Online NewsHour: Shields & Gigot -- May 31, 1996

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Well, I think it does, Margaret. I mean, to listen to Mr. Baker and Mr. Brzezinski, first of all, when the best hope is that the winner will repudiate the platform on which he just won, it certainly encourages cynicism and alienation in the relationship, as well as in--I think the sense and the image of Israel as a special noble, unique place, and people has been dealt a serious blow in this, in this election after the Rabin assassination and all the rest. There's no question the President was very much committed to the election of the Peres government, and made no pretense about it. I mean, Sec. Christopher's trips there, his having Peres here in the middle of the campaign, giving him a boost, sure, it's a setback but more than a political setback I think it's a serious, substantive setback for peace in the Middle East.

MARGARET WARNER:Paul, do you think there's any political fallout here from this outcome?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: I don't think there is great political fallout. I would say it's probably in the realm of a lost opportunity. This administration has not had a foreign policy catastrophe or disaster but it's also not had a big success. And I think that they were hoping that the Middle East peace process would yield one or be able to yield one before November, and I think that that, as Sec. Baker pointed out, has probably ended. So there is, there is a lost opportunity here more than anything else.

MARGARET WARNER:Okay. Well, Paul, let's turn now to the political week, and let's look at Clinton's week first. Obviously, with Whitewater, it wasn't a great week for the President but assess it for us, if you would.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think the White House would, would like to forget it happened, frankly. It had a series of news events, the events that control the news outside of the Israeli election, that return the campaign to exactly what the White House doesn't want the campaign to be on, which is the president's personal credibility, his character, his trustworthiness, whether you can believe him or not. discussion

That's the kind of--Travelgate, for example, where the White House was in a fight with Congress about cooperating with it to turn over documents. You had the Whitewater verdicts, and then you had the flap over the use of the Soldiers and Sailors Act as defense against the Paula Jones case. Those are things that the White House doesn't want to be talking about. So I think they're going to--what they want to do is hope this week just goes away and return to other issues.

MARK SHIELDS: Not a good week certainly but I think, I think Republicans were frustrated and confused by the fact that in 1992, the character issue didn't work. They had all this ammunition, they were so confident they're going to blow Bill Clinton out of the water on it. The American voters looked at it and said, we'll elect Bill Clinton President. It's awfully tough to run on the same character issue 4 years later unless you've got fresh material. And I'm not sure there is fresh material. Certainly the Whitewater verdicts hurt. They hurt politically, Margaret. They hurt in the sense that the suspicion that the president had something to hide is up this week and all the rest, but it doesn't--

MARK SHIELDS: In poll numbers, that's right, but there doesn't seem to be, I mean, you can see critics and defendants kind of overreacting on both sides. I mean, critics say the jury obviously didn't believe him, and the defendants saying the jury believed him but thought it wasn't relevant to the case. I mean, so it--I don't think--it certainly wasn't a good week. It doesn't compare with the weeks that he's had, but it wasn't anything that Bob Dole did that made it a bad week for Bill Clinton.

MARGARET WARNER:So, Paul, how do the Republicans now proceed to try to exploit the Whitewater situation further? And I'm talking about both Republicans on the Hill and the campaign.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think Dole has done the shrewd thing, which is not to talk about it at all. An editor of mine once said when I was just starting out as a columnist, "Kid, remember the persuasive power of facts." And that's--that plays true in politics as well. If you have facts that you can let the media play up and report, they're a lot more credible than if you seem to be giving speeches talking about the president's character. I mean, character matters is best used if you don't have to mention the word "character." You can just let it be a sort of undercurrent for the, for the race. I think you'll see the Republicans on Capitol Hill try to move ahead on the Travelgate probe, see what these documents yield, and then I think you'll also see D'Amato, Sen. D'Amato and the Whitewater Committee try to wrap up instead of going out with their tails between their legs, trying to wrap up by bringing David Hale, if they can work out an immune--immunized testimony, that's David Hale, the municipal judge, who was a key witness in the Arkansas trial, bring him up to Washington and, uh, and try to make some headlines with that.

MARGARET WARNER:Okay. Let's turn to Dole's week, Mark. Dole had an event in Chicago yesterday. It sort of went awry. What happened?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, Bob Dole did something risky. I mean, twice this week in both San Diego and Chicago, he went where Republican presidential candidates don't ordinarily go. He went to the West side of Chicago. He spoke on the question of spousal abuse, women in particular, there and made just an aside the suggestion that welfare, that there was a correlation between welfare and spouse abuse, and was immediately criticized or taken issue with by one of the women who works with abused women there and found himself quickly back-pedaling in one of those moments that as a campaign person you dread and you hope that all the film sort of just immediately evaporates and they miss their deadlines or the cameras don't work or the plugs are unpulled or something. But that--that's what it was. It was--I don't think Dole had a bad week. He made a good move in California, I think, trying to keep the Clinton folks off balance and make them pay some attention there, but it--that was not the kind of event that, that gives you a real, a real lift. And it's been two weeks now since he's been out, since he made his dramatic announcement. And, and we're still waiting for sort of a defining statement about the, the Dole candidacy and, and the Dole presidency and how it would differ.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I don't think there's going to be a defining moment until the convention, Mark, I think, where you're going to see some, some speeches and on different subjects, and I think Dole has done that to some extent. He had a good speech on welfare last week, talked about crime a lot this week. The episode that Mark described where he had a run-in over the domestic abuse and welfare link was, was not the best episode he's had. I mean, Bob Dole is not going to do well trying to audition for Phil Donahue's replacement. I mean, that's just not his strength. But on the other hand, politics, political events are so staged nowadays that we in the media tend to jump on any little episode that shows the smallest hint of spontaneity and play it up as kind of a "gotcha game." And I think Dole was, if he can be criticized for anything in that, was trying to make--overdo the welfare point. He wasn't showing he was insensitive to, to women or something, which is how the press, which likes to play off stereotypes, remember what it did with, with Bill Clinton, "I didn't inhale," and the way Dan Quayle spelled "potato." They just fed into our stereotypes of these candidates. So I actually think Dole didn't do a lot this week but the main focus was on the President. And since he's running for reelection, that's good for Bob Dole.

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SHIELDS & GIGOT: WEATHERING WHITEWATER, DOLE IN CHICAGO

MAY 31, 1996

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