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Jewish World Review March 15, 2000 / 8 Adar II, 5760
Chris Matthews
Gore will try to scare the voters, especially women and
old people.
Women will be the easiest to scare. Gore will tell them
that the next president could well appoint a majority of
the nine-seat U.S. Supreme Court. If Bush gets to fill
those seats with strict constructionists, that will mean an
overturn of Roe vs. Wade — an end to abortion rights.
Next will come the old people. Gore will call Bush's plan
to privatize Social Security a threat to the system itself. In
the darkest possible tones, he will warn seniors that a
program built by Franklin Roosevelt, and opposed from
the very outset by Republicans, now stands in dire
danger.
He will not stop there. More than threatening our rights
and entitlements, Gore will say, the Republicans threaten
our basic quality of life, both economic and cultural.
A prime target will be the big Bush tax cut. Slashing
federal revenues, Gore will warn, threatens to explode the
budgetary discipline of the Clinton-Gore years. It will
jeopardize the country's economic growth, drive up
interest rates, and demolish the working family's 401(k).
Savings and wealth, the hallmark of late 20th century
American life, will morph back to the paycheck-to-paycheck world of the first
Bush presidency.
Gore's final forecast of fear will concern human rights. Let the candidate of
Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell into the White House and we
invite a government of, by and for the religious right. No bedroom, bar room or
boardroom will be safe. A new theocracy, modeled on Salem and Tehran, will
emerge in this land of the free.
If the Gore message will counsel fear, the Bush voice will speak of hope.
Change, in this Texas governor's vocabulary, will sound a positive note. Bush's
first reform will deal with the White House itself. He will scrub the stain of Bill
Clinton from the floors, walls and desks of the Oval Office, showing it the same
reverence his father and Ronald Reagan once did.
His second, government-wide reform will deal with the lumbering liberal
establishment. Education will be the epicenter. Bush will promise to detonate
the country's education system by cracking the iron grip of the teachers' unions.
No more will parents be mandated by law to enroll their children in school,
most of them limited by finance to the public schools. Under a Bush
administration, the kids of working- and middle-class families will have a
monetary edge on the education establishment. They will get the leverage to
spend their education dollars where they want. In George W. Bush's lexicon,
"school choice" will rival abortion "choice" as an election-eve battle cry.
Pushing the reform agenda even wider will be Bush's unrelenting drive for a
giant tax cut. The money belongs to the people, he will argue, not the
government. Far from giving away federal dollars, Bush will say, he is letting
taxpayers keep, save and invest more of their own!
Lastly, in a son's tribute to his father, the Texas governor will demand a
rebuilding of American's military strength. He will score Clinton for jeopardizing
the country's security by extending U.S. commitments but failing to bolster our
armed forces.
It will be a tough contest, with each campaign exploiting the points that work,
discarding those that don't. The victor will be the candidate, whether Gore or
Bush, who wins the minds and hearts of those voters who see truth in both their
03/06/00: McCain's appeal to 'Reagan Democrats'
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