After years of wretched excess, a call for simplicity
November 5, 2000
BY GEORGE WILL
The case for electing George W. Bush begins with a mundane matter: A president fills several thousand
policy-shaping positions in the executive branch. The two parties have very different talent pools from
which the next administration will be staffed.
The Democratic pool swarms with people who share Al Gore's bossiness, his regulatory itch and his
hubristic belief that clever people like them can wield government as creatively as Rodin did his chisel. The
Republican pool is disposed to regard government as a blunt instrument.
Congress' drunken sailor approach to the surplus makes the political case for Bush's tax cut: Leave the
money in Washington, it will disappear like water into sand. The economic case for the cut is that Bush's
advisers, who fortunately include some people capable of bearish thoughts, think the economy may need
energizing sooner than many people think.
Bush would work at both ends of the problem to fix the disjunction between the military's declining strength
and its increasing tempo of operations. He favors ballistic missile defense. Gore's "support" for this is as
meretricious as his "opposition" to partial-birth abortion: He supports only such ineffective missile defenses
as his fetish, the 1972 ABM treaty, permits, and the only "restriction" he would put on late-term abortions
would restrict nothing.
Bush, unlike Gore, will provide a prescription drug entitlement without the lethal folly of price controls
which, by crippling the creativity of the pharmaceutical industry, would prevent the prevention of much
suffering and death. The political class, egged on by media eager to restrict rival speech, favors, under the
rubric of "campaign finance reform," government regulation of political advocacy. Bush's Supreme Court
nominees would block any such evisceration of the First Amendment.
Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republican presidents have filled 10 of the 12 Supreme Court
vacancies, yet the court remains narrowly divided, philosophically. If the next president, who may make
three, even four nominations, is Gore, the court will adopt a permissive stance toward speech-rationing limits
on campaign contributing and spending. A Gore court will be permissive about Congress' usurpation of
states' prerogatives, and hence will end the court's modest attempts to revitalize federalism. A Gore court will
be unpermissive regarding state attempts to slow the slide into infanticide with late-term abortions, and
unpermissive regarding the constitutionality of school choice programs.
America's most glaring domestic inequity is the life-blighting failure of many inner-city public schools to
serve poor--mostly minority--children. Gore, held on a short leash by the public education lobby, opposes
empowering the disadvantaged to make the sort of choices he made in providing some private schooling for
his own children. Another leash will be jerked by the public employees unions--the social workers who
want to gut the 1996 welfare reform.
What kind of people respond to Gore's shouted incantations about how hard he will "fight" for the middle
class? The whiney kind who prompted the Clinton administration to tap the strategic petroleum reserve to
knock a few nickels off gasoline prices. Whininess is encouraged by contemporary liberalism's cultivation
of grievance groups flaunting their sense of victimization.
For the official World Series magazine, Gore and Bush provided written answers to some questions
pertaining to baseball, including "What do you think of domed stadiums?" Gore's complete answer was:
"The design and construction of domed stadiums--in Seattle [the Kingdome was the first free-standing
cement dome ever built], Houston [the Astrodome was the first stadium to use Astroturf] and Minnesota
[the Metrodome is the only stadium in the country whose roof is suspended without beams or rods--it's
supported by air pressure], for example, have been feats of architectural and engineering excellence. But the
real measure of any stadium, domed or otherwise, is how much fun you have inside."
Bush's complete answer was: "I like to go to baseball games outdoors."
Let's vote.
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