ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 26, 1996 TAG: 9607260030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
THE OLYMPIC games are giving Americans a well-deserved respite from the presidential campaign. But the campaign will continue, and right now the prospects for an edifying experience still look somewhat less than excellent.
President Clinton, when he isn't hiding from the latest accusation or revelation, continues to pile pronouncement upon pronouncement about social issues from V-chips, deadbeat dads and school uniforms to curfews, truancy and neighborhood-watch groups.
In Sacramento the other day, he took a stand against busy signals on 911. "The stunning fact," he said, is "that the 911 emergency number system today is completely overburdened." The president called for a new national number for non-emergency calls.
Good idea. We'd also like to hear more about his ideas for improving mediocre public education, extending health insurance to 40 million Americans who now lack it, fixing the unsustainable Social Security and Medicare systems, reducing the role of money in politics, promoting the spread of democracy abroad and shrinking the gap between rich and poor.
Bob Dole, having barked at NBC's Katie Couric and compared the danger of smoking with that of drinking milk, has been hushed for a time by his handlers. He is at work on a blueprint for economic reform.
Good idea. But if he proposes, as reported, big tax cuts as the centerpiece, Dole risks being untrue to himself and his principles. The former Senate majority leader was a fiscally conservative critic of the supply-siders during the Reagan years; he understood the consequences of sharply rising deficits, which the Clinton administration only for now has stemmed.
Dole cannot remain credible on fiscal policy without specifying spending cuts to compensate for the tax cuts he proposes. And specificity on spending cuts could hurt his package's political appeal. If he goes after the big pots of money - entitlements - Democrats might demagogue him into oblivion and GOP congressmen into a minority. What's a befuddled candidate to do?
In spoiler land, meanwhile, Ross Perot looks like he may obligingly "accept" the nomination of the Reform Party that he formed. He has refused to give his challenger, former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a list of the Reform Party's members so that Lamm can solicit their votes.
If Perot succeeds in bankrolling his own nomination, the country will get a tiresome platitude-pushing egomaniac for a third-party candidate, instead of a thoughtful critic willing to talk about hard things that the major-party candidates continue to evade - in particular, the need to stop spending so much on the elderly at the expense of the young.
It's a trend - from John Anderson to Paul Tsongas to the sacrificial Lamm - to thank the moralizing gloomsayers for their contributions to the debate before proceeding to dismiss and ignore them.
The Libertarians also will have interesting things, as usual, to say. But we won't hear most of them, for all the distortion-filled, trivializing presidential-campaign ads with which the Democrats and Republicans already are hitting the airwaves.
Oh well. We've still got conventions and debates to look forward to, and more than three months to go before the election. Things could change. And, for another week anyway, the Olympics are on.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB