Who will you vote for? Bill Clinton or Bob Dole?
Do you like the rich white lawyer from a rural heartland state? The one who talks a pile about small-town values and understanding business, even though his whole adult life has been spent in big cities and government jobs?
Or do you prefer the one married to an Ivy League attorney who was once a liberal crusader but became a corporate sleaze, embarrassing her husband with questionable real estate deals?
Which is better? The one with a history of commodities scams, advisors under indictment, disappearing documents, and backroom payoffs, or the one who paraded around the capital with a leggy blonde while his wife stayed home raising their daughter?
One candidate blathers about ethics, even though he only supports Special Prosecutors when they're digging into his opponents. The other guy gives lip service to campaign finance reform while sucking up tens of millions of dollars in corporate payoffs.
Do you believe the first guy's promise to slash taxes, even though he advocated some of the largest tax increases in U.S. history? Then again, lubricate the other guy's pockets, and he'll sell off the rainforests for logging, hand billions of tax dollars to the oil companies, and let the media moguls monopolize the nation's news.
Can you actually support someone whose flunkies, coolies, and cabinet candidates are polluter lobbyists and white shoe attorneys devoted to ensuring his investors receive what they paid for?
Will you vote for the guy who will continue to increase military spending, in spite of a rather remarkable lack of national enemies? The one who pushes especially hard for unworkable crap like the Stealth, Osprey, and Star Wars, which the Pentagon doesn't even want?
Or do you prefer the one who picks and chooses his Threats To The Free World, favoring exports to Vietnam while tightening the embargo on Cuba? That one speaks harshly of dictators when they threaten his investors' fortunes, as in Iraq and North Korea, but he'll look the other way when the money holds the guns, as in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
Who will you pick?
One guy supports NAFTA, GATT, and China's Most Favored Nation trade status, in spite of its continued human rights atrocities. He also advocates "right-to-work" laws, drastically decreasing the rights of American workers to organize against poor working conditions.
The other guy says with a straight face that the destruction of welfare will ultimately help the poor, and that drug use can be stopped by building more prisons.
Can you really support a candidate who advocates the death penalty for over 60 crimes, favors the execution of minors and the mentally retarded, and wants to restrict the right of appeal even if innocence is proven?
Then again, his opponent derides "big government" but wants to expand FBI and CIA domestic surveillance operations and the government's power to seize assets before trial, sometimes from people who aren't even accused of crimes.
What will you do?
Will you support a candidate who has modified his positions on affirmative action, school prayer, abortion, and other social issues for 20 years, fooling his core voters into assuming he cares what they think?
Or will you vote for someone who will stack the courts based on his only real ideology: the expansion of corporate power, tempered by short-term political expediency?
Who's your choice? Dole or Clinton?
Whether you like it or not, all of the above is true of both.
One of them will win.
All of us will lose.
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Bob Harris is a political comedian who has lectured at over 250 colleges nationwide.
Original file name: THE SCOOP- Decision '96 - Billy
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