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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian P. who wrote (14930)	3/11/2000 11:23:00 AM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 769667

Brian, it's sometimes interesting to go back in history and read a few articles of the past with regard to why Al Gore should not be elected President. Because as much as people would like things to be different, for all practicable purposes. We live in a two party system. And make no mistake, a vote for someone other than George W is a vote FOR Al Gore. One of them will be the next President of the United States. Do we really want four more years of this kind of leadership? ___________________________________________________________ Gore Shows He's Learned From the Master freerepublic.com Wall Street Journal Augist 29, 1997 Paul Gigot Potomac Watch Gore Shows He's Learned From the Master By PAUL A. GIGOT Maybe you've wondered who's in charge of ethics at the Clinton White House. I've concluded it must be Bill Murray, reprising his role in the movie "Stripes." Mr. Murray plays a goofball who decides to join the Army. As part of his recruiting interview, he's asked if he's ever been "convicted of a felony." "Convicted?" smirks Mr. Murray. "No." After this week, that's the only way to think about Vice President Al Gore's now-famous line that he didn't break any fund-raising laws because there was "no controlling legal authority." Seven times he used that phrase during his one attempt at accountability on the matter, a March press conference. This week we learned that much of what he said at that press conference wasn't controlling either. But hey, the public has long forgotten, the details run near the want ads and most of the press corps is on Martha's Vineyard. If there's no felony, there's no problem. What's remarkable about this isn't that Mr. Gore might have broken the law by soliciting campaign cash on federal property. By itself this isn't a capital offense, though others have been hounded out of town for less (Sherman Adams's vicuna coat, John Sununu's limo riding). What's notable is that the episode shows how thoroughly Mr. Gore has absorbed the political style and mores of the Clinton White House. Unlike George Bush, who learned nothing in eight years under Ronald Reagan, Mr. Gore has soaked up the Clinton ethos like a freshman pledging a frat. He's devoted all of his legendary earnestness to mastering the Clintonian art of slickness. After five years he's now willing to cut corners and able to talk his way out of them. No wonder Dick Morris says President Clinton has made Mr. Gore's succession the main priority of his second term: By 2000 they'll be the same guy. At last year's Democratic convention, Mr. Gore showed he has acquired his boss's gift for empathy by exploiting his sister's cancer death to pose as an enemy of the tobacco companies he once accepted campaign contributions from. This kind of emotional flexibility is essential in the Age of Clinton. This year the veep is also showing presidential talent in manipulating Democratic interest groups, especially the AFL-CIO. In public he's the future-seeing friend of high-tech; in private he's fighting to give Big Labor whatever it wants. As one close observer puts it, Mr. Gore is "Bill Gates outside the room, but Mother Jones inside." But it is on ethics that Mr. Gore has shown his greatest powers of adaptation. In Congress, Sen. Gore was like other members who leave their offices to make fund-raising calls, so as not to violate what has been federal law since 1883. But once in this White House, with its we-can-do-anything standards, he apparently figured he could call from his office and get away with it. Once the calls were discovered, a lesser pol like Sen. Gore might have fessed up and apologized. But our newly brazen veep has learned to spin and stonewall his way to safety like his boss. So in March, Mr. Gore admitted making calls from his office on just a "few occasions." But only this week, under Senate subpoena, did his office release documents showing he'd made at least 70 such calls, in each case to raise at least $25,000 from a big hitter, and often $100,000 or more. Those documents appear in the media dead zone before Labor Day and just a week before Sen. Fred Thompson's committee plans to zero in on Mr. Gore. So next week the White House can call it all "old news." Mr. Gore's Clintonization is also symbolized by his reliance on Jack Quinn as his real controlling legal authority. Mr. Quinn is the former Gore chief of staff who became Mr. Clinton's fourth and most stonewalling White House counsel before resigning earlier this year. His predecessor in that job, Abner Mikva, had enough sense to write a memo in April 1995 warning employees not to make fund-raising calls from the White House. Mr. Quinn apparently had no such qualms, carving out after-the-fact exceptions from the ban for the president and vice president this March in an op-ed in the New York Times. And no wonder, since this week we learned Mr. Quinn himself made 32 phone calls from the White House to big donors. Mr. Quinn now says these were merely thank-you calls, which aren't illegal. So here's a distinction for ethicists to ponder: Mr. Quinn couldn't solicit funds from the White House but he could call and thank the same people he allowed the vice president to call and solicit funds from. To spin its document-dump this week, the veep's office also distributed an April article on the phone calls by Stuart Taylor Jr. in the Legal Times. His column argues that Mr. Gore's calls don't add up to a felony because the offense is too technical. But he adds: "Clearly, this is a man who was more than willing to cut legal corners for the sake of his own political advancement and convenience--and to say afterward that 'I'm proud of what I did," even while vowing never to do it again." It says everything you need to know about Mr. Gore's new Clinton standard of ethics that this is his defense.