Candidates Outline Array of Initiatives
Democratic Rivals Pitch Tax, Poverty, Energy Plans to Define Candidacies
washingtonpost.com
By Dan Balz and Brian Faler
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7236-2003Jun17.html
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 18, 2003; Page A14
Democratic candidates for president served up a smorgasbord of policy initiatives and big promises yesterday, from a sharp reduction in the poverty rate to energy independence in a decade to tax breaks for the middle class to a new approach to the war on terrorism.
The separate speeches added up to sharp criticisms of the way President Bush has governed and further attempts by the candidates in a crowded Democratic field to define their identities in the battle for their party's presidential nomination.
Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) offered new tax cuts and wrapped them in the rhetoric of values, arguing that Bush's tax cuts have rewarded wealth rather than work. "Instead of helping wealthy people protect their wealth," he said in a speech at Georgetown University, "we should help working people build wealth." Bush's policies, he said, represent "the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism over a century ago. . . . It is a plan to corrupt the American economy and shrink the winners' circle."
Edwards called for canceling cuts in income, dividend and estate taxes enacted in 2003 and this spring for Americans in the top two brackets. He said he would use some of the revenue generated by eliminating those tax cuts to fund a $5,000 tax credit to help first-time homebuyers make their down payment, cut capital gains and dividend taxes for middle-class families and offer families a dollar-for-dollar federal match, of as much as $1,000 a year, to put into retirement savings accounts.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said he would make fighting poverty a priority. "As president, it will be my goal to reduce the poverty rate to the lowest it has ever been in our history within four years and that means cutting it below 10 percent," Lieberman said at a conference sponsored by the New Democrat Network (NDN). "And then I want to go further. I want to cut the rate of poverty in this country by one-third within a decade."
Lieberman said that some might consider it unusual for him to talk about poverty before a centrist Democratic organization, but he said New Democrats should be in the vanguard of developing innovative policies to boost the incomes of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. "The Bush administration," he said, "has mounted an unprecedented attack on the federal safety net for poor Americans" and it is up to Democrats to reverse what he dubbed "poverty-gate."
The declaration to reduce poverty came with few specific proposals. Lieberman said he will outline those in future speeches, built around the following principles: invigorating the economy, rewarding work, encouraging poor families to save and create wealth and helping combat social conditions that lead to educational failure or the breakdown of families.
Lieberman said that he and Bush share an interest in faith-based solutions to some of these problems, but that the president's actions have not matched his compassionate conservative rhetoric. "The result has not been compassionate," Lieberman said. "It has been neglectful."
In California, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) promoted a plan he dubbed a new Apollo project to make the country less dependent on foreign oil and coupled it with a sharp attack on Saudi Arabia. Dependence on Saudi oil, he said, has prevented the Bush administration from speaking out more directly about Saudi links to terrorism. "It's time we stopped behaving like the United States of Saudi Arabia and started working toward total economic freedom from Saudi Arabia, from the oil it exports and from the radical fundamentalism it's visited on the world," Gephardt said in a prepared text made available in Washington.
Gephardt outlined some proposals that echoed what other Democratic candidates have recommended, particularly by offering larger subsidies and incentives to alternative energy sources or hybrid automobiles. He said that he has voted against raising fuel efficiency standards for automobiles -- a position that puts him in good stead with organized labor and at odds with rival Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), who has led the fight to raise those standards.
Gephardt said he is "committed to higher fuel efficiency as part of a comprehensive plan" that brings the warring factions in the energy-environmental debate together. He said he favored a compromise "that doesn't visit all the sacrifice on one small market sector."
Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.), also speaking at the New Democrat Network conference, accused the Bush administration of a "pattern of deception and deceit," and warned that America will be badly damaged if U.S. forces fail to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "We not only cannot find 'Osama bin Forgotten' or Saddam Hussein, we can't find the weapons of mass destruction," he said. "I hope we'll find them. The consequences of not finding them are going to be an incredible degradation of the already suspect credibility of the United States of America."
The conference also featured a call by founder Simon Rosenberg for Democrats to renew the party by recapturing the centrist values championed by former president Bill Clinton through recruitment of candidates, efforts to get the centrist message out through the media and a more sophisticated effort to attract Hispanic voters.
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