The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 267

I TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 1992 A1 5 LOS ANGELES TIMES CLINTON: As Governor, He Tackled Education First about the worth of government, Clinton believes voters will respond to a candidate who believes government can be made to work and who can convince them that he knows how to do it. And he has structured his entire campaign from his initial speeches to his television advertisementsaround that central theme. Americans, he insists, are not truly cynical about government, they are just "fed up with "The purpose of politics," he adds, "is to change people's It is no exaggeration to say that he has prepared for this race for 30 years. And in an era in which Americans have seemed increasingly turned off not only by politicians, but by politics itself, Clinton has staked his ambition on his ability to do one thing: to convince a skeptical public that politics the career to which he has devoted his life-can, in fact, once again be made relevant to their lives. After a succession of Presidents who were ambivalent, at most, DIAMOND EARRINGS ANNIVERSARY DANDS 35d .299 lJOct.899 $599 Vet DIAMOND EARRINGS DIAMOND BAND $399 A DIAMOND 'U" TENNIS BRACELETS FACTORY DIRECT 33 2 ct $699 4 ct $1299 3 ct $999 6 ct $1999 imMm ifflf.

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I If you are single, lady your life, col SW l.ct 1 tar fih Single comes down the road," Hillary Clinton says. "He isn't trying to fulfill his macho quotient for the day," she said, but picks his fights carefully before deciding to plunge in. During 17 primary and general election contests in the past 17 years, Clinton has demonstrated a willingness, even an eagerness, to battle it out in the electoral arena, trading punch for punch, negative ad for negative ad. And at times, his ability to serve as a mediator has produced remarkably effective results. In the mid-1980s, for example, when governors began pressing Washington for changes in federal welfare laws, Clinton became the chief negotiator forging a unified position among his colleagues, then selling it to both liberal Democrats in Congress and conservatives in the Reagan Administration.

The process led to the first major overhauling of welfare in more than half a century, expanding benefits in many states but requiring states to begin at least limited "workfare" programs designed to move welfare recipients off the dole and into jobs. Along the way, Clinton reached a working partnership with the then-head of the Republican governors' caucus, New Hampshire's John H. Sununu. At one point, recalled a participant who watched the two governors in many of the meetings that led to passage of the 1988 welfare reform law, Sununu paid Clinton the ultimate political compliment. "Bill," he said, partially in jest, "if you ever run for President, I'll organize New Hampshire Republicans for Clinton." Now, although without Sununu's help, of course, Clinton is in the midst of the presidential campaign.

Memorial Honors Dog Who Kept 5Vi-Year Vigil FT. BENTON, Mont. More than 200 people attended a ceremony Sunday, the 50th anniversary of the death of Shep, the faithful sheepdog who waited 5V4 years at a train station for his dead master to return. In August, 1936, Shep watched baggage men load the coffin carrying his master onto a train. From then until Shep died, the dog met each of the four daily Great Northern passenger trains that arrived in this central Montana town.

On Jan. 12, 1942, the dog fell beneath a train and was killed. Associated Press during Clinton's 1974 congressional campaign. When he got the car back, Moore found Clinton had burned out the engine by ignoring the oil warning light on the dashboard. "He knows about politics," said Moore, but "he's so focused, he never had time to learn about putting oil in a car." Clinton has become a professional politician in every sense of the word.

He has practiced and mastered the arts of the campaign from precinct organization to negative advertising and takes a self-evident joy in the handshaking and back-slapping of the trail. To his detractors, Clinton's lifelong attachment to politics is a major failing. His political skills, they say, are just another conflict-avoidance ploy by a slick operator prone to the artful fudge. Clinton, himself, admits that his aversion to conflict has "historically" been a weakness. "I always thought I could resolve all conflicts," he said.

"In my early years," he added, "I got the worst of both worlds" reaping conflict while still losing many of his objectives. Now, he insists, he has come to terms with the fact that "conflict is part of the lifeblood of politics." Others remain unconvinced, citing issues on which Clinton's statements seemed calculated to give ground to each side. When Congress was voting a year ago to authorize President Bush to use force in the Persian Gulf, for example, Clinton said he supported the resolution but was sympathetic with the arguments of those on the other side. On the politically volatile issue of term limits, he makes a point of saying that while he is personally opposed and would prefer to try campaign finance reforms first, he would not stand in the way if voters felt they had no other way of disciplining the process. On abortion, Clinton opposed a bill to require parental consent for minors to have abortions but signed one to require notification of parents or a judge.

His declaration that he would like to see the procedure be "safe, legal and rare" a stance that probably corresponds well with the gut feelings of most voters discomforts activists on both sides. Opponents call those statements carefully hedged. Supporters say Clinton's statements simply show that he knows enough about issues to know they are not simple. Her Husband is "not St. George trying to slay every dragon who Bans.

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And she can do the same for you. For a very private and utfdenhol appointment, col Helena No oUgohon, of course. Continued from A14 spell, they can't do Hillary Clinton recalls. "We weren't going to achieve any substantial progress until we identified those teachers who needed help." That fall, Clinton convened the Legislature and offered a three-part plan: new standards that all school districts would be required to meet, a one-cent increase in the state sales tax to pay for expanded programs and a competency test for teachers. Opposition to the plan was fierce, both from legislators who opposed the tax hike and from the state teacher's union, which bitterly battled the test.

But the resulting victory established a national reputation for Clinton as a policy leader. The substantive results have been more mixed. Arkansas still ranks 47th in overall student tfest scores, 48th in per-pupil expenditures on education, 49th on average teachers salaries. But measured as a percentage of the state's overall resources, Arkansas' effort devoted to public education has now moved into the top half of the states, says professor Alexander, who is now on the faculty of Virginia Polytechnical Institute. And in the 1991 legislative session, Clinton won another tax increase, this time to raise teacher pay and expand the state's vocational schools.

Schooling Improved Slowly, the education changes do appear to be taking hold. Science and foreign language programs, once absent from many school districts, are now present in all. Although few teachers actually lost their licenses because of the competency exams, many were required to take courses to improve their skills. This past fall, for the first time, Arkansas reached the national average in the percentage of high school students going on to college. More importantly, perhaps, public attitudes about education ap-bear to have shifted.

"I've been back to Arkansas every couple of years," Alexander said, and been a fairly dramatic Change." Where once state residents seemed complacent about bad schools, now quality education has become a priority. As with education, most other elements of Clinton's 11-year tenure as Arkansas governor show mixed results. Poor, undereducat-ed, disproportionately elderly and with a tradition of limited and ineffective government, Arkansas is a difficult laboratory for policy experiments. Clinton has appointed blacks and women to numerous key posts, a dramatic change for a state that Was once rigidly segregated and run by a virtually all-male, white club. But in substantive areas the state remains one of the leaders in teen-age pregnancy, overall poverty and similar indexes of misery.

Tax-Break Habit Addicted to corporate tax breaks to attract new jobs and hobbled by a state constitution that requires a three-fourths vote to raise any tax other than the sales tax, Clinton and state legislators repeatedly have turned to sales levies to raise money for new programs, leaving Arkansas with one of the most regressive state tax systems. After launching several environmental and energy conservation initiatives during his first term and finding little public support, Clinton pulled back substantially, compiling a record that has been sharply criticized by environmental activists. In short, there is no "Arkansas miracle" to attract envious headlines from the rest of the nation. Several statistics do, however, show a slow but steady progress. Arkansas' rate of people on welfare, considerably above the national average in 1980, is now slightly below it.

Its overall economy in recent years has grown faster than that of any other state In the region, according to federal statistics, and the income of Ar-kansans has also grown faster than those of neighboring states. And, even through several intensely negative campaigns, Clinton has remained popular. He was reelected in 1990 to his fifth term as governor. Many of Clinton's closest advisers doubted he would make the 1990 race. In announcing that he would, Clinton made it clear that he needed another term to com I I III Ml Ml ll Ml I Beverly Hills 310858-7010 Hdai Wrrafaill V.IR Cluod Badly His Inc.

plete his agenda, but he confessed "that the fire of an election no longer burns in me." "Ambition," he added, "always takes its price." Part of that price has been intense scrutiny of Clinton's personal life and his marriage. For years, in the small-town, hothouse environment of Little Rock and in the similarly gossip-prone circles of Democratic politics, rumors have spread that Clinton has had a series of affairs. In 1987, after the collapse of Gary Hart's presidential campaign, Clinton nearly jumped into the race, going as far as to assemble a score of his old friends in Little Rock for an anticipated announcement. The morning of the appointed day, as his friends sat at a table in Gov. Clinton has appointed blacks and women to numerous key posts, a dramatic change for a state once rigidly segregated and run by a virtually all-male, white club.

the governor's mansion, Clinton came downstairs and informed them he was pulling the plug. A major reason, friends say, was concern over how his daughter, Chelsea, 7 at the time, would cope with the scrutiny which, in the atmosphere of the time, was almost a certainty. In the 1990 gubernatorial election, the rumor campaign rose to a fever pitch. Larry Nichols, a former state employee who had been fired in 1988 for using state telephones and air freight accounts to raise money for the Nicaraguan rebels, sued Clinton two months before the election and used his lawsuit as a vehicle to name several women he claimed had had affairs with the governor. Nichols is not coy about his motivations.

"I have my own agenda," he said in a recent interview in which he declined to offer evidence for his allegations. "They roated me," and now "everything I do will be done to run him out of the state." Fostered by Nichols and others and assiduously pushed by Clinton's 1990 Republican opponent, Sheffield Nelson, and by rival Democrats, the same rumors have dogged the nationwide campaign for months. Many of the rumors are demonstrably false. Clinton, however, has never flatly denied accusations of past infidelity, saying he should not be measured against a standard of "perfection." "Like nearly anybody who's been together 20 years, our relationship has not been perfect or free of its difficulties," Clinton told Washington reporters at a breakfast this past fall to which he was accompanied by his wife. "We believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together 30 or 40 years longer)." As she campaigns for her husband, Hillary Clinton warns Democratic audiences that "people are going to start saying desperate things." Democrats should "keep their eye on the ball and keep this campaign rooted" in the issues that can be used to defeat President Bush in November rather than be sidetracked by "the politics of distraction." In a recent interview, Clinton said: "What I think the people want, what I hope they want, is not someone who ever pretends to be perfect in any way." "Most people intuitively sense whether they're dealing with a person who has a center or a core," he added.

"That's far more important to them than whether a person has made any mistakes in his life." The core for Clinton is intimately bound up with his life's work. Inevitably, he has been cut off from much nonpolitical experience. A longtime friend and former aide, Rudy Moore, recalls lending Clinton a beat -up old Volkswagen 0 COMPUTER TRADE SHOW nnuLcoALC PRICES OPEN TO THE Dllm IP LONQ BEACH-CONVENTION CENTER From LA lake Long Beach Freeway (710) South to Linden. Turn lilt on Linden lo the Convention Center. 1-800-800-5800 I I I Ml I i I II II' BLIND MERVYN'S HOME ADRAY'S WINDOWS PLUS 3 DAY BLINDS PENNEY'S CLUB BLIND CONNECTION do yourself a favor call si 20 Off No Strings Attached i woman, who finds herself single, does not And she would love lo meet that special man.

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