We’re coming down the stretch of Primary Season 2000. It looks like the cash winners are the pollsters who are hired to produce new rankings every day, and the losers are the many pundits whose predictions about winners and turnout have proved so wrong.
We have heard a lot of discussion about tax cuts, how to save Social Security, and health care, issues that the voters clearly care about. But the back-and-forth colloquies on these prime issues leave the voters still wondering what are the differences among the candidates. Who has the best plan?
Here are some issues on which Americans would like to see the differences between the candidates defined.
Do you approve of Clinton’s 78 days of bombing Yugoslavia? Are you in favor of or opposed to letting Clinton get by with initiating a war without Congress’s approval and in violation of the War Powers Act?
How do you propose to deal with Clinton’s two disastrous foreign policy failures, Kosovo and Bosnia? Clinton has been calling up U.S. reserves to try to keep the peace and impose a multiethnic regime against the wishes of the locals, but the Europeans (who are reducing their troop commitment) are demanding that we send in more troops to quell the continuing violence.
Are you going to close your eyes to Communist China’s sabre rattling about Taiwan and nevertheless support China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Is there no price for China’s admission to the WTO?
In the presidential debates, Alan Keyes repeatedly raised the issues of the World Trade Organization and Most Favored Nation status for Communist China, and George Bush and John McCain responded with stony silence. Why can’t we get a direct answer from all the candidates?
The House Republican leaders recently announced that their top priorities for this year are a free trade deal for sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, to “soundly defeat” any legislation to withdraw U.S. support from the WTO, and permanent Most Favored Nation status for Communist China. What’s the position of all the presidential candidates on these Congressional priorities?
How do you propose to address the fact that Communist China is pocketing at least $5 billion a month (by selling us $6 billion of their goods and buying only $1 billion in U.S. goods), and using this unprecedented profit to build up its military-industrial complex? Are you going to let trade trump national security?
The present system called “free trade” allows Communist China virtually unrestricted access to our markets, a windfall that makes U.S. importers very rich, while U.S. exporters such as farmers and manufacturers are being royally shafted because China won’t open its markets to U.S. goods. Mr. Candidate, whose side are you on?
Are you in favor of continued U.S. membership in the World Trade Organization after that bunch of foreign bureaucrats impudently ordered the United States to change our tax laws? Where do you stand on the issue of whether the United States has the sovereign power to determine our own tax laws, or have we ceded that right to a foreign organization?
What are you going to do, specifically, to remedy Americans’ unnecessary vulnerability to a nuclear missile attack? We’re tired of words and promises; we want presidential candidates to address this issue directly and forcefully with a specific plan to defend America and to repudiate Clinton’s refusal to deploy SDI.
When are you going to eliminate the gross discrimination in the tax law which allows corporations, but not individuals, to deduct expenses for medical insurance? We want to hear candidates address this persistent inequity (a major reason why 40 million Americans lack health insurance) instead of picking around the edges with new federal regulations mischievously called a “patients’ bill of rights.”
What are you going to do to get the Federal Government out of the public school classroom through Goals 2000, School-to-Work, national standards, national testing, and other federal regulations? The American people know that education is our number-one challenge, but why don’t you level with them and truthfully say that federal money is not the solution?
How are you going to restore morale and military readiness in the U.S. Armed Forces? Are you man enough to deal with the demands of the Clintonian feminists who seek a gender-neutral military, the elimination of all macho instincts, and evasion of the law barring homosexuals?
Will you stop sending U.S. troops to play global cops and global social workers in phony peacekeeping expeditions all over the world? Will you order an end to the mandatory, universal anthrax vaccination that is causing so much turmoil in the military?
Let’s hear the answers to questions that are meaningful to the American people and to the survival of our country.
