Undecided voters : I still don't know WHAT you are looking for.
The difference between the Democrat and Republican tickets is as clear as day and night.

After the 3 debates, it was crystal clear as to WHO was superior in understanding of the issues, who had the sensible, practical proposals for the problems and who actually was FULLY cognizant of his own plans in detail.

Bush demonstrated a pathetic understanding of the issues, lack of explanation for his own so-called proposals and cruised the debates with almost NOTHING about the issues, but with REPEATED campaign slogans.

The debate experts and coaches agreed that Gore won.
Even some foreign newspapers reported about the lack of knowledge of the issues by Bush.

Whoever is saying that there is no difference between these two candidates is lying.

The Choice MUST have been clear by now.

The emperor ( George W. Bush ) has no BRAIN

Dumbell Bush supporter

Grassroots Democrats : Please go out on November 7 in record numbers and elect Gore and the democrats into congress so that the country will KEEP going in the right direction it is going now. Do you need Clinton to come out and energize you? You should be able to understand both Gore's and Clinton's dilemma at this time. You KNOW what Clinton wants in this election - for Gore to win - for Hillary to win - for the Democrats to take back the congress. He doesn't need to come and plead to you - You KNOW what a Bush presidency will do this country and the world at large.
Please don't let the unthinkable to happen.

Clinton-Gore team has worked VERY hard these years - struggling with a hostile, mean-spirited, hateful, short-sighted GOP congress who are controlled by gun lobby, tobacco industry, HMOs, Pharmaceutical companies, Oil industry and other special interests - to bring this sustained economic progress with low crime rate, low unemployment rate, deficit-to-surplus transformation and keeping the environment safe for the next generation. Please don't let these good times to lull you into complacency. The policies of the President have a HUGE impact on your day-to-day life.

If the congress remains GOP (unlikely, at least in part), imagine a congress without Clinton's vetoes - It is a striking blow to the working middle-class families, safety of the children (guns), health of the children (pollution), civil rights (hate crimes, gay rights, woman's right, minimum wage, vouchers etc. etc.).

Nader supporters : Nader's indifference as to who will be in the White House for the next four years is mind-boggling. If you vote for Nader, ( especially in the swing states ) you are going to elect Dumbell Bush as the leader of the free world - Just imagine the consequences. This election is not the time to make your point about a third party - The stakes are TOO high for that. Please don't waste your vote away - even worse,
Please don't help the Bush-Cheney ticket to get into the White House.

TAMARA BAKER

August 8, 2000

The Enviro-Twins Versus Big Oil

The Differences Are Like Night and Day

Hear that sound? That gritty, grinding noise? That's the sound of hundreds of well-paid GOP strategists gritting their teeth.

No sooner do they finish up with their lovely Philadelphia attempt to pretend that Tom Delay and Jesse Helms don't exist, than they get blind-sided by Al Gore's pick of Joe Lieberman.

The beauty is that they and their press buddies have spent so much time promoting Lieberman, who openly criticized Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, as Elijah-come-back-to-Earth, that they now cannot go back and do a 180 without looking extremely stupid.

They can't even try to paint Lieberman as a conservative, because no real conservative has fought for the environment, or ever supported a woman's right to choose (including the right to have access to the controversial late-term procedure the right-wingers have wrongly called 'partial-birth abortion'), or opposed letting Bush and Cheney's donor friends drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or supported the National Endowment for the Arts. Joe Lieberman has done all these things. The GOP can't even claim that he supports partial privatization of Social Security anymore; as Ron Fournier reported in an August 7, 2000 AP piece, Lieberman has come to oppose even partial privatization.

Social Security

His selection has already done for the Dem ticket what picking the real paleocon Dick Cheney did NOT do for the Republican slate : Give it a big, fat boost. As the August 7 overnight USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll of registered voters (in other words, people who will actually VOTE in the November elections) shows,

Polls

Bush's much-touted seventeen-point convention bounce has been obliterated down to a statistically insignificant two-point margin, all within the 24 hours since Lieberman's selection, rumored for days, was made official.

And this is BEFORE the Dems start their convention.

This will be good.

For one thing, the Democrats aren't going to be hiding the true stalwarts of THEIR party away, as the Republicans did with Tom DeLay, Bob Barr, and Jesse Helms. Nope, the Democrats will proudly display their movers and shakers, from Jesse Jackson (who extravagantly praised Gore's pick of Lieberman today) to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, even down to former Republicans like Minnesota's state auditor, Judi Dutcher. Unlike the GOP event, which featured non-white, non-male faces merely as hired props, the non-whites and non-males you'll see in Los Angeles will be active Democratic party members, holders of the reins of power.

And there at the head of the Democratic ticket, as a contrast to the all-WASP, all-Big-Oil GOP pairing, we'll have the Enviro-Twins, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, men of values and compassion and liberality. And of course, with Joe Lieberman being the first Jew ever to be nominated by a major party for the Vice-Presidency, running against a man, George W. Bush, whose parents broke up his first big romance because the girl was Jewish.

The differences between the two tickets are like night and day.

This will be GOOD.

ROBERT L. BOROSAGE

August 21, 2000

Ralph Nader, America's indomitable public citizen, is the one great man in this presidential election. He has inspired more, done more and stood for more over the past decades than the other candidates put together. And his searing indictment of our corporate-dominated, money-drenched politics is surely a message people need to hear. But the Nader presidential campaign rests on strategic assumptions that are wrongheaded. And liberals and progressives should think twice before casting a vote for Nader in any state that is contested this fall.

A Nader vote assumes that there is no significant difference between the two major parties. Nader says he's not a spoiler because "you can't spoil a system that's spoiled to the core." With Gore against Bush, two sons of privilege, the stiff and the smirk, the presidential race can easily be painted as a choice, in Jim Hightower's words, between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. But what appear to be insignificant choices can have dramatic consequences. In fact, as conservative columnist Paul Gigot has argued, this may be the most determining ideological contest since Reagan's election in 1980. With the House up for grabs in a handful of closely contested seats, routine presidential coattails make this virtually a winner-take-all election. If Bush wins the presidency, Republicans are also likely to control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court for a generation. If Gore wins, Democrats are odds-on favorites to take back control of the House, if not the Senate, and gain a moderate majority on the Court.

Beneath the happy talk, Bush seeks a mandate for the radical reforms left on the conservative agenda : partial privatization of Social Security, which would cut guaranteed benefits to younger workers; turning Medicare into a voucher program, which also masks a cut in guarantees; using public school funds for vouchers to private schools. He stumps for a large tax cut, primarily for the wealthy, crippling the opportunity to deal with cities, poverty, the environment. These would shred much of what is left of the social contract, while proclaiming the magic of markets. Other than the tax cuts, these proposals are far more radical than anything Reagan dared to propose.

If elected, Bush will have a mandate and a majority to enact the reforms. Worse, he'll get bipartisan cover from the New Democrats, the money wing of the Democratic Party. He's also for negating the minimum wage, leaving it to the states; dismantling environmental regulation; repealing affirmative action; limiting a woman's right to choose; and generally fronting for the corporate leveraged buyout of government. Think of the Gingrich Congress without Clinton's veto. That's why corporations are flooding the Republican Party with record contributions. They know who is the better buy.

Gore is hardly a tribune of the working man and Lieberman has endorsed much of the Bush agenda. But they will campaign against it, and for greater investment in education, health care, children. Assuming the Democrats retake the House, liberal committee chairs in the House will challenge Gore's timidity -- and fight to stiffen his backbone. Progressive movements for the working poor, the environment and economic justice will have receptive allies who can hold hearings, move legislation and force votes -- even in a Congress that still has an operating conservative majority. And on globalization, there is a difference between a Congress led by Hastert and DeLay and one led by Gephardt and Bonior. The lesser evil is less.

Nader accepts that there is a difference between a "party that doesn't do anything against injustice and a party that tries to generate more injustice." So he fudges, arguing that Democrats will benefit from the millions of voters his candidacy brings to the polling booth. Really? This assumes that there are millions of voters political enough to tune in to Ralph Nader, alienated enough to cast only a protest vote, but strategic enough to vote for the Congressional candidate of a party Nader lambastes as "hopelessly corrupt." Don't bet the store on it. In fact, Green Congressional candidates attract support in precisely the college-town and liberal suburban districts where they are most likely to help a Republican beat a moderate or liberal Democrat. Moreover, while Nader is pragmatic enough to talk about "thinking tactically" in casting a protest vote, he is naturally spending much of his time in contested states like Michigan wooing angry industrial workers.

The second major predicate of the Nader campaign is that establishing the Green Party will help build the progressive movement in America. Say what? We witness the first stirrings of promising citizen movements around living-wage campaigns, new poverty organizing and, most dramatically, the challenge to the corporate globalization agenda -- bringing Teamsters and turtles, students and steelworkers together -- a movement that Nader has helped to build. But the Nader candidacy splits progressives. African-Americans and Latinos aren't going green. Despite their anger at Gore, progressive unions aren't there. Steelworkers president George Becker, central to the battle in Seattle, says workers can't afford Gore's defeat. Fear will drive feminists and environmentalists to Gore. Nader's campaign will display us as weaker than we are, not as strong as we are.

Worse, it is a direct threat to progressive labor. The strategic political priority of a Bush White House will be to hunt labor in every way possible. Unions will face a frontal attack on their ability to organize, to do politics, to govern themselves. They will be thrown on the defensive--fending off national right-to-work and paycheck-deception laws. And again, the New Dems won't leap to defend their primary adversary for control of the party. Clinton and Gore weren't exactly champions of labor. But labor had the space to revive itself, to start organizing again and to regain political strength. Snuffing that out will be corporate America's first order to a Bush administration, and devastating to any progressive possibility.

Independent citizen movements like the Seattle Coalition are vital to disrupting the suffocating corporate consensus. But in electoral politics, progressives would be better off fighting within the Democratic Party to make it the party of the people that it claims to be. On key economic issues, Democratic voters are more progressive than Gore and the New Dems. So are the vast majority of party activists. Even a good portion of the party's money is union or liberal money. Organizing as the Christian right did within the Republican Party, progressives could take control at the state level and exercise growing influence nationally. The Christian right has more influence inside the Republican Party than Pat Buchanan has as leader of the Reform Party.

Molly Ivins says she votes with her heart in the primaries but with her head in general elections because lesser evils really are lesser, particularly for the poor and the weak. Jim Hightower now supports Nader, but he had it right when he said, "Some say we need a third party. I wish we had a second party." Nader is democracy's champion, but his campaign offers a diversion, not a direction.

Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future