Nurturer with a mailed fist
By Doug Bandow
Copyright 1999 Washington Times
April 12, 1999
In between inventing the automobile, penicillin and
electricity, growing up as
a missionary on the Amazon and supporting his fatherless family of
13 as a
bootblack, and inspiring hit musicals and epic poetry, Vice
President Al Gore
is acting as a commander in chief wannabe.
His role as propagandist
on behalf of the administration's disastrous war of aggression in
the Balkans
is reason enough to reject him in the year 2000. But his record on
domestic
issues is even worse.
The vice president's campaign minions are saying that he is
a tough leader who
pushed for military action against
Yugoslavia. Mr. Gore certainly is talking tough:
"Milosevic has barely begun to incur the damage he will
feel."
Of course, Mr. Gore probably couldn't do worse than Bill
Clinton, who has
bungled every step. Were the latter commander in chief during
World War II, we
would all be speaking German.
However, Mr. Gore is attempting to do more than score
political points by
warmongering for peace. Of late, he's been
battling airlines over compensation for lost bags and pushing to
create a
special phone number to call about traffic jams. For this, newly
independent
American Colonies created a national government?
A Gore associate explained that such measures will
"add up to something
more thematic, something bigger." And they do. The vice
president once said he believes government should be
"like grandparents, in the sense that grandparents perform a
nurturing role."
But Mr. Gore prefers to
"nurture" with a mailed fist. As former ABC
correspondent Bob Zelnick puts it in his
devastating new book,
"Gore: A Political Life" (Regnery):
"Al Gore Jr. was a child of government and a student of
government who grew up
to be a man of government."
The vice president has been traversing the country telling
audiences he
embodies
"practical idealism." However, he has been able to
cultivate the image of
a moderate primarily because he once took more conservative stands
on security
and social issues. But 28-year-old candidate Gore ran a populist
economic
campaign - higher taxes on the rich, support for public jobs
creation - to win
election in
1976 to Congress from Tennessee.
He generally fit well within the Democratic caucus. He was
a reliable
supporter of new spending programs, whether business subsidies or
redistributive entitlements; higher taxes, especially on the
upper-middle
class; increased regulation, particularly for environmental
purposes; and
social engineering schemes, such as
racial quotas.
Mr. Gore was at his worst on taxes. Between 1981 and
1993, he opposed only
one of 19 significant tax increases; he voted to collect an extra
$9,000 per household. He supported a plethora of other tax
increases, which
failed to pass.
At least
all of these measures required votes. The vice president also
backed the
multibillion-dollar e-rate levy (or
"Gore Tax") on phone service, which has been imposed
without public debate by the Federal
Communications Commission.
The vice president has placed himself on the extremist edge
of environmental
policy-making.
In his book,
"Earth in the Balance," he declared:
"We must make the rescue of the environment the central
organizing principle of
civilization."
He has pushed a variety of new energy taxes. He wants
employers to subsidize
workers who don't drive to work. He advocates eliminating the
internal
combustion engine. He proposes banning
packaging that is neither biodegradable nor recyclable. He
advocates more
foreign aid to Third World states for environmental purposes.
Perhaps Mr. Gore's most important environmental crusade
involves
global warming. In no small part due to his efforts, the
administration signed the Kyoto
Protocol to the Framework
Convention on
Climate Change, which mandates substantial reductions in global
energy consumption.
Yet years of scaremongering have proved to be inaccurate.
Observed warming has
been far below that predicted by the models upon which the
convention was
based. Even Mr. Gore admitted in 1995:
"In truth, the scientists
who are expert in this field will tell you that the precise causal
relationship
(between C02 and
global warming) has not yet been established."
The Kyoto Treaty, as yet unratified by the Senate, would
impose huge burdens on
the United States.
Yale University economist William Nordhaus figures the bill
could
run $2,000 per household every year. Wharton Econometrics
Forecasting Associates
estimates 1.8 million jobs could be lost; others predict losses of
as many as 3
million.
Mr. Gore has attempted to disguise his statist bias by
heading up the
president's program to
"reinvent" government. However, his claim to have
saved $137 billion is belied even by the National Performance
Review's own reports.
Federal employment has not fallen due to his efforts. Mr. Gore
has held press
conferences rather than recommend eliminating useless agencies.
Commander in Chief Al Gore? It's a terrible
thought. But even worse would be President Gore running domestic
policy.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
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