he was the only Democratic candidate to support the Persian Gulf war unequivocally. He thinks the isolationism and protectionism being thumped by several Democrats as well as Republican Pat Buchanan are shortsighted. He prefers to move the discussion back to domestic policy as quickly as Bush gets onto a plane to avoid it. Economic growth, Clinton argues, is the solution. "The Soviet Union didn't disintegrate from attack by outside forces but from stagnation within."

On the subject of welfare, Clinton, the moderate Southerner, is yin to Cuomo's Northeastern liberal yang. In Clinton's world, there is not a program for every problem. He cut Arkansas' relief rolls 7%, and part of his platform is to restrict payments to chronic recipients. He favors cuts not only to save money but because living on the dole can instill self-destructive values. Welfare, says Clinton, "should be a second chance, not a way of life." He tells dependent mothers to stop having children if they're not prepared to support them, because "governments don't raise children, people do." A Democrat uttering such sentiments would have been drummed out of the party a few years ago, but the deepening culture of dependency has made an emphasis on personal responsibility palatable even to liberals.

Though he has taken on the gun lobby by supporting legislation to restrict firearms and annoyed abortion activists by backing parental notification, Clinton has a reputation in Arkansas for trying to please everyone. John Brummett, a columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, says Clinton's "desire to be loved is unhealthy, even for a politician." Back in office in 1983, Clinton rewarded his opponents on the right by approving home schooling and signing more than 100 corporate tax breaks.

But a mean streak, unlike happiness, is something money can buy, as Bush demonstrated when he hired Roger Ailes to de-wimp him in 1988. Clinton's hired gun is James Carville, the Democratic version of G.O.P spin doctor Lee Atwater. Carville just helped the darkest of horses, Harris Wofford, destroy former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's 44-point lead and win a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.

Carville's first job may be to ward off overconfidence by spinning the candidate's own expectations lower. That will not be easy in the face of all the head-swelling raves coming in -- even from Republicans. In December, Clinton was invited to breakfast by 60 California executives, several of whom had contributed as much as $100,000 to the 1988 Bush campaign. A few are hedging their bets this time around by pledging money to Clinton.

Just before Lee Atwater died last year, he wrote in LIFE that he had finally discovered that "what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood . . . I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul." Front runners are not generally given to such musings, which tend to come with a few lines in the face, a few more bumps in the road. The next months will tell whether Clinton is just another whiz kid turned fortysomething, bored with being Governor-for-life and looking for a bigger stage, or if he has the depth to fill the hollows in America's soul.