Clinton’s Efforts to Preempt GOP Give His Foes Pause

WASHINGTON — When Bob Dole arrives in Fond du Lac, Wis., today to praise Gov. Tommy Thompson’s welfare reform plan and unveil his own proposals for nationwide revisions, the welcome mat at the airport might as well read: Bill Clinton was here.

It’s a sign Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is encountering with growing regularity. To the increasing anger of Republicans, Clinton has established a pattern of preempting, or co-opting, ideas that the GOP had hoped would clearly define the presidential campaign.

From repealing the 1993 gas-tax increase to imposing new limits on death-row appeals and repudiating same-sex marriages, Clinton has frustrated Dole’s efforts to draw a sharp contrast by repeatedly agreeing with his challenger. The latest example came last Saturday, when Clinton praised Thompson’s plan to replace welfare with a mandatory work program--a plan that many liberals fear goes too far in retrenching basic protections for poor children.

Dole is expected to make a bid today to wrest the momentum in the welfare debate away from Clinton by calling for mandatory drug testing of relief recipients. Although Dole on Monday deflected questions about his plan, campaign aides confirmed that the drug-testing proposal was in the text of his Wisconsin speech and that he was expected to keep it in.

Regardless, Clinton’s strategy of embracing GOP initiatives so far has been an enormous success. It has allowed the president, in most instances, to shift attention toward the areas where he wants to establish contrasts, such as raising the minimum wage.

It also has sparked a rising chorus of condemnation from Republicans, who accuse the president of unbridled opportunism. On Monday, Dole charged Clinton with “petty theft” in appropriating GOP ideas.

Frustrated Republican strategists say that over time, Clinton’s shifts may reopen old questions about his character and commitment to principle.

“There is a cynicism about the Clinton campaign that dares the American people to hold him to a standard of consistency,” says New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, the general chairman of Dole’s campaign. “Bill Clinton runs the risk that people will say, ‘This man doesn’t stand for anything.’ ”

But White House aides argue that the president’s maneuvers demonstrate not opportunism, but a return to the centrist New Democratic principles on which he campaigned in 1992.

“Just because he’s not the caricature of a Democrat they want to portray doesn’t mean he is inconsistent or unprincipled,” says senior White House advisor George Stephanopoulos. “He’s being true to his principles, which are New Democratic principles.”

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Dole’s campaign is divided over how to respond to Clinton’s shifts toward the center, one well-placed source said. One camp has argued for moving to places Clinton cannot follow by emphasizing starkly conservative positions--such as ending affirmative action. Other aides worry that Dole could marginalize himself by seeking to constantly outflank Clinton on the right; they prefer to focus on challenging Clinton’s sincerity.

The question has become pressing for the Dole campaign because Clinton has moved to neutralize so many issues the GOP had hoped would become a wedge between the candidates. Some of the most dramatic convergences have come in the area of crime. When Dole and other Republicans assailed Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. over his decision to exclude evidence seized in a drug case, the White House took the unusual step of joining in the criticism; Baer later reversed his decision. A few weeks later, Clinton signed anti-terrorism legislation that included new limits on death-row appeals--so-called habeas corpus proceedings--that liberals fiercely fought throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies.

Clinton has also indicated that he would sign a temporary repeal of the gas-tax hike included in his 1993 budget plan, and endorsed a GOP plan to provide new tax credits for adoption. When Dole supported Republican legislation meant to restrict gay marriages, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry quickly indicated that Clinton also disapproved of the practice.

Finally, on Saturday, Clinton praised the Wisconsin welfare plan--which went far beyond his own 1992 campaign proposals in converting welfare to a work-based system and establishing a five-year time limit on all public assistance.

That last move--coming after Clinton has twice vetoed GOP welfare reform legislation--sent Republicans howling to the microphones on the Sunday talk shows. “President Clinton is taking every issue that is Republican--which is fine--but they are direct contradictions to his positions both as candidate [and] as president,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained Sunday on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.”

Despite the GOP protests, Clinton isn’t merely slapping the presidential seal on the GOP agenda. The more precise pattern is that he is making extraordinary efforts to control the issues that will be the points of conflict.

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On the issues Dole wants to emphasize, Clinton has stretched his new Democratic principles as far as he can to minimize the differences. But on battlefields of his own choosing, Clinton has shown no hesitation about clashing with Republicans.

Clinton has vetoed GOP bills to limit product liability and shareholder fraud lawsuits and to ban late-term abortions; forced Republicans to withdraw measures he termed anti-environmental from the 1996 budget bill; pledged to veto any repeal of the ban on semiautomatic assault weapons; and denounced Republican proposals, supported by Dole, to allow states to deny education to the children of illegal immigrants, as approved in California’s Proposition 187. Clinton has also remained unwavering in his resistance to the GOP balanced-budget plan, particularly its proposals to reduce the rate of growth in spending on Medicare and eliminate the federal entitlement to Medicaid.

The dividing line between the issues Clinton co-opts and those he confronts “are the issues that are of import to highly organized, vociferous [liberal] constituencies, and those that aren’t,” says Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.

With his latest moves toward the GOP, Clinton may be testing even that boundary. Though administration officials caution that they may still seek changes before granting the waiver from federal law that Wisconsin needs to implement its welfare reform plan, Clinton’s praise of the proposal has provoked loud rustles of unease on the left.

But with their eyes on the larger goal of denying the GOP unified control of government, liberals seem prepared to give Clinton remarkable freedom to tack and shift his course.

“I am not going to second-guess his strategy,” says Amy Isaacs, national director of Americans for Democratic Action, a leading liberal group. “We are living in a world of the possible, not necessarily the desirable.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.