The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

When it came time to deny the obvious, the cool and unflappable James Baker did so with a straight face and a practiced hint of sadness. Like a compassionate schoolteacher calmly instructing a roomful of dim students, the Secretary of State repeatedly insisted that election-year politics had nothing to do with last week's announcement of the Administration's plan to assist the former Soviet Union. "We've been working on it for months," Baker explained, adding that the President wanted his proposals made public before Boris Yeltsin faces a restless Congress of People's Deputies this week. That much was true, but the rest was nonsense.

In fact, Pat Buchanan's mindless "America first" crusade had paralyzed Bush for months. Foreign policy, the President's passion and claim to fame, was stowed throughout the early primaries as Bush told Republican voters that his new first priority was repairing the domestic economy. Aiding Russia and the other republics became possible only when Buchanan's challenge waned after Bush's victories in Michigan and Illinois on March 17. But even then Bush was mute until Richard Nixon chastised the President for a "pathetically inadequate" nonresponse to Moscow's pleas for help. And even then nothing happened until the White House realized that last Wednesday morning Bill $ Clinton was about to unveil his scheme to assist the faltering former communists.

When Bush finally spoke, confusion reigned. "The stakes," the President soberly intoned, "are as high as any we have faced this century." But there was no prime-time, Oval Office address designed to rally a recession-weary nation to the cause -- only a pressroom briefing at which the Administration's key players couldn't say how much their proposal would cost. It was not until eight hours later that Baker said the U.S. contribution to a $24 billion multinational plan of loans, grants and export credits would cost American taxpayers a relatively small "$3-plus billion" in new funding.

Bush did manage to beat Clinton to the punch on Wednesday (by all of 21 minutes) but even that "victory" struck some of the President's more astute aides as hollow. "Either we should have beaten Clinton by at least one news cycle or we should have waited a few days," says a Bush political adviser. "As it was, all we did was pump up the opposition," par for the course for a campaign organization that has yet to get its bearings.

The Bush and Clinton plans are strikingly similar, and both still see the planet as a dangerous place where the occasional use of American force will likely be necessary for decades to come. From there, their prescriptions for dealing with the post-cold war world depart radically. Bush regularly trumpets democracy's virtues, but his actions routinely serve order and stability. Following the gulf war, the U.S. virtually "owned" Kuwait, but Washington did little to ensure democracy's ascendancy in the emirate. Yugoslavia is disintegrating, but Bush has yet to recognize Slovenia and Croatia. The President clung to Mikhail Gorbachev to the end, and viewed Yeltsin as the problem rather than the solution even after Yeltsin won Russia's first democratic election. Clinton's views are exactly opposite. Democracy, he says, offers the best hope for stability, even if moving toward representative government generates short-term disorder.

If one place best illuminates the differences in their approaches it is China, a nation the President professes to understand better than any of his advisers. To Clinton, Bush's "coddling" of China's aging leaders after the Tiananmen Square massacre is "unconscionable. There was a case for looking the other way when we needed China as a counterweight to Moscow," says Clinton. "But there's no need to play the China card now when our opponents have thrown in their hand, no need to ignore China's spreading dangerous weapons technologies and its trampling of human rights. I would deny most- favored-natio n status to China, impose trade sanctions and encourage the younger generation's democratic aspirations. They'll triumph someday, and we want to be seen as having been on their side from the beginning. Bush is behind the curve because he shortsightedly fears the turmoil of revolution."

Clinton's muscularity has its limits. He speaks about using military force to protect citizens from the repressive acts of their rulers, but not in China, which is presumably too powerful for such an intrusion into its internal affairs -- an accommodation to reality that could cause other odious dictators to acquire even more weaponry as a hedge against Clinton's wrath.

Beyond a "realistic" appreciation of U.S. might, Clinton's preference for democracy and human rights has other holes. As he panders for Jewish votes by siding with an Israel "abused" by Washington, he has said nothing at all about Israel's maltreatment of its Palestinian population.

While Clinton's desire to spread Western ideals is less than perfect, his rhetorical vision offers a stark contrast to Bush's actions. At some point in every general election campaign -- and no matter the state of the economy -- voters pause to consider the candidates' foreign and defense policies. When they do, they will have a clear choice -- assuming of course that Clinton, as President, would actually inhale his vision.