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Election!
Vote for
AL GORE
(Democrat)
Voting for Gore because he's pro-choice isn't enough. Democrats cannot continue to drift rightward on economic and criminal-justice issues and then play the pro-choice trump card every four years. But while both Al Gore and George W. Bush are more interested in kissing corporate ass than kissing your disenfranchised booty, the concrete differences between the two men warrant a vote for Gore. Here are five differences that make a difference.
Stranger Personals
1. ENTITLEMENTS. Bush would privatize Social Security and sabotage federal funding for health-care programs like Medicare, "devolving" them to the states. Bush's own state of Texas offers an example of why the federal government shouldn't be taken out of the equation: Bush's opposition to Clinton's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) resulted in a net increase in the number of uninsured children in Texas--ranking the Lone Star State the 45th worst in the nation on that score. Gore would expand CHIP.
2. HEALTH CARE. Bush does not support a patient's bill of rights that would allow health-care consumers to sue HMOs. Gore does.
3. CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM. Gore pledges to ban soft money. He would also require broadcasters to give candidates free airtime to respond to unregulated "independent expenditure" ads. More important, Gore backs the McCain/Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill. Bush doesn't support any of these remedies.
4. TAXES. Bush's tax cut plan would cost $1.3 trillion over nine years. These cuts would not only fuck over poor Americans by gutting social programs, they would also offer 1,000 times more savings to the richest one percent of Americans than to low-income families.
5. JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS. In addition to appointing as many as four Supreme Court justices, the next president will be responsible for appointing hundreds of judges to lower federal courts. These men and women make decisions on key civil-rights issues involving not only abortion rights, but also the workplace, sexuality, and race. Gore would likely appoint centrist and moderate judges; Bush has promised to appoint conservatives and "strict constructionalists."
As for Ralph Nader--the man we endorsed in 1996--he's obviously one of the few great figures in recent American history. Numerous and invaluable environmental, marketplace, and workplace regulations are the result of his work, not to mention entire federal regulatory commissions like the Environmental Protection Agency. Unfortunately, even if every Stranger reader voted for Nader, he wouldn't win our state's 11 electoral votes, and he could very well swing Washington state to Bush. While some Nader supporters argue that Bush and Gore are essentially the same, we've concluded that Bush is, in fact, so much worse on so many issues that we can't back Nader in such a close race. Too much is at stake. Vote for Gore.
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