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Jewish World Review Jan. 10, 2000 /3 Shevat, 5760
Chris Matthews
Gore said Bradley's health-care plan was a recession-inducing "blunder." Bradley shot back that Gore's own spending plans would blow the budget by $350 billion!
Bradley said Gore would merely "tinker around the edges" of the country's health-care challenge. Gore accused Bradley of "nibbling around the edges" of the country's education challenge.
With the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 24 and the first-in-the-nation primary here Feb. 1, the vice president has the look and sound of a fighter intent on an early knockout. Bradley, who hoped to defeat Gore without engaging him, is now going toe-to-toe with him.
But the echo of the two men's fighting words misses the central reality of their differences. This January contest offers a real choice in personality and politics: Gore, the careerist, against Bradley, the outsider; Gore, the down-and-dirty partisan, against Bradley, the Olympian thinker.
Bill Bradley promises "affordable, quality health care for all Americans." Al Gore calls the Bradley plan an "ill-conceived and faulty spending proposal."
Gore warns of the "great risk" of the Bradley plan. Bradley says America needs "leadership that is prepared to take risks."
"It's only when we do not have the courage to try that we guarantee failure," Bradley said in a major address Sunday. "I say now is not the time to be timid."
Gore argues that Bradley's majestic proposal on health care masks an unreadiness to engage in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day government and politics.
"The presidency is not an academic exercise. It's not a seminar where you get to entertain a single grand theory," the vice president said in a major policy speech Monday. "Great achievements don't just happen, not without a president who is willing to fight for them, who is willing to fight for you."
Gore says Bradley walked away from the good Democratic fight when he quit the U.S. Senate after an 18-year career. Bradley says Gore is such a Washington insider, such a prisoner of partisan "meanness and pettiness," that he is blind to the world outside.
"Only those who have never left Washington have missed the lessons of the last decade. Only those who have been mired in the battles of partisanship have failed to realize that Americans are tired of partisanship."
Despite the sound and fury, the two offer voters here and in the rest of the country a significant choice of Democratic
01/06/00: The role of a lifetime
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