Clinton, Dole Exchange Blasts On Each Other’s Personal Integrity Arguments Over Abortions Policies Turn Vituperative

In an extraordinarily intense and personal cross-country exchange, President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole challenged each other’s values and personal integrity Thursday, focusing on the issue of late-term abortion in a daylong series of increasingly vituperative attacks.

That exchange began when Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, went before an audience of Catholic newspaper editors in Philadelphia on Thursday morning and asserted that Clinton’s veto of a bill that would have barred a kind of late-term abortion procedure “pushed the limits of decency too far.”

Barely had Dole spoken when Clinton, who until now had left the attacks on his rival to aides, delivered a severe response that starkly illustrated the candidates’ disagreement on one of the nation’s most divisive social issues.

Speaking in Milwaukee at what was supposed to be a joint news conference with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Clinton characterized Dole’s position on the bill, which would have forbidden so-called partial-birth abortions, as being one of “there was too much political support behind this, I did not want to be bothered by the facts, it’s OK with me - whatever - if they rip your body to shreds and you could never have another baby, even though the baby you were carrying couldn’t live.”

The president added: “Now I fail to see why his moral position is superior to the one I took.”

In his Philadelphia appearance, at the annual convention of the Catholic Press Association, Dole offered a new campaign proposal: a credit that taxpayers would be able to claim for charitable giving.

But it was overshadowed by the latest exchange of what the campaigns like to call “rapid response,” in which Dole, having returned to Washington, got in the last shot before this evening’s television news programs by inviting photographers to his private balcony on the west side of the Capitol.

“He is on the fringe, subscribing to abortion on demand, and now he’s upset about it,” Dole said of the president. “I think what he should do is just admit he made a mistake and urge the Congress to override his veto, ask us to override his veto. That’s what he should do.”

Though Clinton’s veto of the abortion legislation provided the platform for Thursday’s exchange - startling for being so sudden, so furious and so early in the presidential contest - it escalated into a general assault by the two men on each other’s character. It came at a time when both candidates have been under pressure, wrestling with politically troublesome disputes within their parties: abortion for Dole, same-sex marriages for Clinton.

It was Dole who set the bar for the day when he told his audience in Philadelphia that he viewed the presidential election as “a referendum on the basic values of the country.” He left no doubt that he considered Clinton lacking in that regard.

Dole said he worried that the country was in a “moral drift.”

“As a society,” he said, “we can’t shake the feeling that our culture is in trouble and our values are under assault. And he suggested that Clinton was largely to blame.

“We have an administration that reflects the most troubling features of our culture,” Dole said, “an administration that seems to believe in everything and nothing.”

It is, he continued, “an administration guided by nothing more profound or permanent than the latest polling data, an administration constantly exhorting itself and lecturing the public but itself fundamentally adrift, without direction or moral vision.”

He offered as evidence Clinton’s veto of the abortion bill.

Dole’s remarks reflected in part a rising frustration on the part of the candidate and his campaign over the swiftness with which Clinton has rushed to subsume Dole’s issues.

Last weekend, for example, Clinton endorsed a welfare plan that Dole was about to embrace. And Wednesday, the Clinton’s White House, aware that Dole was to speak to Catholic newspaper editors, put out word that Clinton would veto a same-sex marriage bill, presumably in case Dole raised the issue. He did not.