Without some big change, in the presidential contest between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Gore will win.
As everyone knows, Bush is a corporate man. He's already promoting the dark Republican agenda that, with his dad's help, quadrupled our national debt.
He's unbelievable when speaking to any broader effort to improve our lot in large economic terms and in reference to the working poor, the homeless, the environment or needs of individuals over special interests.
Gore has a much better handle, given the transformation of the Democratic Party under President Clinton, of international goals, including environmental protection, and of the need to address the shame of a "booming economy."
That shame is the discrepancy between rich and poor, now wider than ever. Wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the few. And while some billionaires have a personal net worth greater than some countries, we allow public works and public services to flounder. And, despite our desire to lead, we don't take our international debt seriously.
The real battle during the Clinton years has been just this: an effort toward fiscal responsibility while addressing the poor in a rich nation, the need for international leadership, the dire need for environmentalism and the difficulty of getting anything done with an ineffectual government.
Clinton's successes have been willfully obscured by resistance from a Republican Congress via smokescreens about morality.
Amazingly, the result of our Constitution today mandates electing an arch compromiser and manipulator if the office of the president is to have any influence. The power of special interests dictates this. Because of this system, Clinton's own wobbling has also, inevitably, obscured his astounding success.
The trick, using mass psychology, appears to involve convincing us of character and strength, as Sen. John McCain tried to do, while essentially promoting a Clinton-type agenda for the future, as all the candidates have tried to do.
What we will see in the rest of the campaign, among other things, are more attempts to discredit Gore by slander and libel. What else can we now call the relentless legal pursuit of Clinton since his first days in office, with no tangible result? Even now, we're seeing rigmarole over Gore's campaign financing by the party that's king of such financing.
This will no longer work for the Republicans. For one thing, too many of us remember Iran/Contra, essentially an act of treason in which a secret government was set up to bypass our laws. Too many of us remember Watergate, an act of domestic espionage. In not dealing with either crime effectively, we have all lost our power in promoting effective consequences, other than embarrassment, for sexual dalliance. It's just not big league.
More importantly, we all have to ask ourselves which party, not just which president, will at least promote the avoidance of crimes against people and planet. For example, the greenhouse effect is not a fiction or minor problem as one party and some special interests would have us believe. To prove the effect beyond any doubt will require the demonstration of widespread disaster and/or destruction. Perhaps total destruction of a species -- ours.
In the face of issues such as China's industrialization, involving the burning of soft coal by billions, we really have only one choice -- some form of cooperative world government in whatever arrangement it takes. Our leadership in this development will be critical.
If, for example, we have multiple countries, standards of world corporate behavior will have to be set by worldwide agreement. Regulation will need to provide the prevention of further environmental damage before individual liberty is irrevocably compromised by global emergencies.
Our potential to be a world leader is deeper than our power or wealth. The potential is based on our degree of alignment with democracy, which has been weakened in my lifetime by our wars. Not that we haven't won any wars, but factions of our system would continue to seek democracy by kowtowing to power and its ultimate corruption. Control of individuals for corporate need has been the relentless intent, resulting from a very specific confusion.
This confusion is shown by a misinterpretation of the well-known phrase "the government which governs best is the government which governs least." We have not designed our government to make crucial decisions about our domestic well-being, yet we've given government too much power to war on us. No, a corporation should not be allowed to pollute the environment, and regulation should be powerful and swift. No, an individual should not be allowed to dump poison into the water supply.
But what someone grows and eats or what kind of marriage they have should be outside the bounds of regulators. How people make love, how they worship and how they entertain themselves should be off bounds. Americans should do as they please as long as they don't hurt others or the property of others. As long as there is no such hurt, our people should not be warred on by our government.
Furthermore, who regulates needs to be identifiable. Right now we just try to figure out who to blame, and all of the possibilities blame each other. We need a governing body we can vote in and out depending on whether or not it supports our future as human beings.
Around 1982, we figured out that dirty needles were spreading HIV virus, called AIDS after having been called GRID. Needles were, in fact, a predominant form of spread both here and in England. Our government agency, the Centers for Disease Control, immediately tried to initiate a clean needle program, which was blocked by President Reagan. Two years later, we had not made inroads into preventing transmission. England's empowered governing body voted to install a clean needle program almost overnight and reduced transmission to about zero in two years.
If the people of England had not liked the results of the needle program, they could have focused on one group at their next vote. We tend in the U.S. to guess who, usually a presidential candidate, might save us from our governmental mess.
In this manner, we're not always a shining beacon of democracy for ourselves. Rather than the tyranny of the majority, we have the tyranny of bigots, isolationists, greedy profiteers and other "special" interests. Thus, we'll continue to present the world with problems in trusting us to lead the way.
Domestically, the president doesn't have that much power. If he did, we'd be pursuing responsible behavior and reducing our national debt right now. If Congress had that much power, its decisions wouldn't be held up by two senators representing almost none of our population blocking the votes of two senators representing a huge chunk of our population.
If we the people really had power, we'd receive prompt action toward a collective direction and we'd throw out identifiable cheats, liars and power brokers.
All of that requires that we stop treating our Constitution as a sacred document. There's no evidence that the "founding fathers" were smarter, more moral or more capable than we are. In fact, they certainly knew very little of our world or how it would be given the isolation, state of communication, technology and numerous other limiting factors of a past United States.
We need to sit down and revise our governing blueprint as other countries have done repeatedly. Fulfilling our responsibility as an intelligent nation is overdue.
With the coming choice between Gore and Bush, we're left, again, trying to do something that we rarely have the insight to do. Ignorantly, reflexively, sometimes desperately, we try to vote the conscience of our collective soul.
