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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
What's at stake in the 2000 elections? | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
What’s at stake? Whether the nation is going to take its extraordinary prosperity and reinvest it in people who haven't been on the rising escalator. Whether we'll put it into their education and their health, and thereby let them on board. The biggest problem we have is the lack of universal health care -- the single largest missing item on America's unfinished social agenda. We haven't repealed the business cycle. When the economy softens, as it inevitably will, and unemployment rises once again, we’ll be totally unprepared. We've ripped out the safety nets -- welfare, low-income housing, unemployment insurance (now available to only about a third of people who lose their jobs) -- and put almost nothing in their place. This will be the first large domestic challenge faced by the new president.
I'll be very angry if George W. Bush is elected president with only a small portion of the adult population of the United States voting, and Bush's huge wad of campaign cash having blanketed the airwaves with mindless advertising. I'll be happiest if Bill Bradley is elected president, in part by a significant number of people who never bothered to vote before or haven't bothered for years, and a clear mandate for universal health care, better education for poor kids and an end to the scandal of campaign finance. - - - - - - - - - - - - Kevin Phillips, author of "The Cousins' Wars" What's at stake is how the U.S. will deal with economic globalization, fairness and even the threat to some aspects of U.S. democracy. The next president needs to combine smarts, toughness and integrity. We haven't had all three in one package for decades. And it's hard to see how we will in 2001, either. The biggest problem we'll face in the new millennium is the corruption of U.S. politics, policy making and economic allegiances. I'd be angriest over a landslide win for George W. Bush or Al Gore. Either mix of hubris and mediocrity would be dangerous. What I'd like to see is the various third parties -- Reform, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law -- get a combined 15 to 20 percent of the vote to keep the pressure on the Republicans and Democrats. I agree with McCain, the model for the next president should be Teddy Roosevelt. Among the top candidates, the best composite would mix John McCain's outrage over corruption, Bill Bradley's I.Q., Al Gore's wife (for first lady), George W.'s people skills, Donald Trump's wealth-tax amenability and Pat Buchanan's candor and guts on globalization, bankers and bail-outs. - - - - - - - - - - - - Ishmael Reed, author and publisher of Konch What's at stake is whether the nation continues on this selfish, profit-happy, assets-driven course set by Ronald Reagan and continued by Bush and Clinton. If shareholders and their managers continue in this mad drive toward more excess it could lead to class warfare, which up to now the establishment has deflected by feeding the white masses the cheap moonshine of racism -- blaming everything on blacks. The next president needs to blow the whistle on how the modern president has become a sort of game show host and clownish tabloid entertainer, while the corporations dictate policy through their "coin-operated" Congress, flouting the wishes of the majority of Americans on such issues as gun control, Social Security, health care, the environment and homelessness. The most pressing problem is global warming, which may do to man what the asteroid did to the dinosaurs. Some are saying that the point of no return has been reached. We can blame this on the conscienceless notion of "progress," which was inherited from the French Enlightenment, designed by a handful of off-campus racists and anti-Semites who influenced racists and Indian haters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The election of George W. Bush would be a disaster because he'd merely be a hireling for the money behind him. At least Clinton reared up against them from time to time. Bush's comments on out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates shows he is as uninformed on social issues as he is on foreign ones. I find his constantly being photographed with black children sickening, given the number of blacks in Texas jailed for engaging in activities that are considered pranks when practiced by white fraternity brothers at Texas colleges -- nonviolent drug crimes. - - - - - - - - - - - - What's at stake? The fate of our species, as usual. The one thing the next president could do to improve the world is shrink the military-industrial complex to about a fourth of its present size. It would still leave us better prepared to kill large numbers of people than any other nation on earth. The money thus freed can be used to defeat the real threats to America -- like poverty, illiteracy and environmental degradation. Among the many contenders for most-pressing problem, I would choose the ever-growing economic inequality, which condemns about a fifth of the nation to trailer homes and slums while the lucky few at the top huddle in their gated communities. The worst election result would be for Americans to go to the polls in large numbers -- say, more than half the eligible voters -- to elect the smirking frat boy from Texas. (There is no danger, though, of Americans going to the polls in large numbers.) The result that would make me happiest would be for large numbers of people to boycott the election -- or better yet, picket and demonstrate at the polling places -- to protest the meagerness of the options before us and their uniform commitment to the status quo. Outside of that unlikely eventuality, I see no possible sources of personal happiness in the sordid campaign that lies ahead. - - - - - - - - - - - - Andrew Sullivan, author of "Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival" Most people don't think the Senate will change hands, but the House is clearly at stake in the next election. On domestic policy, the differences between the two parties are still small. My main worry is that the surpluses will be funneled into more entitlement programs if the Democrats take back the House and White House. My secondary worry is that a Republican in the White House will add hardcore reactionaries to the Supreme Court. Avoiding either of those things is more important than any positive contribution anyone is now proposing to make. The next president needs to propose a flat tax on all income and capital gains, eliminate all deductions and direct all the surpluses to reducing the national debt. In addition, we need to means test Social Security, build a viable strategic missile defense and end all federal affirmative action. Our biggest problems? The widening black-white economic and social gap -- intensified by the digital revolution -- and the continuing failure of African-American kids in high school. Abroad, it's the management of a resurgent Russia and unstable China. If George W. Bush were elected with Richard Gephardt as speaker, we would have the worst of all possible worlds. My ideal outcome would be McCain as president and an even narrower Republican majority in the house than the current one, empowering moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans in a reformist administration that would be fiscally conservative at home and competently vigilant abroad. A model for the next presidency? Calvin Coolidge. Less is more. - - - - - - - - - - - - I don't know what's at stake in the elections mostly because I don't care. The easy answer is a return to governmental responsibility, but I don't know what's underneath that. Our political situation reminds me of a wonderful medieval story called “The Lord of Misrule.” The governmental system in the story gets ossified and the Lord of Misrule breaks it up in unexpected ways. When the lord gets deposed the next leader puts the system back in a way that works. "Misrule" in the story didn't mean the lord was incompetent but that he accomplished by chaos. Clinton is our Lord of Misrule. He brought chaos in his wake and in the process changed the paradigm of what government was supposed to be. It's up to the next leader to figure out how to put the pieces back together. One of the things Clinton's chaos shattered is the paradigm of the fearless leader, of the "need" we have for a war hero or a sexually upright, morally inspiring leader to look up to. Nobody looks up to Clinton, and yet as a country we're fat, happy and rich. If that paradigm is gone, what do we need? Probably a reasonable person who wants a government in working order. In that way, Gore is probably our best bet. His "Reinventing Government" rationalized the federal bureaucracy. Eleanor Roosevelt is my model for the next president. She was effective and compassionate. She knew what was public, what was private and when to put public importance on the line. Bush's election is the only thing that would really anger me. My mom, a lifelong Republican, expects a kind of vacancy in the party leadership, but I don't.
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