Presidential Race Offers No Choice

Nineteen-ninety-six has been a waste of an election year, primarily because it has not been a contest. The American voter has been made party to an extended infomercial whose highlights have been the scintillating interludes from the farcical partisan monotony: Elizabeth Dole as talk-show host, Susan McDougal in chains, Dick Morris in bed. Despite the political parties' protests that good money is hard to come by, and therefore good information channeling is difficult to procure, Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, and even Ross Perot, have had more access to Americans' time than the stars of "Friends." Yet the candidates choose to hold the country hostage to their ill-informed and irrelevant multimedia sparring rather than provide substantive debate on the hard question of our national identity.

The conventions were fun spectacles of patriotism run amok, and the subsequent traveling of the candidates wooing working women rallied their respective troops. But the process makes the U.S. citizen the big loser, for his or her vote is effectively nullified by the lack of a decent choice in the presidential race.

The Republican Party has chosen to wage its campaign for the executive branch on the very principle of opposition. What does Bob Dole have to offer America beside himself? Certainly he has no new ideas. And the ones he has dredged up from the past are absurd. Supply-side economics has been ridiculed by every economist except Jack Kemp, and so it was he who made a fine selection for a ticket bound to fail alongside its success-proof policies.

Clinton and Gore continue to run on pseudo-Republican steam: fighting crime, fighting drugs, fighting the deficit. They offer sensible government, though not too big, and not too encompassing. Universal health care has been tossed aside by everyone except the First Lady. And welfare has been cast off as the failed policy remnants of a prior era, all while selling out the poor and betraying several decades of Democratic principles. The biggest hope for Democratic initiative in the next four years is a jobs bill which would hopefully correct for some of the externalities of the newer, sleeker American economy.

Ross Perot has presented himself as even more of a joke this year than he did four years ago. He couldn't even get an elected official in the whole United States to be his vice-presidential running mate, and instead chose a radical and misguided economist named Pat Choate who trades in tariffs and isolationism. The "American Revolution" that Perot launched at Valley Forge makes a mockery of legitimate attempts to forge a third party and offers us nothing but demagoguery.

We hope that the upcoming debates among the candidates (whether or not Perot is included) will address hard-core issues important to Americans. Perot has ruined a great opportunity to expand American democracy. Dole has disappointed as a viable alternative to the President. And Clinton continues to govern from the middle, maintaining the status quo. All we ask for is some dynamism focused on policy rather than public relations.