6A
Tuesday, February 6, 1995
NATION/WORLD
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Dole in the running for president
Majority leader will be candidate in 1996 election
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Dole said Sunday that he was going to formally announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination around the 50th anniversary of the day he was seriously wounded in a World War II battle.
He also said Jack Kemp and Colin Powell were possible running mates.
The Senate majority leader said that his injury on April 14, 1945, which left his right arm partially paralyzed, played a seminal role in making him more sensitive to the concerns of other people in difficulty.
The Kansas Republican, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," described himself as a fiscal conservative who identifies with the theme of Kemp, a Republican leader and former cabinet secretary and congressman, who has urged his party to reach out more to Blacks and other minorities.
Asked about his position on a 1996 California ballot issue to eliminate race as a criteria for discriminating for or against someone, Dole said Republicans were reviewing the whole issue of affirmative action.
"With my record, I think I can look at it with some credibility. Has it worked? Has it had an adverse, a reverse reaction? Why did 62 percent of white males vote Republican in 1994? I think it's because of things like this, where sometimes the best-qualified person does not get the job because he or she may be one color. And I'm beginning to believe that may not be the way it should be in America," he said.
Dole said Kemp, who recently said he would not run for the Republican presidential nomination, would be on any list he put together of potential running mates. He also mentioned former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell and several Republican governors, including Pete Wilson of California and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey.
Dole said he had recently talked with Powell but had not discussed teaming up for the presidential race or determined whether Powell was a Republican. Both parties are courting the popular retired general.
Joining Dole among the early front runners for the 1996 nomination are Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas; former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander.
Gramm this weekend was raising money in South Dakota, a state Dole carried in the 1988 GOP primary. Dole was President Ford's running mate in his unsuccessful 1976 race against Jimmy Carter and has ran for the presidential nomination twice, in 1980 and 1988.
Dole was an Army second lieutenant when he was wounded during a battle in northern Italy in 1945. He said announcing his presidential aspirations on the anniversary of that event was not meant to point out differences in the military records of himself and President Bill Clinton, who avoided service in Vietnam.
"I assume some people might suggest that. I picked it because I thought it was a fairly important experience in my lifetime, and it's not aimed at anyone else," he said.
Dole said his candidacy would appeal to people "looking for someone with experience and someone who's been tested in a lot of ways and somebody who gets up every morning and knows that people can have difficulties — because I have a little difficulty dressing, things like that."
He would be 73 when he took office, which would make him the oldest person starting a first term in the White House. He said he had made no decision on whether he would confine himself to only one term in office.
He said he had learned from the mistakes of his past campaigns when he gained a reputation for making sharp attacks on his opponents.
"I'm at sort of peace with myself. I know what I want to do," he said. "I've never personally attacked President Clinton or Mrs. Clinton. I gave that up. I had a round of that several years ago."
Surgeon general nominee may not fit the bill
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Bill Clinton's selection of Henry Foster Jr. as U.S. surgeon general is in jeopardy because the doctor has performed some abortions and supported Planned Parenthood, Senate Republicans say.
"I do think it is in serious trouble." Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Sunday.
"Will it be in some difficulty? Yes," Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., said in a separate interview.
Foster, a Tennessee gynecologist-obstetrician who battled teen pregnancy in Nashville housing projects, was announced as Clinton's choice Thursday. The next day, the White House revealed that he had performed fewer than a dozen hospital
abortions, mostly to save the mother's life or in cases of rape or incest. An unspecified number apparently were elective abortions.
Despite White House efforts to focus on the 10,000 babies Foster delivered and his work to promote abstinence among teen-agers, conservatives and anti-abortion groups mounted a campaign against him. Some Republicans, including Dole, criticized the White House for not telling them sooner that Foster performed some abortions.
"I'm ... troubled by the fact that we were not given that information before the nomination was sent up," Dole said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Dole, who hopes to shore up support from conservatives in his own party for the 1966 presidential race.
said he had not decided whether to oppose the selection, which must be confirmed by the Senate.
"I'm not certain," he said. "I don't like what I hear, what I read."
Lott said he was not prepared to recommend Foster's withdrawal.
White House representative Dawn Alexander said Sunday that Clinton knew about the abortions before the selection and thought Foster's enormously impressive history will stand him well in the confirmation process.
Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., issued a statement in support of Foster, denouncing suggestions that having performed abortions should disqualify him. "Anti-abortion politicians want to criminalize abortions and marginalize the doctors who perform them. We will fight them every step of the way." she said...
But conservatives are also miffed about Foster's long ties to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the fact that his teenage pregnancy program in Nashville, Tenn., dispenses contraceptives.
"There's more than just the abortion question. There are other questions — maybe what he has advocated or participated in with the Planned Parenthood," Lott said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Dole said he wanted to review Foster's record carefully before passing judgment. "My view is we shouldn't shoot down somebody before he's even had a hearing," he said.
On teen-age pregnancy, Dole said,
Foster has done a lot of good things.
The Associated Press
Teen hero waits for national award
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When 16-year-old Mychael Ramsey learned he had been invited to Washington to receive a hero's medal for pulling three people from a burning house, he had a special request: a meeting with Mayor Marion Barry.
What has happened to Mychael since then sounds like something out of Barry's own life. He's been arrested for marijuana possession, and the honor he covets may be taken away.
Now Mychael's playing a waiting game, bracing for another blow in a life that's already seen more than its share of hardship.
Last month, the Justice Department said it was reconsidering its announcement that Michael would get a 1993 Young American Medal for Bravery.
He professes a lack of concern about getting the award.
"I just think if I do, I do," Mychael said in an interview last week. "If I don't, I don't. It's not like I'm going to go back home and cry or something. I'll just be thankful for all the other awards I got."
Still, he doesn't hide his excitement.
"How many young Black people do you know get the opportunity of a lifetime to go to Washington, to sit down and talk with the president, eat with him, do stuff like that?" he asked.
Besides meeting President Bill Clinton, Mychael also was excited about the possibility of meeting Jesse Jackson and Barry, the mayor returned to office despite having spent six months in prison on a misdemeanor charge after being videotaped smoking crack.
"You can put them as role models even though Marion Barry did something wrong." Michael said.
"But I'm still not down on him for what he did."
The Young American Medals Program was established by Congress in 1950 to recognize young people for bravery and public service. By that standard, Mychel would seem to deserve a medal.
On Dec. 12, 1993, he and his friends were driving to a grocery store when they saw a house on fire. Mychael threw a brick through the front door and tried to get inside but was driven back by thick smoke.
Circling the house, he heard someone rapping on a window. With a friend boosting him up, he broke the window with his hand, got inside and helped an 83-year-old woman and her 67-year-old brother to safety. He then returned to the house and led the woman's retarded daughter to safety.
He spent the next several hours in a hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation.
When Etta McKenzie, the insurance agent for the fire victims, searched out Mychael to thank him, she found a boy "in need of special attention," she said.
"With his father in prison since Mychael's birth and his mother unwilling to have Mychael in her life, the boy had bounced from place to place," McKenzie said. When she met him, he was living with 10 other people in a two-bedroom house owned by his paternal grandparents.
He had no winter coat and wasn't going to school.
McKenzie, who has two children and says she thinks about her own son every time she sees Michael, got Mayor Emanuel Cleaver's office to honor Mychael with a proclamation, then applied for the Young American Medal about a year ago.
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