The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch will select its Presidential endorsement within the next week. There is talk that The Dispatch may endorse a Democrat for the first time since Woodrow Wilson. The editorial board is likely undergoing a heated debate this very moment. We need to tip them in the right direction. Beneath the fold I've included their 2000 endorsement for Bush. Please fire off an email and remind them that Bush has failed to live up to every one of their expectations. Please remember to be POLITE, we are trying to influence them, not make them embittered against our cause.
Letters to the editor can be sent to: letters@dispatch.com
Senior Editor Joe Hallett can be reached at jhallett@dispatch.com
The Editorial writers are as follows:
Marry Ann Edwards = medwards@dispatch.com
Mary Morgan Edwards = mcedwards@dispatch.com
Shannon Gilchrist = sbeatty@dispatch.com
Phil Rudell = prudell@dispatch.com
Rick Woodruff = rwoodruf@dispatch.com
Please share your letters with your fellow Kossacks...
October 22, 2000
"George W. Bush should be the next president of the United States, and Ohio's voters can help make that happen.
Of the two major-party candidates, Bush is better-equipped to smooth over the bitter partisanship and frequent gridlock that have characterized the eight years of the Clinton administration and stymied efforts to come to grips with looming fiscal crises in Social Security and Medicare.
As governor of Texas, Bush has won praise from Republicans and Democrats for a political style that builds consensus and cooperation across party lines. Only that kind of political skill can bring an end to the poisonous climate of distrust that exists between Congress and the White House.
Though both parties claim to want to reform federal entitlements to ensure that benefits are maintained on a sound fiscal foundation, as 70 million baby boomers begin to put unprecedented demands on these programs, fear of political ambush has prevented any progress.
With the economy booming and the government awash in cash, now is the time to act on these important issues, but nothing will happen as long as Congress and the president are at odds.
Vice President Al Gore cannot change this unproductive status quo because he is part of it. Politically and temperamentally, he is unsuited to the role of conciliator and consensus-builder.
His natural bent is to attack those who disagree with him.
His election would mean another four years of confrontation, demagoguery and impasse, four years in which this golden moment of peace, prosperity and possibility might reach its end.
As Ohioans cast their votes on Nov. 7, they will be choosing between two very different philosophies of government.
Bush believes that Americans ought to control their own lives and money and that government should be the last resort, not the first, when problems must be solved.
For this reason, he favors across-the- board tax cuts that leave people free to keep and spend more of their own money as they wish. This philosophy also underlies Bush's call for a greater role for private and faith- based organizations in solving the nation's social problems.
To Gore, Americans are the helpless victims of powerful political and economic interests and cannot be trusted to make wise decisions and provisions for themselves and their families in health care, retirement and education.
Gore believes only the federal government can protect citizens from these shadowy forces and from themselves. This is why he does not trust citizens to decide how to spend their own money and favors smaller tax give-backs that go only to those who agree to spend the money in ways that Gore thinks are good for them.
While The Dispatch believes that any tax cuts are ill-advised until Congress and the president address the national debt and the fiscal problems facing federal entitlement programs, if tax cuts are approved, they should be available to all taxpayers, not just those favored by White House officials.
Gore paints himself as the defender of projected budget surpluses and protector of the solvency of federal entitlements.
But he proposes adding an across-the- board prescription-drug benefit to the fiscally troubled Medicare program, a benefit whose costs would balloon astronomically as baby boomers enter their golden years.
Bush calls for fundamental reform of Medicare financing and, in the meantime, supports a more modest, means-tested plan that limits federal help to those seniors who lack insurance or other means to pay for their prescriptions.
Bush brings similar restraint to his proposals for education.
Although the federal government has an appropriate role in setting national standards to measure educational performance, the nuts and bolts of education should be controlled by parents, school districts and state officials.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in education innovation across the country, most of it emanating from state legislatures and governor's offices, not the federal government.
But responding to the national concern about educational quality, both candidates have put forward plans for increasing federal education spending.
At $ 47 billion, Bush's plan has the virtue of being less than a third the size of Gore's. But there is another crucial difference.
While Bush approves of educational innovation, including publicly funded school vouchers, Gore stands firmly against any innovation that threatens the education monopoly held by the two big teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
These two unions, with a combined 3 million members, comprise one of the most powerful blocs in the Democratic coalition.
Because the unions oppose vouchers, so does Gore. Instead, his education " reforms'' focus on putting more money into teachers' pockets by offering federal cash for teacher recruitment and development.
Gore's plan to hire 100,000 new teachers nationwide, ostensibly to reduce class size, also would swell teacher-union ranks. Thus, his education plan would bolster the very monopoly that is a chief obstacle to educational innovation.
There is another area in which the candidates' philosophies will have a profound effect: the U.S. Supreme Court.
By some estimates, the next president could appoint as many as three justices to the high court. Bush's appointments would be likely to maintain or strengthen the 5-4 majority that has gone some way toward adjusting the power balance between the states and the federal government, reining in some of Washington's more egregious incursions on state turf.
Gore's appointments are more likely to be judicial activists who regard the Supreme Court as a lawmaking branch of government and would expand the power of the federal government at the expense of states.
Equally important will be the next president's approach to foreign policy. The end of the Cold War left the United States in a foreign-policy limbo.
Without a deadly superpower rival to confront and deter, what is the U.S. role in the world?
What are its national interests, and which ones are worth defending with American blood?
These questions largely have been in the hands of the Clinton administration, which has been in charge since shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After eight years, the questions remain unanswered; the signals, mixed.
The United States intervened in Bosnia- Herzegovina and Kosovo but did nothing during the more horrific bloodletting in Rwanda. Nation-building exercises in Somalia and Haiti were expensive failures.
The U.S.-led United Nations coalition that corralled Saddam Hussein in Iraq has fallen to pieces on Clinton's watch. Today, there are no U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq to deter Saddam's missile and chemical- weapons programs. At the same time, France, Russia and several Arab nations are violating with impunity the U.N. sanctions imposed on Baghdad.
While Gore promises essentially more of the same, Bush has expressed deep misgivings about the way the U.S. military has been stretched thin in nation- building and open-ended deployments around the world. Though he is no isolationist, Bush would require much more concrete and compelling threats to U.S. security and interests before committing U.S. forces overseas.
And Bush is no stranger to foreign-policy issues. As governor of Texas, Bush presides over a state with 20 million inhabitants and an international border with Mexico.
If Texas were an independent nation, as it once was, its $ 645 billion gross state product would put it among the top 20 richest countries in the world, on par with Asian powerhouse South Korea.
By contrast, Clinton assumed the presidency after serving as governor of Arkansas, a state with no international border and whose population in 1992 was 2.3 million, about that of metropolitan Pittsburgh today.
Bush has excellent ties to Mexico, which will be a plus as the North American Free Trade Agreement draws the United States and Mexico ever more tightly together. His friendship with Mexican president-elect Vicente Fox could mean real progress to stem the flood of drugs and illegal immigration pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border.
For all these reasons, the Dispatch urges Ohio voters to cast their ballots for George W. Bush on Nov. 7. Doing so will help ensure a fresh start in Washington, one that offers the best chance for the nation to use its current good fortune to lay the groundwork for future prosperity.
Bush believes that Americans ought to control their own lives and money and that government should be the last resort, not the first, when problems must be solved."