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One curiosity of this presidential election campaign is how much the Republican nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, sounds like a Democrat.
For instance, fuel prices have been rising lately. This inspired President Bill Clinton to order the release of some stocks from the National Petroleum Reserve, and there may be people somewhere who believe him when he says that this was strictly a humanitarian gesture to keep people from freezing this winter, and it had nothing to do with assisting Vice-President Al Gore's drive for the White House.
Bush has rightly questioned the announced motive, but he
sounds like a Democrat -- he assails the Clinton-Gore
administration
for not having a national energy
policy.
Aren't Republicans supposed to believe in free markets that reflect supply and demand, rather than government policies?
The last president who tried to give us a national
energy policy was Jimmy Carter, who declared the moral
equivalent of war.
Some of this was relatively benign -- more solar and
wind power. But some of it wasn't. Carter proposed
fast-track siting
that would have over-ridden state
environmental regulations to install coal-gasification
plants and shale-oil refineries across the West.
Granted, he didn't carry a single state in the West, but turning our open landscapes into smoggy industrial sacrifice areas seemed like an extreme punishment for voting the wrong way.
Fortunately, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan didn't keep his campaign promise to abolish the U.S. Department of Energy, but he did have the good sense not to have a national energy policy, and without one, the gas lines went away.
Bush the Younger would do better to proclaim that he
would follow the example of Reagan, and he could quote the
first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln (My policy
is to have no policy
).
Education is another place where Bush sounds like a Democrat, rather than Reagan, who promised to abolish the federal Department of Education.
The traditional Republican view is that education is a state and local responsibility, and thus of no concern to the federal government. It was always the evil big-government Democrats who wanted to increase the federal role in education.
Now consider the proposals put forth by the Bush
campaign toward ending the educational recession
which has occurred during the last seven and a half
years of the Clinton-Gore Administration.
Although Republican phrases like restore local
control
and empower parents
do appear from time
to time, the Bush proposals call for a lot more federal
spending and federal control.
For instance, he wants to spend an extra $5 billion
across five years on a Reading First initiative so that
every child can read by the third grade,
and part of
this will be a curriculum that is
phonics-driven.
I like phonics, as opposed to see-say,
when it
comes to teaching reading. But is this really a federal
issue?
The Bush platform points out that American schoolchildren, by and large, perform wretchedly in math and science, ranking behind places like Sloven and Hungary.
Just like a Democrat, Bush wants to spend more federal money on these things. And there's one issue he doesn't address -- the fundamentalist wing of his Republican party, which opposes the teaching of biology and geology, and isn't real strong on reading, either, being as innocent children might get exposed to occult or violent material like Shakespeare.
And then there are Bush proposals for more federal
involvement in school safety, character and
discipline.
These range from requiring schools to enact a
zero-tolerance policy on classroom disruption
to
increasing the federal prosecutions for violating the Safe
and Gun-Free School Zone act. And he would triple
character-education funding,
whatever that is.
Many of us who watched the inclusive and diverse Republican convention last summer wondered if it was really the GOP, or just some contrivance for television.
And now the nominee from that convention is calling for a national energy policy and a greater federal role in education while attacking the Democratic nominee for not moving in these directions.
Where did all those free-market small-government local-control Republicans go? There were millions of them just a few years ago, and now they seem to have vanished.
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