Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 22

Bill Clinton, Arkansas' rising star frt. PrtrrsburQ ffimrg JACK W. Of RMONO wMJUUSWITCOVM "The policy of our paver is very timple merely to tell the our pater ts very simple merely to i Paul foynter, publisher, W12-1950 FRIDAY, MAY 26, 1978 22-A Thay'ra trying to oonvinca tha votart that I wu chnad aomawhara and thrown it Arkanaaa. (But) I muat hava ralativaain ISdiffarant countiaa. Can Congrecc act? AriwtewAtty.Osm.

Thirteen months ago Preident Carter sent to Congress at the nation's top security priority a comprehensive bill designed to reduce this country's dangerous and debilitating reliance on imported oil. THE HOUSE of Representatives acted without unreasonable delay, but it was not until October that the Senate ap- proved its version, after adding a bitterly resisted provision calling for the deregulation of natural gas prices. The ensuing Senate-House conference pro-: duced another seven-month delay, during which the 18 Senate conferees split 9 to 9 on the issue of natural gas pricing were unable even to offer a compromise to their House colleague. This impasse was broken after 219 I days when the conference committee earlier this week accepted the principle of gradual gas price deregulation by 1985. But the delay is far from over.

Conference committee leaders say it will take six to eight weeks to get the agree with the Arkarum Gazette's rhapsodic endorsement of Clinton: "He has extraordinary credentials, an unusual intellect and a dazzling personality to bring to bear upon the problems and opportunities that will confront the next governor." Nobody knows where it will all lead or whether Bill Clinton will be more than a spring sensation. He is only 31, and we don't know if he can hit the curve ball. But, at least for the moment, he is the politician they are buzzing about throughout the political community. LITTLE ROCK One of them comet along every once in a whils some young politician so precocious that there seems to be a limitless future for him and the word busses through the political community. A decade or so ago, for example, professionals used to talk about a young lieutenant governor of Colorado, Mark Hog an.

Then there was the rising star of Democratic politics in Texas, Ben Barnes. Then it was the Republican governor of Missouri, Christopher Bond. There have been at least a dozen others in that same period. IT USUALLY doesn't work out Something happens so that the promise is not fulfilled. Their timing is bad or they get caught in a scandal or they lack the final drive of ambition.

Sometimes they just aren't up to the big league of politics like the legendary baseball rookie who hits .400 all through spring training, then runs into real pitching and wires home: "Don't rent out my room, Mom. They started throwing curve balls today." This year the man is Bill Clinton, who at 31 is about to become governor of Arkansas after only two years as state attorney general. He is engaged in a five-way contest for the Democratic nomination in the primary next week and is considered likely to win with such a landslide that he will avoid a runoff. And already politicians here, and more important, elsewhere, are talking about Bill Clinton's future. A Little Rock political columnist wrote, for example, that Clinton will be only 46 at the time of the 1992 presidential election campaign.

Bill Clinton certainly fit the bill of political precocity. He was still in high school in Hot Springs when John Kennedy was killed, but three years later he was in Washington working on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while attending Georgetown University. After a year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School, he came back to Arkansas to run for Congress at 27, losing narrowly to a Republican incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt TWO YEARS LATER, he built a strong organization and was elected attorney general while serving as Jimmy Carter's state campaign manager here. You get the impression Bill Clinton would like to have a campaign to run in every year. As a politician, Clinton has all the standard equipment for success.

He is intelligent and articulate, apparently thoughtful and commit- the urgency of the energy legislation, but iu consideration is a political must because of the importance attached to it by organized labor. The bill is aimed at recalcitrant employer! such as the J. P. Stevens company, which for yean has successfully evaded orders by the National labor Relations Board. Senate leaders believe they have the votes to break a filibuster, but the effort will be time-consuming.

BACKED UP behind these issues of legislative priority are such vital questions as how to rehabilitate the nation's decaying urban areas, on which no consensus exists. On these there is little or no chance of effective action this year. As a result of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Congress has reasserted its authority against a sometimes overweening executive branch. But it has yet to demonstrate iu power to act in the face of special and regional interests when the national interest is clear and overriding. WHEN THE Senate three years ago modified its rules to permit 60 senators (instead of two-thirds) to shut off a filibuster, then-Sen.

Walter Mondale (now vice president) said: "It means a small minority will still have the opportunity to debate and even to stall, but not the power to paralyze." This year's record demonstrates that without the collective will and determination of a Senate majority, with strong leadership, something near paralysis by a minority is still possible. I i ted. He has a reputation as a personal campaigner of extraordinary charm and diligence. He practices the liberal-populist politics that has been so successful for other Arkansas politicians, such as Dale Bumpers, in the last few years. But what has made Clinton a candidate apart has been his ability to persuade Arkansas voters that someone so different a Rhodes scholar who supports ERA and has a wife, Hilary Rodham, who practices law and uses her own name, for heaven's sake is still one of them.

CLINTON'S OPPONENTS in the gubernatorial campaign are trying to make him the issue, depicting him as an alien intruder, but it isn't working. "They're trying to convince the voters," he says, "that I was cloned somewhere and thrown at Arkansas." In fact, he points out, he is a native, "and I must have relatives in 15 different counties." What is critical is, first, that Clinton has the remarkable ability to combine Yale Law School sophistication with touches of the native; and, second, that there is a strain of progressivism here that argues for politicians who will help carry the state into the economic and social mainstream. "Two-thirds of the people here want to do better," says Clinton. "That sounds like a bunch of pap, I know, but I've seen it" That doesn't suggest that such abstract issues dominate the day-to-day campaign. Instead, it turns on Clinton's personality and the image he has built both as a politician and as a consumer activist in the attorney general's office.

And opinion polls suggest that voters agreement written into legislative language. And when the compromise bill finally does reach the Senate floor it faces a certain filibuster by the opponents of deregulation. BEFORE THAT happens, however, the Senate already behind schedule because of 10 weeks spent in leisurely discussion of the Panama Canal treaties must deal with another filibuster, this one over an Administration bill to revise the nation's labor laws. The labor bill clearly does not have 'Nlnaty-frVa parcant poMad aw phaaad you'ra tha Praaldant Howavar, thoaa poJtad outsJda tha Immadlata Roly on Constitution Somo chort-torm roodomo may havo to cuff or if wo aro to koop roodom for tho long torm There's less to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision this week on job safety than first meets the eye.

The high court ruled 5 to 3 that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) no longer could make spot checks of work places for violations. Instead, the inspectors would have to get a court warrant when employers refused to allow an inspection. SINCE CONGRESS passed the OSHA act in 1970, that agency has stumbled into the center of the cockpit of conflict between labor and business. Most unions support it In business, strange to say, OSHA under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford became the hated symbol of arrogant bureaucracy at its worst. When Ferrol G.

Barlow, a plumbing and electrical contractor and John Birch Society member in Pocatello, Idaho, refused to allow an OSHA inspector in his establishment in 1975, the case quickly came to symbolize the business-labor and big government vs. little guy conflicts. The issue isn't easy. It pits the interest of workers in a safe work place against anyone who would cut corners on safety. Should a federal safety inspector, fearing an explosion in an oil refinery, be required to get a warrant before beginning the check? The court was asked whether a machine shop is a public place or a private area fully protected by the Fourth Amendment's guarantee that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated The court relied on the tried and true provisions of the Constitution, that old veteran of battles between government authority and individual rights.

The majority decided wisely, we think. The effect on work safety probably will be less than expected. Most employers will cooperate with OSHA inspectors because they are responsible citizens who share with their employees a desire for safe work. When some employers want to return to sweat shop conditions, we think employees and unions will blow the whistle quickly. While the court held that warrantless inspections violated the Constitution, it also said that OSHA would not have to meet the strict requirements of criminal law to obtain a warrant.

It indicated that the mere fact a work place was part of hazardous industry would satisfy the legal requirement of probable cause. MORE THAN anything else, perhaps, this decision was a kick in the pants for OSHA. That will make a lot of conservatives happy. We can't say OSHA didn't deserve it. Now how about getting back to the real job of making and keeping America's work places safer? erly pressured to invest in alternative mcdes of transport that will guarantee liberty of movement for our grandchildren.

Less freedom for the doctors: Too much modern medicine gains its prestige from the size of individual doctor's income and from the accumulation of newly acquired gadgets rather than the application of its inherited wisdom. The medical profession must be policed if there is to be enough good but affordable medicine for everybody. There should be tough guidelines on when to operate and restrictions on the growing dependence of modern hospitals on expensive machines for diagnosis and treatment Freedom to be unnecessarily ill is no longer tolerable. Less freedom for the march of urban technology: An end to the false worship of the Golden Calf of economies of Male. Not only is the anonymity of work destroying our individualism but we are becoming dangerously dependent on single sources of everything, not least water and electricity.

We are creating hostages for the urban guerrilla of future years. Leas freedom for nuclear energy: No one has yet effectively answered what one Nobel Prize-winning scientist has written: Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should; if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions; if there is no sabotage; no hijacking of the transports; no reactor-fuel-reprocessing plants or reprocessing plants or repository anywhere in the world in a region of riots or guerrilla activity and no revolution or war, even a conventional one, takes place in these regions. No acts of God can be permitted. IF WE DON'T restrict the freedom to crests the nuclear genie we will end up being forced to accept out of desperate need for self-protection, vast increases in internal and international surveillance and the surrender to the police of extraordinary powers of entry, arrest, detention, interrogation, and even torture. How else can the police hope to move fast enough to prevent highly organized criminals and terrorists from capturing positions from which they can effectively blackmail a nation? Even in the 1870s, as the debate between John Stuart Mill and J.

S. Stephen made clear, freedom was something of an elusive idea. Modern technology makes it even more difficult to define. But what is clear is that too much freedom at one time forces limits in another. Jonathan Power, a guest columnist of The New York Times, write regularly for the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

By JONATHAN POWER Htm Vort Tim LONDON How free are we? The question provokes a reminder of a savage Monty Python skit Two housewives decide to telephone that nice Monsieur Sartre in Paris to settle a philosophical point. A lady answers. They ask: Is M. Sartre free? (Meaning, is he there?) And they fall off their chairs in hysterical laughter si the reply comes back: He's been asking himself that all his life. The negative is the easy way to preface an answer to my question.

I can say: The Red Brigades is not freedom; Jean Paul Sartre's Maoists are not freedom; Eurocommunism, at least at present is not freedom. But to say what freedom is is more difficult THE BEGINNINGS of an answer emerge with some more questions. Does 20th century liberalism give us freedom? Has the unionization of journalists, leading in the case of Britain to the closed shop, protected the freedom of their pens against the arbitrary behavior of editors and proprietors or has it made it more difficult for fresh ideas to enter introverted establishments? Have modern divorce laws given greater freedom? Or is the strain on the increasing number of one-parent households destroying many children's chance of a stable family life which, if not altogether happy, provides the backbone of emotional security? Does freer abortion make it easier for women to avoid the choice between an unwanted child and a backs treet abortionist or has it been offset by the erosion of the respect for life? The truth is, many modern liberal ideas on freedom appear less convincing than they recently did. Indeed, perhaps one can go further and say that the evidence of life is pushing us toward arguing for moderately less freedom in the immediate future if we are to avert a dramatic reduction of freedom in the long term. A few examples: Less freedom for the automobile: Americans alone kill off their fellow countrymen at the rate of 50,000 a year.

No other machine in common use is such profligate waster of lives and energy. Speed limits should come down to 50 miles an hour. The minimum age for holding a license should be raised to 18. There should be restrictions on Sunday driving, as happened in a number of European countries in the immediate wake of the oil embargo. Unless this is done, we will never feel prop A blooper at the Fed By ROWLAND EVANS and ROBERT NOVAK A moderate Palestinian grows angrier By ANTHONY LEWIS tint York TmtM special adviser on national security seems to have enjoyed great success.

Still there will be no immediate payoff in actions that inhibit Russia's assertive policies. Which shows that even the best thing the U.S. has going in international affairs the quasi-alhance with China has not evolved in a way that makes it easy to check Russia's present course. The U.S. does not emerge from the Brzezinski mission to Peking in better position to deter the Soviet advances in Africa or to wring more favorable terms from Russia in the arms control negotiations.

China is not strong enough to exert serious pressure on Russia for more careful behavior anywhere in the world. Nor, despite American help, will China achieve that kind of strength for years to come. The magic is now out of the three-cornered relation. The concessions exacted from Russia by President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger under the threat of some kind of no-American deal are at an end. The Chinese card has been turned up, and it is not a trump.

So Brzezinski' success in Peking only reinforces the lesson that the building of barriers against Soviet assertiveness is a long, hard, slogging job. and 11,000 houses. Much of the property in Ramallah, for example, is owned in the United States, because 15,000 people from this area live in America many, for some reason, around San Francisco. Most property in Bethlehem is owned by people in Latin America. The apparent new definition of "absentee property" has therefore caused alarm on the West Bank.

The widespread suspicion is that Israel has come up with another device to acquire land for settlements. What exactly Israel is doing is impossible to say because questions to the authorities get no clear answers. West Bank mayors who complained vigorously about the land rulings have had no satisfactory explanation. A news service, getting precisely opposite replies from officials on successive days, concluded that the Israeli government was divided on the policy. I submitted a written question asking if there was a new policy.

I got no answer. THE ABSENTEE-property affair indi-' cates why, after nearly 11 years of occupation, West Bank residents seem to be growing increasingly resentful By the standards of this world, Israel has been relatively benign in its military rule. A military governor has just been dismissed for covering up an assault on schoolgirls. Criticism appears in newspapers, Ot.fetfrBburgOIimfa WASHINGTON William Miller, the widely praised new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has made a potentially serious tactical blunder by seeming to reverse his stand on a touchy tax question because of Carter Administration pressure. At issue is Wisconsin Republican Rep.

William Steiger's popular proposal to roll back capital-gains taxation to 1969 levels, now the business world's No. 1 legislative target. In private sessions with Republican congressmen and business representatives. Miller gave the distinct impression of supporting the Steiger amendment or at least its concept. Soon afterward, following arguments by Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal.

Miller publicly opposed it. Miller's position on the Steiger amendment is scarcely a matter of life or death, either for him or the amendment. What could be deadly are doubts Miller has generated among congressmen and businessmen about his own credibility, an indispensable asset for the nation's central banker. Equally important is what the incident shows to businessmen, here and abroad, about Miller's ability to run the Fed independently of Administration pressure. and outsiders can talk to the critics.

But people live with a sense of harassment and arrogance that grinds at their pride. An old woman in Jenin lives in a house that she built years ago. She gave a third of the property to each of two brothers who live abroad. Recently an occupation official came to the house and told her that her brothers' shares had vested in the custodian so she had to pay rent Every family on the West Bank has its stories of arbitrariness on the part of the occupation authorities: the doctor humiliated by soldiers on the steps of his hospital, the students detained without charge just long enough to miss their exams and lose a year of school, the lawyer forbidden without explanation to publish verbatim reports of judges' decisions. Israelis say they have to act firmly for security reasons, and in any occupation that is sometimes true.

But after 11 years the inevitable result is to build up a reservoir of hostility. IT IS A MEASURE of the occupation's human result that a man like Aziz Shehade expresses outrage. "The other day," he said, "I heard Mosbe Dayan on the radio, in Denmark, saying 'We don't want to rule So what is this?" Some West Bank Palestinians think the occupation, with its frictions and humiliations, is really designed to make the intelligent and sensitive among them want to get out and ease the wsy for a permanent Israeli hold on the territory. A surgeon said: "By hook or crook they want us to leave tha country." Just what Israel intends on the West Bank is not so clear to me. The country is divided on the iaeue, its leaders evasive.

What I do know that the longer the occupation goes on, the worse it will be for Israel. Occupations corrupt the occupiers. Arrogance becomes a habit And today's security becomes tomorrow's RAMALLAH, Israeli-occupied Jordan Aziz Shehade is a widely-known West Bank lawyer, a man of 65, respected, successful. He has friends in Israel, and he spent two months this winter as a visiting fellow at Harvard. He is a model of the moderate Palestinian with whom Israel ought to be able to get along.

A few weeks ago Shehade bought some property near Ramallah from a cousin who has lived in Canada for years and is now a Canadian citizen. He took the title documents to the Israeli military government to register the transfer in the routine way. But he was told that the sale could not go through: the land had been taken over by the custodian of "absentee property." THE REFUSAL to register the sale outraged Shehade, and for more than personal reasons. Land is a highly sensitive question on the West Bank under the occupation, and it appeared that Israel had adopted a new policy sharply restricting Arab property rights. Since Israel occupied the area in 1967, it has treated si absentee property real estate owned by persons in hostile that is, Arab countries.

The same practice has been the law in Israel itself since 1948. The property vests in a custodian who may dispose of it as he wishes but keeps the proceeds in trust for distribution as part of any political settlement with the Arab states. Now, suddenly, Shehade was told that a property owner living not in an Arab state but in Canada was an "absentee." And within days, others around the West Bank had similar experiences. TO TREAT ALL foreign-owned property in the West Bank as "absentee," subject to the custodian, would have a very large impact Residents of non-Arab countries are estimated to own 100,000 acres of land on the West Bank Friendly persuasion By MARK RUSSELL (humorist) htllariaa BUG PATTBtSOM Bwfvr cngl Prvwosiw Mission to Peking By JOSEPH KRAFT iraaEKT pittman i Kdrler aw EMrtsi OBEKT MAMAAN ANOftEW SAMNES EracuHv Mrtor jcteia lam After the vote to sen planes to the Mickfe East, now comes the hard part convincing Israelis that we still love them. It's the same selling job that the unfaithful husband has returning from a night out with flowers for his wife.

CLTO O. CAMP Jt. BuOwn Mnm NORMAN P. DUSSEAULT DAVD T. FLUKE OoAXMn Oractar Zbigniew Brzezinski went to Peking determined to allay Chinese concerns about American policy.

The President's LEO KUMET JOHNOCAaN Atfnr MMOkactar i jnmurm I Ontrwm lLSONPOVNTt.