Author: A.T.

Notice: Due to the large volume of voters expected for this election, the election process has been expanded to two days. Democrats will vote on Tuesday, November 7th, and Republicans will vote on Wednesday, November 8th. Please pass this along to your friends and let them know so no one is left out. Thank you. — The Management.

You’ve probably already seen that . . . as well as the mirror-image Republican version that’s going around. It’s a joke. (Well, you knew that, of course, but I was warned that some election officials are taking this very seriously, so I repeat: it’s a joke. Republicans are voting on Thursday.)

Not quite as frivolous, but still way overblown, is the sudden hoo-ha over Governor Bush’s drunken driving arrest. He’s already told us that up until the time he was 40, he sometimes acted badly. This DWI was a long time ago, and, when confronted with it, he calmly affirmed its accuracy. What more is there to be said? Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile was right on, in my view, when she reportedly called the incident ‘nothing.’

Indeed, my first impression of Bush’s forthright admission was one of some admiration. We should all own up to our mistakes with such poise. On reflection, though, I’m not sure what other course he could have taken. He was, after all, confronted with court records of a conviction. He might have been more evasive if it had been an allegation that could not readily be proven – ‘I will not talk about things I did before I turned 40.’ And he might have been less poised if this had been more embarrassing. But on the scale of embarrassments, a 24-year-old DWI conviction barely moves the needle.

The questions I’d like to see asked and answered forthrightly – and believe should have been asked long ago – include these:

1. Governor, there are people in Texas prisons right now serving long prison sentences for modest involvement with drugs when they were under 40. Do you think they should be in your prisons? If not, why are they still there? If so, why can’t you just categorically deny having used illegal drugs yourself? And if you can’t deny that, as you have thus far declined to do, doesn’t this raise legitimate questions about why those people should remain in prison at the same time as you should be in the White House?

2. Governor, are you aware that Vice President Gore never said he invented the Internet? And that it is generally agreed he played the lead Congressional role in championing the Internet? If you’re not aware of this – why not? The statement of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf praising the Vice President for his work in this area has been widely circulated. If like most knowledgeable people you are aware of this, why have you continued to call the Vice President’s trustworthiness into question on this issue, and ridicule him? Is it not particularly important, in calling someone’s credibility into question, to be completely truthful and fair yourself?

3. Governor, you mock as fuzzy math the Vice President’s assertion that your plan to cut the top estate tax rate from 55% to 0%, and to cut the top income tax rate from 39.6% to 33%, would direct nearly half your tax cut to the wealthiest 1%. If he’s wrong, what is the correct percentage, and how do you arrive at it? If he’s right, is it fair for you, knowing that his math is correct, to insinuate, instead, that he cannot be trusted?

4. Governor, you speak often of compassionate conservatism. Your running mate and key advisor earned $20 million over the past decade, of which he donated 1% to charity. Does this shake your faith in the belief that voluntary contributions can be relied upon to provide the resources needed to aid the weakest among us when government steps aside?

5. Governor, in one of the debates, the Texas record of providing health insurance to children was attacked and you repeatedly responded that Texas spent ‘$4.7 billion on children’s health.’ You said it three times, I believe. It was subsequently reported that of this $4.7 billion, $3.2 billion actually came from private charities, not from your budget – so you were really only spending about a third as much as you said. Were you aware of this at the time you said it? If not, why not? Does a few billion dollars in health care for Texas kids not capture your interest? Or, if you were aware of this, wasn’t your repeated use of the $4.7 billion figure at least as misleading as any of the ‘gotchas’ you and your campaign have used to try to persuade the American people that Al Gore is untrustworthy?

6. Governor, your campaign is horrified by an NAACP ad that criticizes you for killing the Texas Hate Crimes statute that was proposed in the wake of James Byrd, Jr.’s dragging death. Separately, the leadership of your party has bottled up a national Hate Crimes statute that has been passed 57-42 in the Senate and 232-191 in the House. As leader of your party, who holds out the appealing prospect of being able to work with both parties to get things done, can we not assume that, if you had wanted to, you could have gotten this bill out of Congress? After all, it already had a majority in both Houses. Not having done so, can we fairly assume that you side with Trent Lott and Jesse Helms in opposing the majority on this legislation? Finally, as a compassionate uniter, not a divider, can you tell us why — unlike so many other Texas leaders on both sides of the aisle — you didn’t make the symbolic gesture of attending the Byrd funeral?

7. Governor, under the Texas sodomy statue that you support, your running mate’s daughter could be imprisoned for loving her chosen partner in the privacy of their own bedroom. As a conservative who wants less government interference in our lives – who trusts people, not government — why do you think it is the state’s obligation to tell people whom they may and may not love in the privacy of their own homes?

8. Governor, what about the Harken Oil insider-trading investigation, where you, as a member of the board of directors and the three-man audit committee sold all your shares a week before bad news was announced? In the months following your sale, Harken stock dropped 60%. Did you have no idea what was going in your own company? Or, if you did, do you understand why the timing of your $828,000 sale leaves the impression with some that you violated a very basic securities regulation? The S.E.C. did not charge you (then the son of a sitting President) with an offense, but also did not exonerate you as you later alleged it had. Does this speak in any way to the character issue?

I have a lot more questions I’d like to ask, and I would hope we would give the Governor a very full and respectful hearing as he answered each one of them. My guess is that the answers would be somewhat fuzzy or unresponsive. Or else, if he answered candidly, that his support among moderate Republicans and independents would shrink.

All that said . . .

• The fact is, both candidates are good men who love their country and would try to do a good job.

• The fact is, one drunk driving charge 24 years ago really is nothing, and tonight’s intense scrutiny of it deserves to die very fast. (It may not, but it should.) What dismays me is how more-substantive issues, many of which actually do affect our future, have gotten less scrutiny.

• The fact is, there are huge differences in the proposals of these two candidates. In my view, our friends in the Republican party are doing a masterful job of shifting attention from the big stuff to the question of how the Vice President could possibly have claimed he flew to a Texas flood site with FEMA director James Lee Witt when in fact he flew with Witt on 17 other disaster inspections, but on this particular one flew with a FEMA regional director instead. Or the question of how, in trying to make a valid point in a folksy way about the cost of medicine, he said “my” dog when he should have said “someone’s” dog.

Listen: Central to Governor Bush’s economic plan is a huge tax cut at a time of rock bottom unemployment. It makes no sense to add massive stimulus to an already booming economy. Enact that tax cut and, to keep inflation in check, the Fed would almost surely have to raise interest rates – which means higher mortgage rates and car loan rates and all the rest, wiping out the tax savings for many families (though not for wealthy families that do not borrow). And having enacted it, what do you do when the next recession arrives? Cut taxes still further and return to the trickle-down years of super-low tax rates for the rich and super-high budget deficits?

We’ve tried that, and it didn’t work very well. We’ve tried this – the Clinton-Gore recipe – and it’s worked great.

What this election should largely be about is whether we want to go back to the old way or continue as best we can on the current progressive path, with modest tax cuts aimed at the middle, leaving a reserve for further stimulus the next time, inevitably, we have a recession.

That’s the question the talk shows should be focusing on, not Governor Bush’s distant-past DWI.

One last thing, while I’m all jazzed up (and, I know, infuriating some of you, for which I apologize – that’s not my intention). Of course you would expect me to say this, as the highly paid treasurer of the Democratic National Committee (although I promise you I speak here entirely unsanctioned and on my own) . . . but on Social Security and the rest, the Governor’s math isn’t just fuzzy, it’s wrong. You know the famous trillion dollars that our side alleges he is promising to two different groups of people at the same time? He says, no, he’ll get that trillion from the surplus. Fair enough – that’s one trillion. But he would also enact a tax cut (yes, with huge advantages for the wealthy) that would shrink the surplus another $1.6 trillion or so. Now you’re up to $2.6 trillion. And then he would spend money to shore up our military and build a $450 billion missile shield and add a little for our schools, and such. That gets him up around $3.1 trillion. The only problem is, the surplus – which is anything but assured for the next 10 years, to say the least – is projected at around $2 trillion.

In the words of some much smarter people than me, 3.1 is a bigger number than 2.

Where is that extra trillion going to come from? It is not a trivial question.

So . . . was it annoying when Al Gore kept calling this “a risky tax scheme.” Candidly, it was. I found myself wishing from the first time I heard it, let alone the fiftieth, that he could have found a more appealing way to say it. But that doesn’t change the fact that Governor Bush’s plan would put our prosperity at risk, and that, incidentally, it would widen still further the yawning gap between the wealthiest few and everybody else.

So in these last five days, can we please stop talking about DWI’s and mocking the VP for saying he invented the Internet, which he did not say, and focus on whether $3.1 trillion can be found in a hoped-for $2 trillion surplus? If it can’t, we could have economic trouble ahead.

Harry Brown: “Can someone explain how there can be a surplus when we have a national debt? It’s like saying you have an extra $100 in your savings account while owing your $1,000 on your credit card.”

The surplus refers to this year’s budget — like a guy who manages to have $3,000 left over after paying all his bills. The debt is the sum of all our accumulated deficits from years past — like a guy who’s racked up a ton of credit card debt, car loans, and a mortgage. (Remember that year he earned $43,000 after taxes and spent $140,000 to buy a house? It was not necessarily imprudent to do it, but that was a particularly deep deficit year.)

The question on today’s political table is how much of the hoped-for future annual surpluses to put in each of four main pots: (a) debt reduction (like paying down your credit card balances when times are good); (b) tax cuts and credits for low- and middle-income folks; (c) tax cuts for those best off; (d) other extra spending, like beefing up the military.

The fundamental difference between the two candidates is that Governor Bush uses a big chunk of the hoped-for surplus for (c), leaving that much less for (a), (b), and (d). Vice President Gore uses none for (c), leaving that much more.

Which approach is fairest and/or best for the economy? That’s what we’re all being called upon to decide next Tuesday.

GLORIA STEINEM

Top Ten Reasons Why I’m Not Voting For Nader
(Any One Of Which Would Be Enough)
by Gloria Steinem

10. He’s not running for President, he’s running for federal matching funds for the Green Party!

9. He was able to take all those perfect progressive positions of the past because he never had to build an electoral coalition, earn a majority vote, or otherwise submit to democracy.

8. By condemning Gore for ever having taken a different position — for example, for voting against access to legal abortion when he was a Congressman from Tennessee — he actually dissuades others from changing their minds and joining us.

7. Nader is rightly obsessed with economic and corporate control, yet he belittles a deeper form of control — control of reproduction, and the most intimate parts of our lives. For example, he calls the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movements “gonadal politics,” and ridicules the use of the word “patriarchy,” as if it were somehow less important than the World Trade Organization. As Congressman Barney Frank wrote Nader in an open letter, “your assertion that there are not important issue differences between Gore and Bush is either flatly inaccurate or reflects your view that…the issues are not important…since you have generally ignored these issues in your career.”

6. The issues of corporate control can only be addressed by voting for candidates who will pass campaign-funding restrictions, and by conducting grassroots boycotts and consumer campaigns against sweatshops — not by voting for one man who will never become President.

5. Toby Moffett, a longtime Nader Raider who also served in Congress, wrote that Nader’s “Tweedledum and Tweedledee assertion that there is no important difference between the major Presidential candidates would be laughable if it weren’t so unsafe.” We’ve been bamboozled by the media’s practice of being even-handedly negative. There is a far greater gulf between Bush and Gore than between Nixon and Kennedy – and what did that mean to history?

4. Nader asked Winona LaDuke, an important Native American leader, to support and run with him, despite his likely contribution to the victory of George W. Bush, a man who has stated that “state law is supreme when to comes to Indians,” a breathtakingly dangerous position that ignores hundreds of treaties with tribal governments, long-standing federal policy and federal law affirming tribal sovereignty.

3. If I were to run for President in the same symbolic way, I would hope my friends and colleagues would have the sense to vote against me, too, saving me from waking up to discover that I had helped send George W. Bush to the most powerful position in the world.

2. There are one, two, three, or even four lifetime Supreme Court Justices who are likely to be appointed by the next President. Bush has made clear by his record as Governor and appeals to the ultra-rightwing that his appointments would overturn Roe v. Wade and reproductive freedom, dismantle remedies for racial discrimination, oppose equal rights for gays and lesbians, oppose mandatory gun registration, oppose federal protections of endangered species, public lands, and water — and much more. Gore is the opposite on every one of these issues. Gore has made clear that his appointments would uphold our hard won progress in those areas, and he has outlined advances in each one.

1. The art of behaving ethically is behaving as if everything we do matters. If we want Gore and not Bush in the White House, we have to vote for Gore and not Bush — out of self-respect.

I’m not telling you how to vote by sharing these reasons. The essence of feminism is the power to decide for ourselves. It’s also taking responsibility for our actions. Let’s face it, Bush in the White House would have far more impact on the poor and vulnerable in this country, and on the subjects of our foreign policy and aid programs in other countries. Just as Clinton saved women’s lives by rescinding the Mexico City policy by executive order as his first act as President — thus ending the ban against even discussing abortion if one received U.S. aid — the next President will have enormous power over the lives of millions abroad who cannot vote, plus millions too disillusioned to vote here.

Perhaps there’s a reason why Nader rallies seem so white, middle class, and disproportionately male; in short, so supported by those who wouldn’t be hurt if Bush were in the White House.

Think self-respect. Think about the impact of our vote on the weakest among us. Then we can’t go wrong.

PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY

☞ Picking up on Nader’s “MasterCard” TV commercial parody, People for the American Way has produced one of its own:

“Priceless”
TV :30

Nine black robes: 945 dollars.

One wooden gavel: 14 dollars.

Forty years of influence over our freedoms . . . Priceless.

George Bush’s favorite justices — like him — oppose choice, gun control and strong environmental protections.

Al Gore favors justices who are pro-choice, support gun safety laws and environmental protections.

The next President could appoint three of the nine Supreme Court Justices.

With our freedoms at stake, shouldn’t you cast a vote that really counts?

THE SIERRA CLUB

☞ Carl Pope is executive director of the Sierra Club. He may be forgiven if he believes that his concern for the environment matches even that of Ralph Nader.

Dear Ralph:

Yesterday you sent me (and many other environmentalists) a long letter defending your candidacy and attacking “the servile mentality” of those of us in the environmental community who are supporting Vice President Gore.

I’ve worked alongside you as a colleague for thirty years.

Neither the letter nor the tactics you are increasingly adopting in your candidacy are worthy of the Ralph Nader I knew.

The heart of your letter is the argument that “the threat to our planet articulated by Bush and his ilk” can now be dismissed. But you offer no evidence for this crucial assertion. Based on the polls today Bush is an even bet to become the next President, with both a Republican Senate and a Republican House to accompany him.

You have referred to the likely results of a Bush election as being a “cold shower” for the Democratic party. You have made clear that you will consider it a victory if the net result of your campaign is a Bush presidency.

But what will your “cold shower” mean for real people and real places?

What will it mean for tens of millions of asthmatic children when Bush applies to the nation the “voluntary” approach he’s using in Texas to clean up the air. And what about his stated opposition to enforcing environmental standards against corporations?

What will it mean for Americans vulnerable to water pollution when Bush allows water quality standards to be degraded to meet the needs of paper mills and refineries as he has consistently done in Texas, most recently at Lake Sam Rayburn? And what if he eliminates federal financial support for both drinking water and water pollution, as his budget calls for and his record in Texas (46th in spending on drinking water) suggests?

What will it mean for communities of color and poverty located near toxic waste sites, when Bush applies his Texas approach of lower standards and lower polluter liability to toxic waste clean-up?

What will a Bush election mean to the Gwich’in people of the Arctic, when the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is turned over the oil companies and the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd on which they depend are destroyed and despoiled?

What will it mean for the fishing families of the Pacific Northwest when Bush amends the Endangered Species Act to make extinction for the endangered salmon a legally acceptable option? If he refuses to remove the dams on the Snake River or reduce timber cutting levels to preserve salmon?

What will it mean for millions of rural Americans whose livelihood, health and communities are being destroyed by unregulated factory feeding operations, if Bush weakens the Clean Water Act? When he appoints Supreme Court justices who complete the task of shutting down access to federal courts for citizens trying to enforce environmental laws?

What will it mean for the wildlife that depend upon our National Forests when Bush undoes the Clinton-Gore Administration reforms, reverses their roadless area protection policy, and restores the timber industry to the mastery of the forests and the Forest Service that it enjoyed under his father? If he doubles, or triples, the cut on those Forests?

What will it mean for millions of people in Bangladesh and other low-lying countries when an American refusal to confront the problem of global warming unleashes the floods and typhoons of a rising ocean upon them?

Your letter addresses none of these real consequences of a Bush victory. Nor has your campaign. Instead, you indulge yourself in the language of academic discourse when you claim:

“Bush’s “old school” allegiance to plunder and extermination as humanity’s appropriate relationship to our world speaks a language effectively discounted by the great tradition of naturalists from John Muir to David Brower. Bush’s blatant anti-environmentalism will lose corporate favor as it loses popular support. It is a language of politics fading rapidly, and without a future.”

Candidate Bush may well be speaking a fading language. So was candidate Reagan in 1980 when he ranted that trees caused air pollution. It is power, however, not language, that determines policy. President Bush would be vested with the powers of the government of the United States, and he is an even more devoted servant of environmental counter-revolution than Reagan ever was.

Because your letter is couched in this language, so divorced from the real world consequences of your candidacy, and the real world choices that face Americans, it is difficult to respond to all of its selective misrepresentations and inaccuracies. A few samples, however, may show you why I am so disappointed in the turn your candidacy has taken:

You claim that “Earth in the Balance” was “an advertisement for his calculated strategy and availability as an environmental poseur.” Can you offer a single piece of evidence to support this quite astonishing statement?

You claim that the Clinton Administration stood up to the oil industry on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge only because “focus groups have shown him he cannot give” it up. In fact, most polls show that the public is somewhat split on this issue, and there are certainly no focus groups I know of showing that it is a third-rail which no President can cross at his peril. Can you cite your evidence?

You lament that the Administration has “set aside lands not in National Parks, but rather in National Monuments….” You are surely aware that a President cannot legally create national parks, which require an act or Congress; nor can you be under the misapprehension that this Congress with Don Young as the head of the House Resources Committee and Frank Murkowski as his counterpart in the Senate would have designated these areas as parks however long a battle Clinton and Gore might have fought. No, you simply took a cheap shot, and ignored the facts.

You have also broken your word to your followers who signed the petitions that got you on the ballot in many states. You pledged you would not campaign as a spoiler and would avoid the swing states. Your recent campaign rhetoric and campaign schedule make it clear that you have broken this pledge. Your response: you are a political candidate, and a political candidate wants to take every vote he can. Very well — you admit you are a candidate — admit that you are, like your opponents, a flawed one.

Irresponsible as I find your strategy, I accept that you genuinely believe in it. Please accept that I, and the overwhelming majority of the environmental movement in this country, genuinely believe that your strategy is flawed, dangerous and reckless. Until you can answer how you will protect the people and places who will be put in harm’s way, or destroyed, by a Bush presidency, you have no right to slander those who disagree with you as “servile.”

You have called upon us to vote our hopes, not our fears. I find it easy to do so. My hope is that by electing the best environmental President in American history, Al Gore, we can move forward. My fear is that you, blinded by your anger at flaws of the Clinton-Gore Administration, may be instrumental in electing the worst.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Pope
Executive Director
The Sierra Club

☞ It’s no wonder the Bush camp has been featuring Ralph Nader in a TV commercial. He’s become the Republicans’ brightest hope. The irony of tobacco executives, corporate polluters, and assault-weapons wholesalers rooting for Ralph Nader, is . . . breathtaking.

You know who must be getting a big kick out of all this? Trent Lott. And Jesse Helms. And Charlton Heston.

You can hear them now: “Go, Ralph, go!”

Jim Batterson: “Pardon me for cluttering up your political discussion with a thought on personal finance. My sons are grown now and I am mostly through paying for college. I believe that the way I managed this financially was a good technique and one that I, and you, ought to be passing on to families with younger children.

“Instead of setting up Uniform Gift to Minors (UGM) investment accounts for my children, I regularly put my funds into what I thought were good, long term growth stocks during their pre-college years, all in my own name. It was mostly a buy-and-hold strategy with a variety of investments. When a child, now a young man, enrolled in college and needed funds, I was able to then set up his own account with my brokerage house. Then I could send a signed letter to my broker asking him to transfer my shares of selected stocks to my son’s account.

“Over the period of eighteen years that I had been investing, some of these stocks had increased significantly in value, while others had done less well or even declined. By selecting the stocks to transfer that had the largest capital gains, I was able to avoid the capital gains tax myself and have my son pay the capital gains tax at his much-reduced marginal rate. At the same time, I was able to keep the losses for myself and use them to my advantage for tax purposes. It also allowed me more control over the funds and the timing with which I could transfer it.”

☞ A sound strategy, Jim. Thanks for sharing it. (Don’t forget that transfers valued at more than $10,000 per child per parent in any given year require filing of a gift tax return.) Are your sons Democrats?

Hank Gillette: “I thought Vice-President Gore did better than Governor Bush in the final debate, but I thought he also missed some opportunities to sharpen the differences between the two of them. For example, on Bush’s tax cut he could have said something like ‘The previous two Republican administrations ran up deficits of $4 trillion. I think that while times are good, it is more important to repay our country’s debts than to initiate large tax cuts, especially during a period when the Federal Reserve is trying to slow the economy. That’s why I am earmarking most of the surplus for deficit reduction while targeting tax cuts to the people who need them most.’

“On the death penalty: ‘I am in favor of the death penalty, but I think it is imperative that the people executed get a fair trial and actually be guilty of the crime committed. Gov. Bush and the state of Texas have not met this standard. They have executed people whose defense attorneys were either drunk or asleep during much of their trials. Despite the fact that the Republican governor of Illinois has declared a moratorium on executions because so many condemned prisoners were found to be innocent, Gov. Bush asserts that the much larger number of prisoners on Texas’ death row are without a doubt guilty. And if Gov. Bush finds the death penalty so serious, why did he mock in an interview with Talk Magazine Carla Faye Tucker’s efforts to gain clemency?'”

☞ If there’s a fourth debate, we’re sending you into the ring, Hank.

Robert Johnston: “You know very well tax revenues nearly doubled as a result of Reagan’s tax cut — a Democratic controlled congress just raised spending at a faster rate. Cheap shot of the week.”

☞ Are you saying that if Reagan hadn’t cut taxes as he did, the IRS would have collected barely half as much money? I think that would be a hard statement to defend. Be that as it may, I totally agree that it made sense to lower the top rate drastically from 70%. And I think we’d both agree that a 0% top rate would be too low, and that, thus, the best balance must lie someplace in between. I think 28% didn’t work (although I sure enjoyed it!), and that 39.6%, though it chafes, has worked quite well. At least we can agree on this: it shouldn’t be any higher.

Chris: “I will be surprised when any person (including myself), who is trying to convince others of their position, will fully represent the truth. I find it humorous that you are intentionally ignoring the truth for your own benefit, or are just naive. The fact of the matter is that Bush’s tax plan is fair.”

☞ I would think fairness is a matter of opinion, not fact. Why not just a poll tax, where everyone pays the same amount, and a family of five pays five times as much as a single person? Why would you have some people pay more than others at all? And if so, why a graduated tax? But if you agree a graduated tax is fair — and you may not — then why specifically 33% for the top bracket (the Governor’s proposal), versus asking those who’ve done the best in recent years to keep paying as they do now so we can pay down the debt and keep the prosperity going? Reasonable people can disagree on what’s fair without “intentionally ignoring the truth for their own benefit.” No?

J Raymond: “We all like putting down the government while simultaneously benefiting from it, and I think about this often as I drive home each day on the roads I carved out of the wilderness as a small child.”