Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: August 30, 1996
(Page 2 of 2)

The President vowed to ''build a bridge to help parents raise their children, to help young people and adults get the education and training they need, to make citizens feel safer on our streets, to help Americans succeed at home and work, to break the cycle of poverty and dependence, to protect our environment for generations to come, and to maintain our world leadership in the face of new threats and new opportunities.''

Mr. Clinton summed up his goals in the terms of children and families that have become his unceasing refrain.

''If we do these things,'' he said, ''every 8-year-old will be able to read, every 12-year-old will be able to log on to the Internet, every 18-year-old will be able to go to college, and Americans will have the knowledge they need to cross that bridge to the 21st Century.''

Mr. Clinton drew his sharpest contrast with Mr. Dole at the very end, saying the real choice was ''whether we will build a bridge to the future, or a bridge to the past, about whether we believe our best days are still out there or our best days are behind us, about whether we want a country of people working together or one where you're on your own.''

And, as he has repeatedly, Mr. Clinton vowed to protect the most popular, mainstream Government programs from any who would diminish them.

''I could never allow cuts that devastate education for our children, that pollute our environment, that end the guarantee of health care for those served under Medicaid, that end our duty or violate our duty to our parents through Medicare,'' he said. ''I just couldn't do that. As long as I'm President I'll never let it happen.''

He continued: ''Of course, there is a better answer to this dilemma. We could have the right kind of balanced budget with a new Congress -- a Democratic Congress.''

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the scarred, silver-maned war horse of the party's liberal past who briefly flirted with making a bid for the Presidency at the last Democratic convention in Chicago, in 1968, and who scored victories in Congress this summer on the minimum wage and health insurance legislation, started the evening on a full-throated, partisan note. Senator Kennedy mocked Mr. Dole's warning against intolerance to the Republicans in San Diego two weeks ago.

''We are proud of who we are, proud of where we stand and proud of who leads us,'' Mr. Kennedy told the delegates. ''No one in this convention hall has to point to the exit signs to tell the prejudiced, the extremists and the intolerant that they are not welcome here.''

And with mirror-image mimicry of one of the most pointed speeches of the Republican Convention, Mr. Kennedy drew raucous cheers and whoops of laughter by turning Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson's hyphenated attacks back against her, denouncing the Republicans' platform as a Trojan Horse of hidden hazards.

Interrupting himself at one point to accommodate the applause, Senator Kennedy declared, ''It is the radical wish-list of the education-cutting, environmental-trashing, Medicare-slashing, choice-denying, tolerance-repudiating, gay-bashing, Social-Security-threatening, assault-rifle-coddling, Government-closing, tax-loophole-granting -- there's more, there's more to come -- minimum-wage-opposing Republican majority than dominated the delegations in San Diego.''

For weeks, Mr. Clinton's aides have billed his acceptance speech tonight as his first specific effort to sketch out the details of a second term, and the aides and advisers most charged with drafting it -- from Mr. Morris on down -- are squarely in the moderate mold.

Mr. Clinton made two new specific policy promises: a modest proposed tax break for homeowners and tax cuts for businesses providing jobs in depressed areas. The first amounted to a nod to longstanding Republican proposals for cutting capital gains taxes and, the second, a way to assuage the concerns of liberal Democrats that the Republican-sponsored welfare bill Mr. Clinton signed last week would cut off benefits for poor people without providing adequate job opportunities.

Mr. Dole has already endorsed a nearly identical capital gains proposal, and his running mate, Jack Kemp, has long supported the concept of tax incentives to spur economic development in urban ''empowerment zones.''

White House aides said Mr. Clinton spent virtually the entire day going over drafts of the speech at the dining room table of his 31st-floor hotel suite, reworking triple-spaced computer printouts with a black felt-tipped pen. The aides said President Clinton was so intent that his daughter, Chelsea, joked that he was sitting in exactly the same spot when she returned from a day out on the town at 5 P.M. as he had been at 10 A.M.

Photos: Confetti and balloons greeted Bill Clinton's acceptance of the Democratic Presidential nomination at the United Center in Chicago last night. Members of the New York delegation danced to ''Shout'' yesterday. In the center of the action was a high-spirited Hazel N. Dukes. (Photographs by Monica Almeida/The New York Times)(pg. A23); President Clinton arriving on the podium for his speech to the Democratic National Convention last night. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. A1)