Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
The day of reckoning The presidential campaign has provided the electorate with a remarkably benign view of the country's condition. George Bush has no reason and, as far as we can tell, no...
...We encourage Japan to remilitarize instead of supporting their recent, tentative steps toward fostering third-world development...
...They have been aided and abetted by TV cameras that prefer cheap shots to matters of substance...
...men and women should work and eat, earn and spend, both privately and collectively, so that their children and their children's children would inherit a better world...
...Michael Dukakis suspects, probably with reason, that he will win no votes spelling out the drastic measures needed to remedy those eight years of supply-side wrongs...
...It allows Mr...
...It is a deadly temptation: giving way to it could lead to a still darker, still meaner brand of politics in this country, particularly at that not too distant time when the bills for the Reagan revolution start falling due...
...In all of these areas, the next administration will face a daunting task: the reorientation of American policy from domination and rigidity toward partnership and flexibility...
...But much of the Soviet government's change in policy is not our doing and not under our control...
...New corporate debt amounts to $726 billion...
...A substantial portion of this unprecedented borrowing has been misspent...
...If it's successful...
...The deficit is the most conspicuous symbol of our altered economic condition...
...Bush holds up the Mickey Mouse invasion of Grenada and the wasteful and destructive support of the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters...
...Or worse, if it's not...
...As to values, everyone has embraced the cause of the family, but to what end...
...He ascribes our improved relations with the former evil empire to the administration's military build-up, especially NATO's deployment of and ground- launched cruise missiles, and in that he may be partially correct...
...We treat the peace efforts of the Central American presidents with disdain...
...Those who argue that this debt is relatively easy to reduce-raise taxes, spend less, and raise productivity in the private sector-fail to take account of our political inability to agree on the first two and business's failure to accomplish the third, even after eight years of deregulation...
...Dukakis's views precisely to avoid a genuine confrontation...
...In a new book, The Day of Reckoning (Random House), Benjamin Friedman sums up what responsible economists, including several who have gone through the Reagan administration's revolving door, have been saying fora while: "The radical course upon which United States economic policy was launched in the 1980s violated the basic moral principle that...
...One is the economy, another is military and foreign policy, and the third involves the much-talked-about but wildly distorted question of values...
...As examples of a "tough-minded" foreign and military policy, Mr...
...We are radically unprepared to deal with its changing foreign policy and the pressure-cooker atmosphere developing in Eastern Europe...
...Since 1980 we have broken with that tradition by pursuing a policy that amounts to living not just in, but for, the present...
...allies...
...As a result, neither candidate is trying to win by educating the electorate about the critical issues a new administration will have to confront very early in its term...
...We nourish Israeli intransigence toward the Palestinians with a flow of blank checks...
...government owes over $2.5 trillion...
...Forty years of Cold War thinking has eroded our capacity for flexible and pragmatic responses to what will be among the biggest foreign and military policy questions we have ever faced: How will we respond to a Soviet government groping for credibility and prosperity...
...George Bush has no reason and, as far as we can tell, no capacity to criticize the last eight years...
...We are living well by running up our debt and selling off our assets The costs, which are only beginning to come due, will include a lower standard of living . . . and reduced American influence and importance in world affairs...
...their campaigns have not even addressed much less illuminated the precarious future the country faces...
...Rather than investment in new productive capacities, which along with the lower dollar could help reduce the trade deficit, there have been buyouts, mergers, golden parachutes, and other forms of corporate bingeing...
...Our politicians have taken the lead in depoliticizing the electorate...
...Bush has done nothing to relieve honest concerns on the first two points and has vulgarized Mr...
...That means having the guts to tell the truth about the Reagan government and its policies, about the economic state of the nation, and about the positions of its political opponents so as to engage them in genuine debate...
...And what of U.S...
...Dukakis, though embracing liberal values in social and cultural matters, has done little to defend them either passionately or rationally before a skeptical electorate...
...This kind of electioneering creates a temptation to withdraw, to opt out, to say "a pox on both your houses...
...The U.S...
...Bush to avoid talking about the values a government really has the capacity to foster-above all, maintaining a sense of trust between itself and its citizens...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
