ustxtxb_obs_2001_01_19_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

means drawing lines around the freedom of maneuver of the incoming administration. In many areas, including foreign policy, there will be few major changes. In others, such as annual budgets and appropriations, compromises will have to be reached. But Bush should be opposed on actions whose reach will extend beyond his actual term. First, the new President should be allowed lifetime appointments only by consensus. The 50 Senate Democrats should freely block judicial nomina tions, whenever they carry even the slightest ideological taint. That may mean most of them, but no matter. And as for the Supreme Court especially, vacancies need not be filled. The Court can be rebuilt later, when properly elected government returns. Second, the Democrats should advise Bush not to introduce any legislation to cut or privatize any part of Social Security or Medicare. Third, Democrats should furiously oppose elimination of the estate taxa social incentive for recycling wealth to the non-profit sector, to foundations and universities, that has had a uniquely powerful effect on the form of American society. Once gone, this ingenious device will never be reenacted. Fourth, the people must unite to oppose the global dangers of National Missile Defensea strategic nightmare on which Bush campaigned that threatens for all time the security of us all. \(On this, the Democrats’ Fifth, Congress should enact a New Voting Rights Act, targeted precisely at the Florida abuses. This should stipulate: mandatory adoption of best-practice technology in all federal elections; a 24-hour voting day; a ban on private contractors to aid in purging voter rolls; and mandatory immediate hand count of all under-votes in federal elections. With those steps taken, Democrats must also recognize and adapt to the new polit ical landscape that emerged from this election. Outside of Florida, Democrats are finished in the South. But they have excellent prospects of consolidating a narrow majority of the electoral collegeso long as, in the next election, there is no Nader defection. What can prevent such a thing? Only a move away from the main Clinton compromises that so infuriated the progressive left. Nader’s voters were motivated passionately by issues like the drug war, the death penalty, consumer protection and national missile defenseissues where New Democrats took Republican positions in their effort to woo the South. Clinton the Southerner succeeded at thisbut against Republicans who were only weakly “Southern” at best. Gore, on the other hand, was principally a Northern candidate, strongly backed by the core Democrats, who ran against, and defeated so far as ballots were concerned, a wholly Southern Republican. Future Republicans will almost surely also be “Southern,” for that is where the base of the party now lies. And future Democrats, if they are Northern candidates too, can beat them. Many Democrats are at the moment bitter toward the Greens; they cost Gore support among environmentalists that he should not have had trouble holding. But Nader cost Al Gore the election only in a very narrow ._{.3 74: IMENECK Kevin Kreneck sense. Al Gore won the election. Gore beat Bush in almost every state that Nader might have tipped: Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin. The “narrow sense” was small New Hampshire, where Gore lost by 5,000 votes and Nader got 22,000. The tragedy, of course, was that Nader’s New Hampshire votes, and the four electors they could have delivered, would have made Florida irrelevant. But Gore actually won Florida, too. In short, Al Gore’s campaign proved that there is an electoral majority in the United States for a government that is truly a progressive coalition, and not merely an assemblage of sympathetic lawyers, professors and investment bankers. Rather, Americans will elect a government that firmly includes and effectively represents labor and minoritiesand greens. This is the government we must seek to electif we get another chance. And for that, the first task is to assure that the information ministries of our new corporate republic do not successfully cast a fog of forgetting over the crime that we have all just witnessed, with our own eyes. James K. Galbraith is a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, U.T.-Austin. He is author of Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, and co-editor of Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View. p JANUARY 19, 2001 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 13