What Former President Clinton's home town newspaper has to say about him...


Ak. Democrat-Gazette Oct 13, 1992 "Sunday Nights Debate"

"Has anyone noted that, while the Clinton administration was raising taxes on groceries, gasoline, and even used cars, George Bush signed the bill that raised the top income-tax bracket 3 percentage points? Arkansas may be near the bottom in other rankings, but we're 15th in the Union when it comes to percentage of income taken by state sales taxes. The poorest 20 percent in this state paid 13 percent of their income in taxes last year, while the top 1 percent(those making more than $537,000 year) had to pay the tax collector only 8 percent of theirs. Such is the progressive legacy Bill Clinton leaves Arkansas. He may be campaigning for president on a soak-the-rich platform, but his tax policy back home comes closer to soaking the poor."


Ak. Democrat-Gazette 10-13-92 "Democratic platform worries taxpayer"

"...Add to this equation a Bill Clinton, who supports more excessive taxation as a solution, and you will have the United States failing for the same reasons as the Communist countries." Bleeding the hard-working, inventive and motivated people in this country through excessive taxation will quickly break their spirit and this country."


Ak. D-G 10-13-92 "Clinton wants us to ignore cloudy past"

" He (Clinton) does not want us to look into his, for we'll see that his only loyalty is to himself and not to the people he is supposed to serve. And we'll also see that he is for sale to the highest bidder.
Simply remembering his (Clinton's) jaunts outside the state to further his agenda when he should have been home doing the job we elected him to do, and his broken promise of "only" doing the work of the governor if we elected him this last time, would be enough to substantiate this statement.
Clinton's mouth writes checks that his talents cannot cash, and we don't need him as president."


Ak. D-G 10-13-92 "Cost of School supplies in state is shocking"

"....I have no doubt that some parents' inability to pay for all these things (ie. parents in Ak. now have to pay for all schools supplies themselves such as, paper, pencils, notebooks, test books, etc) results in may children dropping out of school before completing the 12th grade.
One would think that Bill Clinton professing to have been the education governor, might at least have realized the hardship many Arkansans suffer in in trying to keep their children in school.
Of course, if he were as poor during his childhood as he wants folks to believe, he would have realized that long ago."


Ak. D-G 10-16-92 "Right to presidency lost"

" When considering the particulars surrounding Clinton's draft record and the double-taking he has done in dealing with it, which portrays character, it is my belief he has forfeited his right to even ask to be awarded the honor of the office of President."


Ak. D-G 10-16-92 "Up and down with Al Bore"

Al Gore in vp debate stated: "Under Bush-Quayle administration, everything that should have gone up had gone down, and everything that should have gone down had gone up."
"...The press wouldnt have let Dan Quayle get away with such a stupid statement, but Gore , prep school- and Harvard-educated, couldnt make a stupid remark, could he?" This was a very satirical article, so I put together the items listed. " Under Bush-Quayle, interest rates have gone down. Was Gore saying they should have gone up?" " Under Bush-Quayle, the rate of inflation has dropped, ...the number of free nations in the world has gone up, ...international respect for the United States has gone up, ...both the rich and the middle class are paying smaller percentages of their income in taxes, ...the Berlin Wall came down,... (the writer mentions there are a bunch of others to list)...
"
"...does not excuse reporters for failing to pin him down after the debate"

"...Dan Quayle said over and over again, ""Bill Clinton has trouble telling the truth.""" "...Meanwhile, let me say, I know Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was once a friend of mine. Dan Quayle is right. Bill Clinton has trouble telling the truth, and he will lie to further his political career."

column by John R. Starr


Ak. D-G 10-15-92 "'Old McDonald' out of tune"

"...Sept. 27 Iowa Sen Tom Harkin, while introducing Candidate Clinton, kept alive Al Gore's ridicule of VP Qualye by repeating the way Qualye would sing "Old McDonald" - "E, I, E, I, O -- E!"
"...Given Gore's environmentalism and the notorious poultry pollution in Clinton's state, it is mystifying to me why Old McDonald, of all songs, would be chosen for this bit of ridicule....Such echoes other Gore mysteries: The easternmost 50 acres of the Gore estate is leased to a mining company (zinc) when the non-partisan environmental group, WorldWatch has called mining the No. 1 polluter worldwide."


Ak. D-G 10-17-92 This is part of an editorial in the Democrat about the recent debates.

" (Bill Clinton is great at theory; only in actuality does his performance falter.) The red tape and bureaucracy and artificial controls he would impose were barely visible. He could even cite the support of experts for his plan, perhaps some of the same ones who have designed the country into into its current crisis in medical care.
" The governer (Clinton) is at his best in such a forum (speaking of one of the recent debates), interacting with strangers who may not have followed his twists and continuous turns, and who remain blissfully ignorant of the messes he has left behind in Arkansas for others to clean up -- from a regressive tax structure to a Department of Human Services in continual crisis. No politician is better at simulating sincerity."


Ak. D-G 10-7-92 "The Boneless Wonder" (an editorial of Bill Clinton on free trade)

" Surely to no one's suprise, Bill Clinton now has come out for and against free trade. He's for in principle but against the current free trade agreement with Mexico, though not entirely. He would change it but, he assures, not re-negotiate it.(Which should be a neat trick.) He would add just a few clauses, commissions, controls, and programs here and there, and leave it to somebody else -- in this case, his running mate -- to work out the details.
It all sounds familiar to anybody who has watched our absentee governor operate in Arkansas. Back home, he's all for tax reform, and has appointed so many commissions to study it that the state's tax code has become more regressive than ever. Mainly because, in his even-handed way, he's okayed tax exemptions at a record clip and raised the sales tax to new heights in order to balance his talk about tax fairness.
Other examples of the crushing Clinton touch abound:
He's so much for the environment, and has appointed so many committees to study it, that nothing much has been done to protect Arkansas' rivers and streams, its water level, and the people of Jacksonville form dioxin-burns. He has managed, however, to keep the state's environmental comission relatively free of environmentalists.
He's all for school reform but school consolidation has scarcely progressed. Consolidating some of this small state's 300-plus school districts being
(a) the chief requirement for an efficient educational system, and (b) politically sensitive, it has been given a good leaving-alone.

....Somewhere one of his commissions is supposed to writing a civil-rights law for the state, which still doesn't have one after a decade of Clintonesque rhetoric about his devotion to the cause of racial justice.

...Bill Clinton is all for efficient law enforcement, too, but one couldn't tell it by the continued crowding in the state's prisons. Conditions are being alleviated by turning convicts loose on the public at an alarming rate. Occasionally they may maim or kill, whereupon Governor Clinton will send his condolences and hint strongly that something is wrong with the way the prisons are being administered -- as if he were just visiting the state.

...Surely no one is better at complicating the simple than Bill Clinton, at least when opposing political foreces are arrayed on both sides of an issue. The classic example: He might have voted to authorize the use of force in the Persian Gulf in a close vote, he said, but he agreed with the arguments of those who opposed it, he also said.
Now he's all for this trade agreement with Mexico if secondary agreements can be attached to create controls, commissions, and complications."


Ak. 9-11-92 "Sierra endorsement a puzzler"

"Last week, the Sierra Club gave its endorsement "enthusiastically" in simultaneous announcements across the nation based on Clinton's promises vis-a-vis George Bush's record.
...In its enthusiasm, the Sierra Club did not mention Vertac, or Ensco, or runoff from the chicken and hog waste in Northwest Arkansas, or the Crater at Diamonds State Park.
...Arkansas was ranked 50th in state policy initiatives, 45th in energy use and production, 44th in transportation efficiency, 42th in community health, 38th in workplace health, 36th in hazardous and solid waste, 32nd in air pollution, 28th in toxic waste and 25th in agricultural pollution.
The state was ranked 48th in overall environmental health.

...During the presidential primary season this year, the League of Conservation Voters, a national coalition whose members organizations include ...., the Sierra Club, rated Clinton's performance on the environment the worst in the Democratic field."


Ak. D-G 9-28-1992 "Inside the Clinton economic plan"

" Bill Clinton's plan to 'invest' in America by raising taxes on businesses and investors will kill private investment, destroy jobs, swell the deficit and reduce incomes for the middle-class wage earners.
These are amoung the chief findings of a revealing study by the independent National Center for Policy Analysis that ran Clinton's plan through an econometric model to measure its impact on the economy.
Contrary to Clinton's insistence that his tax and spending economic plan will spark new investment, create good paying jobs, and get the economy moving again, the study shows that his principal taxes would end up driving capital, the life blood of business expansion, out of the economy and hurting the very people he professes to want to help.
...Bush's non-tax, pro-investment plan would lead to the creation of 369,000 jobs while the Clinton pro-tax plan would result in a minimum of 747,000 lost jobs and possibly more than 2 million over the next four years.
The Robbins forecasts also showed that Bush's plan would raise America's gross deomestic product, the national measure of our economic health, by $226 billion by 1996, while Clinton's plan would reduce GDP by $173 billion."


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