GOP ‘Soothing’ Ways Hide Tilt to Right, Clinton Warns

CHICAGO —  President Clinton set the stage Sunday for his party’s counterattack against the Republicans, calling the GOP’s national ticket more conservative than the 1996 standard-bearers and offering a partisan warning for Americans watching the Republicans each evening: “I bet butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth for the next few days.”

Clinton charged that Republicans, led by Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his vice presidential pick, Dick Cheney, “are speaking in very soothing, reassuring ways about compassion and harmony and inclusion. Gone are these harsh, personal attacks that dominated their politics from ’92 to ’98.”

But, the president said, while their approach is “appealing as a package and a terrific marketing strategy,” it is designed to obscure the differences between the two major parties and their candidates. “It is just what they mean to do--because on issue after issue, this ticket is to the right of the one that [Vice President Al] Gore and I opposed in 1996.”

Two weeks before he claims the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Gore is on vacation at the North Carolina shore and has been largely out of view.

In his remarks Sunday, Clinton spoke first at a Democratic National Committee lunch, which was expected to raise $250,000, and then at a convention of the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America, a group that, by profession, ranks among the Democratic Party’s top contributors.

He honed the campaign message he has been delivering, largely out of public view, at fund-raisers across the country and tailored it for the week when the Republicans hold the political stage in Philadelphia.

“I don’t blame them for trying to hide the differences,” he said. “They know, if the folks find out, they’re toast.”

Leaving it to his audience to draw the contrast between Gore and Bush--but clearly suggesting the Texas governor was unprepared for the presidency--Clinton offered a list of issues into which Gore had delved as vice president, including the human genome project and global warming.

Then he asked: “Wouldn’t you like someone in the White House that really understands that? You need someone that understands the future.”

In his first public comments on Bush’s choice of former Defense Secretary Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, Clinton singled out Cheney’s vote, as a member of Congress, against a House resolution supporting the release of Nelson Mandela from a South African prison, when the leader of the African National Congress was incarcerated by the apartheid government.

“That takes your breath away,” Clinton said.

In a television interview Sunday, Cheney defended that vote. He said the resolution also asked apartheid South Africa to recognize the ANC. Cheney said that, while he supported Mandela’s release, he opposed the measure because the ANC “was then viewed as a terrorist organization.”

The president took advantage of his appearance before the lawyers to renew his complaint that the Republican majority in the Senate has gone out of its way to delay votes on some of his most important judicial nominees, among them Enrique Moreno, an El Paso trial lawyer, to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and has blocked his effort to place the first African American judges on the bench of the 4th Circuit. That court hears appeals from trial courts in a circuit with a larger black population than any other--and has a 25% vacancy rate on its bench.

His minority nominees, he said, “are being held in political jail because they can’t get a hearing from this Republican Senate, and their [presidential] nominee won’t say a word about it.”