Nation Topics - Political Analysis | The Nation

Israel and Palestine will not find peace until both have security and sovereignty.

Recent calamitous events—9/11, the recession, Enron's collapse—haven't affected the Bush administration's aims: tax cuts, drilling and Social Security 'reform.'

September 11 showed us true American heroes. Now let's build on their strength.

I want to vote for Bill Clinton for President again, but that not
being possible I had resigned myself to Al Gore. Surely, I thought, he
would defend the Clinton Administration's record of the past eight years,
and voters would recognize it as obviously preferable to the debt and
divisiveness the Republicans had wrought.

Indeed, the only reason to favor Gore over Bill Bradley in the
primaries, which I regrettably did, was that Gore had on-the-job training
in the most productive administration in decades. That's what the vice
President brought to the table, certainly not his deer-in-the headlights
stage presence, and yet he sits dumbfounded for lack of a ready reply
when George W. Bush rails on about the failed opportunities of the
Clinton-Gore years.

"Hey, buddy," I keep waiting for Gore to say, "I wasn't going to bring
up your daddy's wreckage of the economy but you leave me no choice. Are
Americans better off now than they were eight years ago? You bet they
are. Crime, unemployment and poverty are all down, and the economy is
still on an unprecedented roll. Under Bush senior, the Japanese were
thought to be entrepreneurally invincible, and now it is US know-how
the world seeks to emulate."

Instead of a celebration of what he and the President accomplished
despite reactionary Republican control of the Congress, Gore offers only
the most mealy-mouthed rejoinders when Bush slanders the record of the
Clinton Administration.

Unfortunately, Al Gore has spent most of the election trying to prove
that he is not Bill Clinton. He needn't have bothered. No one could ever
confuse the two. Gore is by temperament, and apparently conviction, the
un-Clinton--it's like comparing a fresh out-of-the-bottle swig of Coke
with a 7-Up gone flat.

The President is a compelling advocate for his vision of progressive
government, so much so that even his lousy ideas, like welfare reform,
have a sizzle of optimism. But in the main, Clinton deserves a great deal
of credit for demonstrating that a concerned activist government also can
balance the books while lifting the US economy from the doldrums.

Whether it is a matter of personal chemistry or absence of genuine
commitment, Gore lacks Clinton's ability to convince us that deep down
he's on our side--whoever we are. Gore has made doing even the obviously
right thing, like saving Social Security and Medicare, seem partisan and
dull.

His best moment was that acceptance speech at the Democratic
convention when he sounded the alarm that George W. Bush could actually
do serious harm to this country. But since then his campaign has become
nothing more than an awkward attempt to keep up with Bush at Texas
line-dancing as a form of governance. They move together in a dreary
drumbeat of support for the death penalty and huge military expenditures,
and Gore has even muffled his criticism of Bush on guns and abortion.
Gore has come out of that contest so disoriented that he has even managed
to make Ralph Nader seem like a sexy dancer.

Which is why what could prove to be a critical 4 percent of the electorate,
composed of largely thoughtful and well-intentioned people, are willing
to risk Republican control of the White House. No small risk, given that
right-wing Republicans likely will continue to run Congress, and with
Bush as President, the third branch of government--the federal judiciary
from the Supreme Court on down--will be shaped in the image of Jesse
Helms. There is no reason to expect otherwise from a Bush presidency,
since he has warned us that Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia, two of
the most reactionary judges in the history of the Court, are his judicial
role models.

Nader has been less than honest in tarring the major parties with the
same brush. He surely must know that the Democrats are better, far
better, at protecting consumers and the environment, supporting labor,
including raising the minimum wage, and advancing the rights of women,
minorities and gays.

However, there is an argument for having Nader in the race and even
for telling pollsters that you intend to vote for the man. It's to force
Gore to distinguish himself from the Bush campaign in order to win back
those Nader votes.

Yet, on Election Day, Gore, for all his faults, still deserves the
votes of those who care about the frightening damage that a Republican
sweep of the White House and Congress portends for this country.

Behind that smug Bush smile lies the calculations of Trent Lott and
the heart of Jesse Helms. There even might be room for the ghost of Newt
Gingrich in a Bush Cabinet. It's Halloween time.

The front-loaded primary regime produced its expected result by the first week in March: George W. Bush and Al Gore wrapped up the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

The spectacle of human beings acting out mindless violence through pack behavior instills more terror in the heart than perhaps any other event in the natural world.

He's not dead yet, but the spirit of Ronald Reagan is omnipresent these days, and nowhere is it more damnably profane than in politicians' relentless invocations of the Almighty.