Election 1996: The Star's Choices
The electorate seems particularly quiescent as the Presidential election of 1996 approaches. It's as if the voters have heard it all before and aren't going to be moved from their preconceived ideas. Even four highly visible Presidential candidates - Clinton, Dole, Perot, Nader - haven't electrified their constituencies. If there are national campaign headquarters on the South Fork, they aren't visible, and the only Presidential signs on trees and poles around town seem to be for Perot.
In endorsing President Clinton for a second term, we are cognizant of the fact that he has gained a solid reputation during his first term as a waffler. He has bent to political influence more often than his supporters like to admit. The Whitewater miasma that surrounds the White House and the First Lady also is hard to dispel: The Clintons were hard to keep on a pedestal.
Nevertheless, the Clinton Administration has accomplished feats even the President's supporters might not have thought likely. The deficit has been reduced by large measure. Wars, famine, disease, and fear are not under control in the world at large, but there is no overall war, and, at least for the moment, Bosnia and Haiti, to which the President committed American troops, have seen an end of outright violence and a beginning at democracy.
What we don't buy, however, is the conventional wisdom in some quarters that Bob Dole deserves to be President because he is the man of higher character. We need our national leaders to be of high moral character, but the morality we need, and the exercise of judgment that comes from it, has to do with principles that affect the lives of us all rather than with personal relationships. For our part, it is clear that Mr. Dole, who supported Richard Nixon blindly, who insulted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who did an about-face on supply-side economics, which he once dubbed "voodoo," and who is against family leave, has shown lesser character on the basic issues of our time. President Clinton has learned a lot about policy, foreign and domestic, in the last four years. We look forward to further progress in the term ahead.