Philosophies of Government

...Mystifyingly, he accused North Korea of violating arms control treaties when North Korea is not a party to any arms control treaty...

...That was the confirmation I needed to break the story on the CBS Evening News...

...Don't hold your breath waiting for the report from that investigation— there was no conspiracy...

...Another piece of pandering was Clinton's proposal, borrowed from the Republican Contract With America, to give a $5,000 tax credit to many families adopting a child...

...Although he would still speak against big government, as he did in his State of the Union message, he did not favor a weak government...

...But Dole did not have a lot to lose...

...No good reason for doing so existed any longer, but by this time gas tax reduction had developed a momentum of its own...

...There was nowhere to go except up...

...Dole's dramatic declaration that he would go to the White House or go home transcended considerations of policy, ideology and oratory...

...Of these, more later...

...Todd Purdum...

...writing in the New York Times Magazine, has observed that "Clinton is better at defining himself in relation to the opposition than to goals of his own...

...Pandering to the Public LOOKING BACK to the developments that impelled Dole's decision, it was hard to believe that only six months earlier the cover of U.S...

...In the Doledrums ONCE THE STUNNING surprise of the Majority Leader's decision to retire from Congress was absorbed, it seemed almost inevitable...

...Conservative stalwarts such as former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and columnist Robert Novak began wringing their hands in public...

...He also had a disconcerting habit of adding "whatever" in a way that diminished his lines: "I feel your pain, or whatever...

...Given these circumstances...

...What is needed is help in raising the adoption rate of children with physical and other disabilities...

...The spooks, so long secure behind their secrecy, hated Bill Colby for exposing them to the sunlight...

...Finding loving families for children in foster care is a serious problem...

...So he felt a line had to be drawn between the way the Republicans and the Democrats see government...

...It documented countless acts of Agency malfeasance, from illegal surveillance in this country to drug experiments, lethal in at least one case, on unsuspecting subjects...

...Clinton dismissed Republican complaints that those moves were an election ploy...

...As an Office of Strategic Services operative he had parachuted into France on D-Day, and in Vietnam he had run an infiltration project called the "Phoenix Program," the Agency's biggest ever covert operation...

...When I asked Colby in 1975 about rumors that the Agency was involved in assassination conspiracies, he said, "Not any more...

...Ambassador in Teheran to testify before the ensuing Congressional investigating committees, he was understandably furious not only with me but especially with his colleague who had broken the spymaster code of silence...

...Dole is learning that this makes it hard to come to grips with the Oval Office occupant...

...After the government shutdowns this past fall and winter, and the provision of vital Federal assistance in response to a series of natural disasters, Clinton declared, he had a new appreciation of the role Washington plays in the lives of Americans...

...He probably also knew that for the most part a tax cut would undoubtedly not be passed on to the consumer...

...When Colby's predecessor, Richard M. Helms, was called back from his post as U.S...

...Moreover, Dole's effort to choreograph his race from the Senate showed there can be severe disadvantages to campaigning while shouldering legislative responsibilities...

...He said he still wanted to come—and did, causing a lot of mouths to drop in the ballroom...

...Enraging Republicans and disheartening his own liberal supporters, Clinton embraced the stringent Wisconsin plan that would end the half-century welfare entitlement and substitute wages for mandated work...

...The speech had some new features, like mandatory drug testing for welfare clients...

...He didn't say that...

...His first major foreign policy speech criticized Administration policy in Asia without offering a significant alternative...

...The Cuban exile community, though, is generally happy with President Clinton, who has done about everything short of a Bay of Pigs invasion to keep the pressure on Castro...

...In fact, the GOP campaign was nervously lurching from one issue to another in a search for targets of opportunity...

...It sought to invoke the general sympathy of Americans for a fighter...

...A prominent pollster, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, said: "He's a dead stone loser...

...recommended 15 per cent as a first step toward replacing the tax code with a "flatter and simpler system...

...The Wall Street Journal said that "right now things are virtually hopeless...

...Gates records how "we all would go home at night and face spouses who had watched news of poison dart guns and assassination attempts and other nefarious activities, and question whether that was a place they wanted a spouse or father or mother to work...

...Then the President himself embraced the tax cut...

...Colby's book...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Philosophies of Government AT A WHITE HOUSE DINNER to raise funds for a planned memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the protagonist of Federal interventionism, I had an opportunity to discuss with President Bill Clinton his philosophy of government and whether it had changed during three years in office...

...Searching for an Issue ROBERT DOLE (I have to get used to not calling him Senator) has in fact been trying to draw that line since freeing himself at last from Congress to pursue President Clinton, and instead is finding out how hard it is to pin down a rapidly moving target...

...But much of the presumptive GOP standard bearer's fire was stolen by the President in his radio talk the preceding Saturday...

...The President has moved on a second front as well to seize the initiative on family values issues that Republicans have long considered their intellectual property...

...In the wake of Watergate, Colby compiled a 693-page report that became known, familiarly and bitterly, as "The Family Jewels...

...Some of Dole's supporters have been urging him to propose an across-the-board tax cut as high as 25 per cent...

...There are some 80,000 such children whom couples might adopt if they had adequate support...

...When gas prices started going up last February, reaching a national average of $1.38 a gallon for all grades, oil economists were quick to point out that there was no reason for worry...

...Yet as child care experts observe, a one-time tax credit is not the answer...

...He promised, if elected, to "bring Fidel Castro down...

...From the Shadows, the worst year in the Agency's history...

...Whether or not this would jump-start a faltering campaign no one could say for certain...

...That helped to make 1975 what a more recent ex-CIA Director, Robert M. Gates, calls in his new book...

...Ex-Governor Ronald Reagan, ex-Governor Jimmy Carter, ex-Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and ex-Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, among others, had already demonstrated the advantages to being unemployed when running forpresident, which tends to be a full-time job in itself...

...On May 9 I happened to be in California, where the top headline in the Los Angeles Times read, "Gas Prices Show Signs of Decline as Production Surges...

...News and World Report showed a grieving donkey next to an open grave and the headline read: "The Democrats—Is the Party Over...

...He fired James J. Angleton, the powerful chief of counterintelligence, whom he considered paranoid...

...What made his revelations worse for the professionals was that he was not a wet-behind-the-ears outsider...

...Gloom and doom," pronounced the Na-tional Journal...

...Honorable Men, concludes with the hope that a younger generation of "American intelligence officers under law" will contribute to "a safer and better world...

...In Wisconsin, Dole made a long-scheduled speech that was meant to separate him from the incumbent on the welfare issue...

...It was the act of a person with loyalties going beyond protecting spies...

...But he felt strongly that in a democracy even a secret agency has to be accountable and should not break the law—not American law anyway...

...Dole came back from the Congressional spring break saying he was "a doer, not a talker...

...The Administration had just intervened in the market to decrease gas prices and increase meat prices...

...Various factors —for example, refineries postponing their shift from producing heating oil because of the long, harsh winter—had resulted in a temporary shortage that would soon be over...

...But he acknowledged that it was difficult to overcome public cynicism about the actions and motivations of the Federal Establishment...

...Once a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Colby believed that after an irresponsible quarter of a century, the CIA had to be opened up to save it...

...Dole suddenly raised the question of liberal Federal judges and whether Clinton appointees—the great majority of whom he had voted to confirm—bore some responsibility for the crime wave...

...A Class Act ATTENDING A memorial service in the National Cathedral on May 14,1 thought back to my associations with William E. Colby, the former CIA Director who died in a boating accident...

...He did not say how he would make up the lost revenue...

...In his search for an issue that will draw a clear line between the GOP and the Democrats, Dole visited a Cuban-American festival in Miami on his first weekend as an instant outsider...

...David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, notes that since there are so few healthy infants available for adoption, couples often go abroad to get a child...

...Opposition to raising the minimum wage looked like a better prospect...

...The GOP candidate's sense of irony did not always serve him well either—for instance, the self-deprecating "I'll be brief, since I know you have better things to do...

...But what Dole further knew was that striking the cheap-gas nerve in the American public was a political winner...

...It happened to be the 20th anniversary of that dinner, and I told the audience about what I have always thought of as a class act...

...Rising gasoline prices were picked as the next target of opportunity...

...When I became controversial myself for the publication of a suppressed Congressional report on CI A misdeeds, I called Colby and offered to spare him the embarrassment of attending the dinner with me...

...Without time for much consideration...

...A personal note: In 1976 Colby was to be my guest at the annual dinner of Congressional correspondents...

...The issue did not catch fire...

...His speeches were criticized by his most ardent supporters as uninspired and uninspiring...

...The campaign isn't working...

...Dole proposed repealing the 4.3 cents per gallon 1993 hike in the gas tax...

...Much of this Colby testified about in open sessions of Congressional committees...

...He did neither successfully...

...This past March, I was on a symposium panel concerning intelligence reform with Colby...

...That would take more than a single $5,000 credit and is not being considered...

...Colby did more than that...

...In three years of dealing with the situation from the inside, the President said, he had modified his own view...

...He announced regulations that would deny cash benefits to teenage parents who quit school or do not live with their parents, but would reward those who do finish school with bonus payments...

...It became clear the funeral would have to be postponed for a while when the polls showed that Clinton was a solid 20 points ahead of Dole, and that only 36 per cent of voters thought the Republican agenda would benefit most Americans...

...Far from having the perfect platform for challenging President Clinton with must-sign or must-veto bills, he was unable to mobilize his own Republicans, especially in the House, and found himself outmaneuvered by the White House into the appearance of presiding over gridlock...

...Then it turned out, to the surprise of many, that Americans in general favor the increase...

...While the proposal was caught in the legislative logjam, gas prices began easing...

...For being too cooperative with Congressional investigations, he was fired by President Gerald R. Ford and replaced by the more accommodating George Bush...

...Instead, his hasty reaction was to release an insignificant amount of oil from strategic reserves and to order the Justice Department to investigate whether there was a price-gouging conspiracy...

...That was pandering, which the President soon matched...

...He was appalled, he went on, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia blamed a generalized "welfare state" for acts as reprehensible as Susan Smith's drowning of her two children, or two men and a woman in Illinois allegedly murdering a pregnant woman and her two children, then cutting a full-term fetus from her womb...

...And he almost surely knew that one way not to bring down demand is to reduce prices...

...Nevertheless, Senator Dole said that prices were "careening out of control and are diminishing the value of millions of American paychecks...

...The Republican candidate, however, has to consider whether the tax-cut tactic would not appear to contradict his dedication to a balanced budget...

...Clinton could have said that cutting the gas tax at this point would be a dumb idea, adding to the budget deficit when prices would soon be coming down anyway...

...So it was that in his first major speech, to newspaper editors...

...Dole probably knew that gas prices were not "careening out of control...

...More interestingly, he recognized that he was among the politicians—dating back to Jimmy Carter— who had contributed to this hostility by campaigning against the government...

...In the Wall Street Journal, Senator Spencer Abraham (R.-Mich...

...And when he announced the unconditional renewal of China's most-favored-nation trade status in Washington the following Monday, he did so comfortable in the knowledge that Dole supports this position...

...In two earlier radio talks, the President borrowed Republican ideas for measures to keep teenage parents in school and to provide tax credits for child adoption...

...In the light of Dole's inability to match President Clinton's gifted oratory, and the failure of his Senate floor strategy, his chances of winning the election began to be written off by some of the media...

...That day the top Washington Post headline was, "President Offers Gas Tax Tradeoff for Minimum Wage...