President Clinton, sharpening his rhetoric after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, on Monday denounced some radio broadcasters and said that too many of the nation’s political leaders have failed to combat “purveyors of hatred.”

“We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today . . . (who) leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable,” Clinton said in a speech to a meeting of community college executives. The President said the rhetoric that concerns him includes “some things that are regularly said over the airwaves,” suggesting that he was thinking of the archconservative broadcasters who have attacked him ferociously and relentlessly for more than two years.

“Some of us have not discharged our responsibilities,” he added. “It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.”

Clinton’s remarks reflected a marked shift in his role over the last three days--from spokesman for a sorrowing nation to wrathful leader with a serious political point: that extremists have so coarsened the nation’s discourse that social peace is at risk.


And he came close to the point of accusing his most bitter adversaries of helping to create the climate that engendered the Oklahoma tragedy. “People like that . . . must know that their bitter words can have consequences,” he said.

Even before Clinton spoke, the nation’s most prominent conservative broadcaster, Rush Limbaugh, devoted much of the opening monologue on his nationally syndicated radio show to defending conservatives against accusations that their rhetoric had helped create a climate which allowed extremists to flourish.

“Liberals intend to use this tragedy for their own gain,” Limbaugh said. “I am here to tell you it is irresponsible and vacuous to suggest” that conservative arguments “caused this tragedy.”

Liberals have tried to label “the mainstream conservative agenda in this country as extremist and now that same word is being attached to the nuts and lunatics who blew up this building,” Limbaugh said. “The left in this country would love for the right to be permanently disqualified and silenced by virtue of their innuendo.”


For his part, Clinton was careful not to name any individuals in his speech, and senior White House aides sought hastily to head off any impression that Clinton was spoiling for a fight with radio talk show hosts or other broadcasters, saying that the President did not intend to point a finger at any particular medium. Neither, they said, would the President single out any politicians for failing to condemn extremism.

“He’s talking about public discourse generally,” said Harold M. Ickes, Clinton’s top political aide. “The fact is that a lot of public discourse goes out over the airways. . . . He’s not pointing his finger at any particular person or any particular program.”

In the past, however, senior Administration officials have not been shy about naming broadcasters and other conservative critics whom they have accused of going overboard with their rhetoric.

In one striking example that caught the attention of White House officials, G. Gordon Liddy, the former Watergate conspirator who now has a syndicated radio show broadcast from Virginia, told his listeners recently that, under certain circumstances, shooting agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could be justifiable. And Liddy went on to advise listeners that, if they did shoot, they should avoid aiming for the agents’ torsos because they wear bulletproof vests. He suggested “head shots. Head shots.”


Liddy said today that he was only advocating such violence “if they come at you with lethal force.”

A year ago, in a radio interview in St. Louis, Clinton denounced both Limbaugh and the Rev. Jerry Falwell by name for some of their broadcasts and attacked opponents who argued that “anyone who doesn’t agree with them is fair game for any wild charge no matter how false for any kind of personal demeaning attack.”

The theme that the nation must avoid harsh rhetoric is one that Clinton has sounded before, as his aides pointed out on Monday. But the searing images of last week’s bombing put a new edge of passion in the President’s statements.

“Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake,” he said. “I never want to look into the faces of another set of family members like those I saw” in Oklahoma City.


The President has also begun to link his condemnations of extremism with his battles with the Republican-led Congress. Clinton said Sunday that he will ask Congress to give the FBI broad new authority to fight domestic terrorism. His chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, said that the bombing has given the Administration new resolve to fight GOP efforts to overturn the ban on certain assault-style weapons that gun-control advocates won last year.

White House aides have been careful to tread lightly around the political implications of last week’s bombing, acutely conscious that any attempt to exploit the Oklahoma tragedy would be both unseemly and self-defeating.

“This is not a campaign gambit that he’s on,” Ickes, who is leading Clinton’s reelection effort, said sternly. “He is presidential. . . . This is a matter of national concern.”

In private, though, officials acknowledged that they are pleased at the Administration’s sure-footed response to the disaster--and the apparent boost to Clinton’s own standing.


The bombing has given Clinton one of his rare opportunities since the Republicans took control of Congress to appear “presidential"--to order executive agencies into action, to speak as the nation’s voice and to call for new legislation.

In Clinton’s own awkward phrase from his news conference the day before the bombing, the episode has made him clearly “relevant” again. The same television networks that refused to broadcast his news conference because it would deprive them of situation-comedy revenues televised his Oval Office session on Saturday and gave him lengthy, respectful coverage at the Oklahoma City memorial service on Sunday.

In that sense, the bombing was the domestic equivalent of what happens in time of war: the President’s role changes from one politician among many to the nation’s paramount leader.

The effect may not last long. Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush, could not turn his victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War into reelection in 1992.


But for the time being, the bombing has put Clinton’s Republican political opponents on the defensive, even though no one has accused them of sympathizing with the extremist paramilitary militias that are now under scrutiny.

Three days after the bombing, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was asked by a reporter whether his attacks on the federal government had encouraged extremism--a suggestion that Gingrich denounced as “grotesque and offensive.” Gingrich faced further questions on Monday, saying in an interview on the “CBS Evening News” that he is “sure” that Clinton “wasn’t speaking about us” in his criticism of extreme rhetoric.

“I don’t think we should tolerate or in any way support people who advocate killing Americans,” the Georgia Republican said.

And Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, quickly announced Monday that he is ready to support the Administration’s anti-terrorism proposals.


Earlier this spring, Dole had promised the National Rifle Assn. that he would lead the GOP effort to repeal the 1994 ban on assault-style weapons, an effort that now may be endangered because of the perception on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the NRA’s sometimes violently worded attacks on federal gun laws and those who enforce them are uncomfortably close to the language of the militias.

Clinton also has taken the opportunity to remind voters that he has long taken tough positions on crime. In a television interview Sunday, the President made a point of noting that he administered the death penalty as governor of Arkansas and said he would seek that penalty for the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City attack.

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