Clinton Looks Toward Home Even Amid Troubles Overseas

WASHINGTON — On receiving word that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had finally blinked, President Clinton rushed to join a Cabinet meeting that was focused on some pressing matters: gun control, Medicare, Social Security, budget priorities and global warming.

The session provided the clearest evidence yet that the president had learned a lesson from the man he defeated nearly seven years ago: Don’t confuse international triumph with domestic success.

Even while preparing to go to Germany this week for meetings with NATO partners and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Clinton is mindful that his predecessor, George Bush, squandered an opportunity to parlay a 91% popularity rating after winning a distant war into a mandate to tackle problems on the home front.

During a June 3 Cabinet meeting, Clinton spoke of predecessors who, he said, became “consumed” by foreign policy while neglecting domestic concerns.

With just 19 months remaining in his term, the president’s lame-duck status might ordinarily doom any effort to ram major new policy initiatives through a Republican Congress. But Clinton believes that a weak and largely feckless GOP leadership in Congress gives him a strategic advantage, one that he intends to exploit, say aides and allies.

During the Cabinet session this month, Clinton listened to a quick Kosovo update from his national security advisors, then spoke of how the Republicans’ budget plan would require, in Clinton’s words, “deep cuts in areas of great national need, from law enforcement to education to the environment.”

“He had been up for the better part of the night before and clearly was pretty consumed with the breaking developments” in Kosovo, said one meeting participant. “But he wasn’t distracted at all--he was fully engaged on the budget.”

After adjourning the meeting, the president stepped out to the Rose Garden and delivered a brief statement on Kosovo--and then talked at length about the budget, Social Security, Medicare, education, retirement savings and global warming.

He announced an executive order to require federal agencies to improve energy efficiency, with a targeted 30% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. He also displayed his readiness to confront Congress, calling the GOP’s budget plan “a blueprint for chaos,” adding sternly: “We can do better.”

Domestic policy also was on Clinton’s mind as he headed out of town for a recent five-day Florida vacation. In addition to a canvas bag full of mystery novels, the president took along a hefty Medicare briefing book.

Medicare is just one of many health care issues that Clinton is focusing on--hardly a surprise, since he had set out in 1993 to restructure the entire health care system.

Last week, Clinton convened the first-ever White House conference on mental health at which he urged insurers to provide the same coverage for mental disorders as for all other illnesses.

To encourage that process, Clinton issued an executive order directing the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the nation’s largest private insurer and an industry pace-setter, to provide full parity by 2001 to its 9 million beneficiaries.

The president also is pushing Congress to strengthen the rights of managed-care patients, enroll early retirees in Medicare, expand coverage to children, protect privacy of health records and provide tax credits for long-term care.

Although the president has devoted considerable time to the Balkans since the air war in Kosovo began March 24, he repeatedly has linked the root causes of the conflict between the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians to a domestic concern: the violence in America’s culture that he believes contributed to the April school shootings at Littleton, Colo.

And as he campaigns for stricter gun controls and less violence in movies, Clinton has told audiences that the conflict between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians and the school shootings stem from the same cause: irrational hatred that must be eradicated.

“He’s spent a tremendous amount of time on these two issues,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

Surviving the impeachment controversy and winning in Kosovo, Daschle added, “has emboldened the president to become as engaged as I’ve ever seen him. He’s every bit as active as he was the first year in office.”