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| ESSAYISTS ON AGENDA 2K | |
 August 10, 1999 
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, another special emphasis discussion about the 2000 presidential election campaign. As you regular viewers know, we are asking a variety of individuals and groups what issues the candidates should debate and discuss. Tonight we hear from four of the NewsHour essayists. I talked with them yesterday. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And they are Clarence Page, Anne Taylor Fleming, Roger Rosenblatt and Richard Rodriquez. Richard, what would you like to hear the candidates discuss and debate in the campaign? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I'd like to hear them discuss and debate something that they really believe. I have no assurance that I've ever heard a politician, especially one running for President in the last 25, 30 years actually speak or write a speech or write his own book. The other day I got a phone call from one of the staff members of one of the candidates for President, I think a lot of people get these phone calls, but he asked me -- the candidate was about to announce his candidacy for the presidency -- he asked me whether I had any ideas, whether I could write a few phrases, whether I could, as he put it, punch out a few phrases that the candidate could use. And it occurred to me that there are people running for president in this country who need strangers to give them ideas, because they don't have any ideas. In some way, I'm not even sure after eight years what Bill Clinton believes. It would be nice if somebody were running for this presidency this time around who said something that he or she really believed, composed his own speech, but in fact most of what the discussion will be is what their pollsters will tell them we want to hear, and they will have carefully orchestrated answers, so that they will either not offend us or they will flatter us. So the discussion will matter very little. I just yearn for a President or for a candidate who could write his own speech. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Clarence, a candidate who could write his own speech? CLARENCE PAGE: Well, Richard made some good points. I would like to hear some ideas in regard to how we can restore the dream of an opportunity society. Unfortunately, the kind of problem Richard articulates has played itself out in such a way that you have candidates and their pollsters and advisors saying what's the biggest block we can get, so they go for suburban, middle class swing voters. Who does that leave out? It leaves out people who need government the most, children, needy children, urban poor, rural poor folks who are the victims of a multi-tiered educational system. We're the only industrial country I know of that says you buy your school when you buy your house, you know. If you live in a really good neighborhood, you get great schools. If you live in a not-so-good neighborhood where you really need an education the most, your schools are not as good as other schools are. And the politicians generally tend to divide that issue according to who's my constituency, well, teachers' unions support me, so I'm going to support them, or they say, well, suburban property owners support me, so I'm going to support them. We're not really talking about what are the real ideas we need for guaranteeing the sort of opportunity, equal opportunity every kid ought to have to a good education in this country. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Anne Taylor Fleming, what do you want to hear? ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Well, I'll certainly second everything that my two colleagues have said. I think the public is so cynical about politicians. And all we do is - you know -- we're already told how many millions each of them has amassed to win. That said, I would love to see them talk obviously about education. I don't know if any of you go to your local public schools - I mean -- they are a shambles --public parks, infrastructure, health care, all of the gut-level issues. And the terrible tragedy to me as we sat atop this economic boom time, crime is down, we're at peace, never was there a better opportunity to try and look ahead and say, gee, what do we want to do? And even we're seeing it with this surplus discussion. I mean, it's not breaking free. I mean, Clinton is talking his usual clichés about, yeah, I'm going to veto this, giving all the surplus back in tax breaks. But we're not really saying what do we want to do with the surplus, where should it go, how should it be spent? And I think the same is desperately true of foreign policy, we just lurch from situation to situation, you know. And what's going to happen in the next decade, century millennium is not going to be about America. It's going to be about the fact that India and Pakistan are testing nuclear bombs, about what happens with China, about North Korea. So it would be wonderful to see a big blowout conversation about foreign policy, as well about domestic policy. And the question is how do we get politicians who are so frightened - and this I certainly agree with both of them -- of offending anybody, lest - you know -- they lose one more precious dollar? So I guess the bottom line, too, and the one thing that Senator McCain is at least talking about is campaign finance reform. Take the money out of them, give them free time, maybe we'll give them a little bit of our airtime, and then, you know, force them to have some sort of conversation. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Roger Rosenblatt, can they be force today have a conversation and about what? What do you want them to talk about? ROGER ROSENBLATT: I don't think they need to be forced about the subject that interests me. They have -- in fact -- three candidates spoken quite well in different ways about gun control. I think gun control is going to be a major issue of this campaign. I think the candidate that comes the closest to actually not to gun control, but to gun elimination is going to garner a surprising number of votes, not just Columbine, not just the terrible incidents in Alabama and Atlanta recently, but going back over 30 years and no more than 30 years, this has been the most destructive force and the most dramatically, sometimes melodramatically destructive force in the news. Here we've got a culture that is associated quite erroneously with guns. In fact, America, before 1850, U.S. citizens, there were 15 percent, only 15 percent of citizens owned guns. 10 percent of the deaths outside natural deaths were attributed to guns. Samuel Colt came along in the mid 19th century and said that guns were equalizers, and this nonsensical myth, which was just really an ad slogan, pertained all the way up till the 1960's. In the 1960's, then you had an acceleration of gun activity and other forms of anarchy and danger. And, by the way, the NRA didn't oppose gun control until the 1960's. So all this business about associating America with a gun culture is historically nonsense. We've had 30 years of a terrible eruption of semi's, of automatics and of handguns. The candidate who tells us how to get rid of those, leaving the hunting rifles and the shot guns and the other guns in the hands only of law enforcement agents, that candidate is going to be a successful candidate . ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But Roger, you feel fairly good about the fact that some of these issues are being addressed. ROGER ROSENBLATT: This -- what's interesting , Marcia McClelland said that by the time you've noticed a cultural event it probably has already happened. And my guess is - actually it's not a guess because the polls support it -- gun control is as good as here. Gun banishment may be here in 10 years, 15 years - not the national legislature -- that doesn't do anything, of course, as we see every time they perform before us. State legislatures are against it, foundations are supporting activities against it. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But I mean from the candidates. Are you hearing it? ROGER ROSENBLATT: Oh, sure. Elizabeth Dole, courageous Elizabeth Dole gets up there and talks about trigger locks. To me, this is just a mechanism on an obsolete machine, but she talks about it. Bill Bradley attacks the NRA head on, very nice, I like to hear it, and Al Gore, too, doing it. So from three of the four candidates -- three of the four candidates who have addressed it have addressed getting rid of it. Only George W. has done something in the other direction by making it impossible to sue gun manufacturer in Texas. But that's entirely against the grain. There are lawsuits in 20 states. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Clarence, what can be done to get the issues in this campaign that you want on? You said that because people think they have to reach a certain kind of constituency, the issues of poverty aren't being brought up. CLARENCE PAGE: Right. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What can be done to get those issues on the agenda? CLARENCE PAGE: Well, timing is everything. Right now is a good time to get them on the agenda, because the public is not paying attention, and so the politicians feel free to say something closer to what they really feel as Richard Rodriguez was alluding to earlier. For example, we've heard Al Gore and George W. Bush both speak eloquently about the need for government to work with faith-based organizations. That's a very interesting debate because we see -- if you look at the people who are still on welfare -- for the last three years of successful welfare reform, they are the people who are the most alienated. And faith-based groups have had a lot of success with drug rehabilitation, with family work --helping people to feel better about themselves , but there's that church-state problem, and that's a very real concern. And so we need to have a real debate nationally about how closely can government work with faith-based organizations without stepping all over church-state separation? We're going to hear more about it right now I'm afraid than we will this time next year because this time next year I'm afraid we're going to get caught up in the same old horse race and the same old game of gotcha over who is slipping in a banana peel this week. And it's up to us, the voters, to keep the politicians honest about that. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Richard, have you got any ideas for how to get the candidates to do what you want them to do, to really speak from the heart about the issues they really care about? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: No. I have no idea at all. What I do suggest is that when Roger speaks about gun control, that we be very careful about assigning certain questions that are properly politicians to discuss and others that are not. It seems to me that after Columbine, for example, the national press routinely turns to Washington for answers to questions that Washington and certainly the power elite is in no position to answer. There is a conversation that America needs to have. And it's not going to come during this presidential campaign. It is a conversation that does or does not take place in the American house between parents and children. And the conversation that we have at the political level, that we have on "Meet the Press" and on Sunday morning with the self-appointed chaplains like Bill Bennett or Trent Lott talking about my homosexuality or Dianne Feinstein talking about gun control , these people are properly talking or -- what shall I say - they should be properly assigned certain issues to discuss, but we should not be confused about the relationship of our own lives to more intimate, more personal issues in conversations that the politicians have no right to intrude in. It seems to me that what we are doing too often in American public life is we are referring to politicians when we should be referring to some other level of our experience, to priests, to poets, to our own intimates, and we are asking from presidential candidates answers to questions that they are not prepared to answer. But like all politicians, they're too willing to answer. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Anne, you said you thought that the candidates might not address your issues because they're afraid of offending anybody. How can they be compelled to address some of these issues? ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: You know, I was just sitting here, and I listen to us talk, and I find it - it happens even when I talk - we - it seems to me we need a whole new vocabulary, those of us who want to hold their feet to the fire. I mean, we use these - this sort of retread language that somehow doesn't get at the passion with which even we sitting here feel about these issues. We find ourselves - I mean, Clarence uses words that I resonate to, like alienation and the poor. But it isn't cutting through. It almost seems to me that we in the media and those of us who care need to find a whole other vocabulary to try and address some of this - to bring some passion back to it. And I think that this is one of the things Richard was talking about in the beginning. But once you say "the poor and the alienated", you've already agreed to a striation in the society that doesn't make those of us who are better off and who have benefited by the economic boom feel part of the dialogue. You know, there's suddenly the poor and the rich and what are we going to do for them. How do we address it again as a sort of societal, familial problem? I think one of the things that - why gun control has cut through is because it's affected everybody right across that economic spectrum. It's also one of the issues that's therefore easy for us to get at. Let me just say one thing about Richard's point about the fact that we should call on other people than politicians, I say yes to a certain extent but no to the other extent. I think then we cede territory. I mean, the ongoing issues about the spending of the surplus which is absolutely fundamental where that money goes, how it's played out, and again I want to bring up foreign policy again, because it's one of the things that we have not talked about much. I think it's going to be a huge issue coming into the next decade and century. I mean, what conversation are they prepared to have about the proliferation of arms? And there was a piece in the New York Times not too long ago how the fact that America's armed the world and continues to arm the world. All of that is going to come back to haunt. And I do think we need to have conversations in our private places, but I think we have to try and find a vocabulary ourselves that's somehow fresh and somehow forces these issues onto the table. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this now, but many thanks to all of you. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Our emphasis and our questions will continue for several more months, and you can participate by visiting our Web site at pbs.org/newshour, and also by regular mail to: The NewsHour, Box 2626, Washington, D.C., 20013. |
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