Why Bush Won

by Andrew Grossman

In this election, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore is the insider and exemplifies all that's wrong with the Beltway crowd and Loop mentality. Al Gore had an opportunity in the first Presidential debate to distance himself from the moral relativism and verbal gymnastics of the Clinton presidency. Instead, with slippery language and "fuzzy" mathematics, he promised us more of the same.

Consider the Vice-President's answer to moderator Jim Lehrer's first question, in which he asked Gore to clarify his attacks on Bush's experience. Gore, programmed to play "statesman," offered a flat out denial: "I have actually not questioned Governor Bush's experience." Recent quotes in the New York Times ("Does he have the experience to be president?") and the Military Times (Bush's military proposals reflect "inexperience and naïveté"), however, reveal a candidate at ease with negativity.

Strategy number one from the Clinton playbook: deny, deny, deny.

Gore changed tack quickly from truth-bending to evasion, spouting boiler-plate campaign rhetoric. This election is an "important moment," and we must make use of our "extraordinary prosperity" to "enrich not just the few but all families." The vice president seemed to have confused the debate with his standard class-baiting stump speech.

Class warfare lurked beneath his every word. No less than a dozen times the vice president characterized his opponent's proposed tax cuts as a handout to "the wealthiest one percent." Elsewhere he championed his own "targeted" cuts, aimed at middle-class families but excluding over 50 million taxpayers.

The truth is far from Gore's manufactured reality. Bush proposes to cut taxes across the board—for all taxpayers. And Bush's largest cut would go to the least-paid, whose federal taxes would be halved. The plan that Gore blames on "wrong priorities" provides more relief for the working class families he claims to represent than does his own complex and befuddling scheme of behavior-based benefits.

Gore targets, among others, college students and their families, to whom he promised to make tax-free up to $10,000 a year of tuition. Gore forgot to add, however, that over seventy percent of this "cut" already exists in the Lifetime Learning credit, a current federal program. Further, students working their way through college would be ineligible for this income-based benefit. Gore's plan is, at best, an incremental increase and ignores those who most need help funding their educations.

From the Clinton playbook: craft complicated legislation and explain it in misleadingly simple terms.

Outed as an environmentalist with the publication of his 1991 Earth in the Balance, Gore made an ineffectual stab at populist oil policy, promising to "increase the supply" by freeing the country from "big oil companies that have the ability to manipulate the price." This is the same Al Gore who in his book called for higher gasoline prices to discourage consumption and cast the tie-breaking vote for the last gas-tax increase, known in the Loop as the "Gore tax."

What's more, although Gore claimed to support "new incentives for the development of domestic resources," many of our resource-laden lands have been placed off-limits by President Clinton's recent National Monument naming spree. Gore, of course, is also against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the most promising site on our continent.

Gore's odd oil machinations once again come directly from the Clinton playbook: say anything to please anyone—in this case, environmentalists and middle-class voters, whose views would be, to anyone less ideologically amorphous, irreconcilable.

The Vice-President's doubletalk rose to new heights as he responded to Lehrer on campaign finance reform. Gore announced that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill would be "the very first bill" that he would send to Congress as President, having forgotten that he had previously made the same claim for the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Gore has received more money from Washington lobbyists than any other candidate this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. Senator John McCain, with whom Gore claimed allegiance, called the DNC's fundraising efforts "incredible abuses of the institutions of government and every ethical standard."

Until this year, Gore was curiously mute on the issue of campaign finance reform. The issue went unmentioned in his 1992 convention speech, 1996 convention speech, and even at his nomination acceptance speech this year. Instead, Gore's mind was on more mundane matters, such as all those important phone calls he had to make from his office, daydreams of Buddhas offering soft money, and all the special investigations that ensued. Of all the candidates who ran in the primaries this past year, Gore has the least credibility, and most notoriety, on the campaign finance issue.

Still, Gore is no Clinton (when's the last time you saw Bill kiss Hillary?), but he's internalized his mentor's lack of values and electoral desperation. His debate performance was a muddle of misleading statements, half-truths, and, as necessary, lies.

In contrast, Bush's presence signaled that we aren't necessarily doomed to four more years of the duplicity and deception to which we've become accustomed. Bush took Gore's thinly-veiled attacks in stride and maintained the honesty and plainspoken delivery that have served him well since the primary. Even if he had fared far worse, though, Bush still would have come out ahead—just for being on the stage, opposite Al Gore.