Clinton Back On The Stump
President Clinton returned to campaign mode Friday, hitting the fund-raising circuit even as he tried to maintain public focus on the U.S. military's engagement in Kosovo.
The domestic fund-raising trip is the president's first since NATO began bombarding Yugoslavia on March 24 to try to stop the Serb onslaught against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.
Between a fund-raising luncheon in Dearborn, Mich., and a dinner in suburban Boston, Mr. Clinton planned to meet with support personnel at two military bases and with humanitarian relief organizations in Roseville, Mich., a suburb of Detroit.
The president had canceled a fund-raising swing through western states at the outset of the conflict in Kosovo, but with the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia in their fourth week, administration officials were determined to show they were also tending to normal business.
House and Senate Democrats hoped to raise more than $1 million from the two campaign events. Both the Dearborn lunch and a Weston, Mass., dinner benefit ``Majority 2000,'' a drive to collect campaign money to help Democrats win back the Senate and House of Representatives.
"One of the things that any president does, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican," said White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, "is, as a leader of the party, participate in party politics."
After meeting with Air National Guard personnel at Selfridge Field, Clinton was flying to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass., for another meeting with base personnel before dinner at the home of former Democratic National Committee finance chief Alan Solomont.
Engineers at Hanscom play a key role in the development of avionics equipment that guides the B-1 bomber and other tactical aircraft.
On Thursday, Clinton told a meeting of the nation's newspaper editors that a post-World War II-style reconstruction plan will be needed in the Balkans once the current conflict there is over.
But he cautioned that the region "will never be safe with a belligerent tyranny in their midst."
Speaking before the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Clinton vowed anew that NATO will prevail and reverse Milosevic's forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.