No Czechs Please?
The Washington Post and USA Today
lead with Janet Reno's protestations that her probe of Clinton fund-raising is
far from closed. The New York
Times leads with a simmering debate about the costs of NATO expansion.
And the Los Angeles Times front, dominated by local stories, gives
some play to the new stricter rules for disability aid to children (a story
done in greater depth last week by the Wall Street Journal ).
Today's Reno leads are the product of her Sunday "Meet The Press"
counteroffensive in response to Republican charges of being duped by Clinton in
the handling of the coffee tapes. "Nothing has been closed, and nobody has been
exonerated," Reno is quoted as saying in both papers.
The Post juxtaposes its report that as of right now, Reno still feels
the coffee videos are not indications of Clinton criminality with mention of
the appearance in the tapes of Arief Wiriadinata, an Indonesian who identifies
himself on camera as an emissary of the Lippo Bank's James Riady, and of five
businessmen having coffee with the president in the Oval Office who, it is now
known, each contributed $100,000 within a week.
The NYT points out that President Clinton's proposed expansion of
NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic depends on the joint
approval of the Senate and the parliaments of the 15 other members of NATO, and
that cost will be the decisive issue in those votes. Senate conservatives, led
by Jesse Helms, says the Times , don't want to pay too much of the total
expansion bill, but European politicians, who need to cut their deficits to
qualify for the Eurodollar, are not much inclined to pick up the slack.
And apparently, nobody agrees on what the bill is. The current American
estimate is up to $35 billion through 2009. The Brits think that's 40 percent
too high. The French, not to be outdone, intend to pay nothing extra. The
Congressional Budget Office says the American estimate is too low.
The WSJ has given some good coverage lately to the upcoming global
warming meetings and to the political debates they are provoking, and today's
"Outlook" column by Alan Murray takes the issue seriously, saying that in the
next century the Earth's average temperature probably will rise by two to six
degrees. Murray says that the question dominating the White House debate
between the environmentalists and the economists, the question that President
Clinton is faced with, is, "How much should the nation sacrifice now to buy
insurance against threats in the future?" Murray says that Clinton and Gore
"know that proposing even something as modest as a 25-cent-a-gallon gasoline
tax for this purpose wouldn't sell with the American public, which is busy
buying gas-guzzling sports vehicles, or with Congress." But is that so obvious?
In southern California, where the economy is roaring back, gas prices went up
nearly that much this past summer and it was hardly a back-page story, much
less the cause of any political ferment. If the economy is good, people will
pay extra for gas, and what the Journal tends to downplay is that almost
all the environmental controls implemented thus far have proven to be good for
business.
The President arrived in Caracas, Venezuela yesterday, where he made his
initial pitch for what will be the main theme of his ten-day South American
trip--the expansion of free trade. The LAT puts this story on its front
(although below the fold) and it also is the top item in the WSJ 's
world-wide news digest. But it's buried by the WP (picture on the front,
but story on page 22), and by the NYT (the national edition has a
picture on the front, the story inside, while the metro edition dispenses with
the picture). Now, not every country is equally important to America or
Americans, but it's hard to understand, given the increasingly Hispanic
demographic of this country, how it is that the papers could show less interest
in this trip than say, Bill Clinton's vacation on Martha's Vineyard.
