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Jewish World Review Sept. 27, 1999 /17 Tishrei, 5760
Chris Matthews
Between now and next November one of the major party hopefuls George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill Bradley, John McCain, Elizabeth Dole may find the right wiring. He or she may shock us by actually talking about the things we are all thinking and worrying about.
What should we do then, Mr. or Ms. Presidential Wannabe? Start pouring the red ink again? Begin another rampage of big deficits like we had in the '80s? Bloat up the national debt and hope interest rates won't spike? Pray that inflation won't come roaring back?
And what about health coverage? Hillary Clinton blew the issue in 1994 with all the hubris about granting "universal coverage."
How about a humbler ambition: a living income (and that includes adequate health care) for the families of those who work?
Yes, I think it would sell.
And what about the social differences between the two groups? Today, you see middle-aged and elderly white people who resent paying for the public schooling of minorities. Tomorrow, we'll see a lot of young Hispanics and blacks who might just resent paying for the Social Security and Medicare of old folks.
Sure, there are the small areas of progress you see it oftentimes among school kids, sometimes at the workplace but an aerial view of American life would show a quilt-like country with people returning each evening to their separate racial lives at nightfall.
Economic differences add to this nightly segregation that leaves millions of blacks living among millions of blacks, marooned in their own country.
Who among the candidates has produced a hard agenda for closing this chasm, which threatens to widen exponentially as laptop computers increasingly sit on the laps of whites?
Peace. What happened to that national objective?
Again, I'm thinking about Jimmy Carter, the last president with the guts to talk about saving the planet.
The millennium politicians Bush and all the rest should stop boring us with all the bromides about "our children" as if we were the children. They should begin talking to us grown-ups as if they were
09/22/99: The biography battle
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