In the 1996 campaign, the truth will oust

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 28, 1996 | by R. Cort Kirkwood

Republicans, led by Bush, also were responsible for the Americans with Disabilities Act, a Dole-sponsored measure requiring owners of small businesses across the country to comply with bureaucratically designed rules to make their establishments accommodate wheelchairs. "Handicapped accessible," they called it.

Moreover, it was the Bush Justice Department that used a mailed bureaucratic fist and judicial fiat to overturn election results in the South between 1988 and 1992 that trespassed upon the abstruse and sensitive language of the Voting Rights Act.

Perhaps the principal claim Republicans have against Democrats is the way they handle -- or mishandle -- the economy. Polling data suggest that Americans trust the Republicans more than Democrats on economic matters, yet Cato's Moore says the economy has performed remarkably well under the Clinton regime. "The left's new line is that [the economy] doesn't master that much" he says. "I think the president does have a big impact. That's why it did well in the 1980s. It's done poorly in the 1990s. The economy is better than it was four years ago, but then again, Clinton didn't have [Bush budget director] Dick Darman working for him."

During the four years of the Bush administration, the net number of jobs -- an important indicator of economic health -- did not increase. During Clinton's years in office, the number of jobs has increased by 8 million. "Bush has a worse economic record than Clinton on just about everything," Moore says. "The economy grew much more slowly, job creation was more anemic. Much of the income decline in the nineties occurred under Bush, not Clinton." Of course, that doesn't compare with the outstanding record of the eighties under the conservative Reagan, but Moore still argues that Clinton has outdone the man he defeated in 1992. Could the problem have been voodoo economics?

On another count as well, Moore says, the big-government Democrats outdid the limited-government Republicans. Bush's energy secretary, Adm. James Watkins, refused to get rid of the DOE's Naval Petroleum Reserves by selling them. No serious energy expert believes the country needs the reserve, which was instituted to protect the Navy's oil supplies when most of the ships burned oil. Now they burn diesel fuel and split atoms. That's why Hazel O'Leary, Clinton's energy secretary, advocates selling them.

Last, it was Republicans, not the alleged party of regulation, that conceived the dreaded legislation that would have expanded the use of the government's power to code and trace the activities of American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism. The so-called "666" bill, which would have authorized wiretaps on just about anyone with a telephone, allowed judges to seize corporate financial records without an adversarial hearing and added billions to the budgets of the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

So on occasion both parties lie about each other . . . or hide the truth about themselves. The challenge for the voting public is to figure out who's better at that -- and vote the other way.