From the WSJ: opinionjournal.com
Gore, a Fiscal Conservative
He has the imagination to unleash America's great talents.
BY MARTIN PERETZ
Thursday, November 2, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
The editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal have waged so relentless a battle against the presidential candidacy of Al Gore that its readers may not realize how attuned he is to many of their concrete concerns and moral values. Mr. Gore is not, to put it mildly, the unreconstructed pre-1980s Democrat that the media has invented in its recent coverage of his campaign. He is not running "to the left." He is running as himself, which is to say, as a philosophically and politically complicated liberal who deserves the respect and even the support of a certain variety of American conservatism.
To begin with, Mr. Gore is deeply concerned with sustaining the remarkable prosperity of the last five or six years, and his methods for doing so are conservative in the best sense of the word.
Seven years ago, two factions within the embryonic Clinton administration struggled for control of economic policy. The first argued that through fiscal stimulus the public sector could lead the country out of recession. The second argued that through deficit reduction the private sector could lead the country out of recession. Mr. Gore, the most committed New Democrat in the new administration, argued for fiscal conservatism. His side won and the results have been spectacular.
The Clinton administration's deficit reduction has done nothing less than banish real inflation and real unemployment. Al Gore's debt reduction would further reduce interest payments. And it would reduce interest rates as well, which would encourage organic investments in long-term entrepreneurial productivity based on research, efficiency and technology. Mr. Gore is proposing the kind of program that used to commend itself to truly prudent and conservative people--Republicans, in fact. But, then, perhaps truly prudent and conservative people were once more committed to the national good than to their own momentary enrichment through tax breaks.
George W. Bush, of course, also says he wants to maintain the current prosperity. But his tax cuts would likely bring back the inflation that Republicans spent the 1980s trying to stamp out. His huge cut would stimulate helter-skelter consumption at the very moment when Alan Greenspan already tells us our capacity is constrained. If Mr. Bush is elected, watch the prime rate go to two digits, and not slowly.
Gov. Bush's trite distrust of government flies in the face of the realities of his own financial life, and his running mate's. Mr. Bush's $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers grew to something like $15 million because the government of Arlington, Texas, put up the money for the team's stadium. As CEO of Halliburton, Mr. Cheney lobbied for a repeal of the aid embargo against Azerbaijan, a country that, because of its corrupt habits and its ethnic cleansing of Armenians, the State Department argued, did not merit financial underwriting from U.S. public funds. It's astonishing that these two men who profited so handsomely from government connections so disdain government's potential for really transforming the American economy.
The truth is that the Bush-Cheney opposition to government involvement in the economy is cheap rhetoric. And it is not simply that business has always counted on government to enforce contracts and protect intellectual property through the patent process. In very risky and very expensive initiatives that may end up as very profitable businesses--indeed, that sometimes end up as entirely new industries--government often is the first real investor. Here, the role of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation is at once paradigmatic, exemplary and absolutely indispensable. One cannot imagine any one of our immensely profitable scientific industries without them. In fact, without their patient long-term investment in basic research, our industrial system might well resemble those of England and Germany: sluggish, backward and dependent.
Al Gore has the imagination and, yes, the candor to project a great unleashing of human talent in America, both individually and collectively. He also understands that the fabric of society is always fragile, and that it requires support from the more privileged to the less. This is, in Mr. Gore's view, as it was in Edmund Burke's, the price of social peace. But Mr. Gore has never reflexively equated public subsidy with public good, not by a long shot. Thus, he was the fiercest proponent of welfare reform in the Clinton administration. He saw that welfare could enslave people to helplessness while evoking resentment from those many millions whose lives are defined by work.
One gathers from the ridicule Mr. Bush has heaped on Mr. Gore's proposals for targeted tax credits that he opposes the Democratic contender's proposals to enlarge the cohort of young people going to college. But Mr. Gore's proposal is the very opposite of welfare--since it links public help not to individual dependence but to individual aspiration. Like the GI Bill, a tuition tax credit to make higher education financially plausible for hundreds of thousands of men and women annually would be another stage in the democratic revolution that is the very essence of American history. It's a shame that the candidate of the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt does not understand this.
Alas, there is much that George W. Bush does not understand. Mr. Bush has the instincts of an isolationist. What he does not have is the intellectual equipment to make a real argument for isolationism. He uses the phrase "nation-building" as if it were one of the deadly sins. This is not about his failure to identify foreign leaders correctly or the idiosyncratic names he gives other peoples: Grecians, Timorians, Kosovians. It is about the fact that he knows almost nothing about the world, and doesn't see it as a place where America has moral, as opposed to strategic and economic, interests.
Mr. Bush reminds us that he has advisers, and yes, they have a firmer grasp of policy detail than he does. But their impoverished moral vision echoes his. Condoleezza Rice, his top foreign policy aide, recently gave an interview to the New York Times in which she purported to give Mr. Bush's views on foreign affairs. She/he wants U.S. troops out of Bosnia as peacekeepers. Then Ms. Rice, still speaking for her boss, said that while protecting lives in Kosovo and Bosnia should no longer be America's role, protecting Saudi Arabia's oil still must be.
Al Gore wants to protect Saudi Arabia as well. After all, he was one of only 10 Democratic senators to vote to protect Kuwait. What he wouldn't have done is leave the Gulf War unfinished and Saddam Hussein still in power, as George W.'s father and George W.'s running mate did, probably in deference to the same Saudi Arabia.
Ronald Reagan was my favorite Republican president of this century, and at the idiosyncratically liberal New Republic we admired his vigorous anti-communism. But Mr. Bush's Republican Party, as TNR's editors wrote recently, "adamantly denies any moral connection between the imperative to oppose Soviet totalitarianism and the imperative to oppose the newer species of tyranny that have arisen since its demise."
Mr. Bush may share Mr. Reagan's indifference to policy detail, but he utterly lacks his ideological engagement. From his labor union activity during the New Deal on, Mr. Reagan was politically involved. He had tangible political experience as a two-term governor of California. But the governor of Texas has a part-time job, in which Mr. Bush has, by his own account, put in part-time hours. Moreover, given the strange structure of Texas politics, many of the accomplishments he claims for himself actually belong to his lieutenant governor and to the legislature over which his lieutenant governor presided. And a few of the accomplishments Mr. Bush claims for himself, like the patient's bill of rights, he in fact opposed. Maybe he didn't remember.
In contrast to Mr. Bush's vagaries, Al Gore has worked at politics and policy for nearly a quarter of a century. But he has brought to his vocation the skepticism of a journalist, the search for ethical boundaries of a man of faith, and the unfettered mind of a free-spirited intellectual. Such a person doesn't tinker casually. What he wants to do is build, and to build on the foundations of knowledge, insight and vision. It would be a blessing if he were elected. |
