Bent Promises

THE FIRST TASK OF A STATESMAN, QUIPPED THE LATE New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, is to disappoint supporters and break campaign promises. By that standard, Bill Clinton was off to a flying start the week before he moved into the White House.

-- Clinton promised his economic program would "start with a tax cut for the middle class"; last week he said he is reconsidering that.

-- He promised to cut the federal budget deficit "in half" by 1997. Now that the goal looks tougher, he has scaled it back.

-- He promised to submit his economic plan to Congress "the day after I'm inaugurated." When reminded of that last week, he retorted, "I don't know who led you to believe that." He slipped his deadline to mid-March, which he said would be earlier than President Reagan's first State of the Union address. Not exactly: Reagan spoke on Feb. 18, 1981.

--During the campaign, he denounced as "callous" President Bush's policy of returning refugees to Haiti. Last week, fearing that his statement would produce a new flood of boat people heading for the U.S., Clinton switched again and embraced the Bush approach, at least for the moment.

--He vowed to cut the White House staff 25%; now his spokesman calls the staff cut a "goal."

--Among his most fundamental campaign pledges, one that helped to define him as a "New Democrat," was the promise to "end welfare as we know it," but welfare reform fails to appear in the top five priorities of either Clinton or Donna Shalala, his designated Secretary of Health and Human Services.

At Shalala's confirmation hearing, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that "this week there has been rather a clatter of campaign promises being tossed out the window." Asked at a press conference whether he considered any campaign promise to be "ironclad," Clinton replied that he must "respond to changing circumstances." (See cover stories, beginning on page 26.)