PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE : America Deserves a Leader With Principles

Never before in history has a nation had such glittering opportunities as we do today. We are the only superpower. Empires and great states of the past were essentially regional affairs. Our influence is global. If America gets it right, the world has a chance to get it right. If America gets in trouble, the rest of the world is in trouble.

The question is: Will America rise to this extraordinary occasion? Or will we be known as the Era of Missed Opportunities?

Bob Dole and Jack Kemp must be elected to our nation’s highest offices. They have put forth positive proposals that will unleash our enormous potential. They will be better able to guide us through the crises that soon will be exploding around the globe.

Bill Clinton has proven himself unequal to the demands of these times. His higher taxes and increased regulations have burdened us with the slowest economic expansion in American history. He has failed to come up with a coherent foreign policy. And his administration is morally squalid.

The U.S. should be experiencing an economic boom of unprecedented proportions. The economic fundamentals are fabulous: a powerful investment boom since the early 1980s; our reemergence as a manufacturing powerhouse; formidable leads in microprocessors, software, fiber optics and Internet technology; abundant capital; trading prowess. But to experience a vibrant, surging economy, major obstacles must be removed, the principal one being the tax code.

The typical family today pays eight times as much tax on each dollar of income as did a similar family 45 years ago. Two breadwinners cannot provide for a family the way one breadwinner could in generations past. Clinton favors the status quo, with a dose of small fixes here and a dollop of “targeted tax cuts� there.

Clinton and his cohorts cannot comprehend that when you lower the price of and burden on work, success, productivity and inventiveness, you get more of these desirable things. The John Kennedy tax cuts of the early 1960s made possible five straight years of 5% real growth rates with minimal inflation. The Reagan reductions triggered our longest peacetime expansion with the rate of inflation falling by two-thirds. The problem of the ‘80s wasn’t insufficient federal revenues--they doubled--but rather a political culture that spent the extra money and then spent some more. It was as if you got a $10,000 raise and spent $20,000. That’s a spending problem, not an income problem.

The Dole-Kemp tax cut package would lower barriers to growth. Of vastly greater significance, though, is the Dole-Kemp vow to junk the currently complex, corrupting tax code and replace it with something that is fair, simple and flatter. Do that, and the economy will explode with growth. Immense amounts of brainpower would be applied to productive tasks. Now, we spend about 5 billion hours and almost $225 billion a year filling out tax forms. Government revenue would grow even faster than the economy because there would be far better compliance. The Dole-Kemp ticket also advocates sensible, long-needed legal, education and regulatory reform.

Meanwhile, the moral rot at the core of the administration is mind-boggling. The president’s ill-disguised hint that he will pardon Whitewater criminals is, in spirit at least, an obstruction of justice. The abuse of FBI files on opponents is a crime of Watergate proportions. The president’s until-this-election-year indifference to drug use has helped fuel a nationwide epidemic among our young. The Democratic National Committee’s attempt to hide a former administration official implicated in the Indonesian contribution scandal from a subpoena is appalling. Clinton’s cynical veto of a bill to ban “partial-birth abortions�--a euphemism for infanticide--is disgraceful.

The administration has no foreign policy. It did nothing when Iran sent agents and troops into the safe haven in northern Iraq that we and our Gulf War allies were enforcing to protect the Kurds. The White House did nothing effective when Saddam’s troops brazenly entered the forbidden zone and set about butchering all who supported us. That disaster was not just a foreign policy failure; it was a betrayal. And weren’t our troops supposed to be home from Bosnia by Christmas? The president’s glib reassurances that no missile defense system will be necessary for a decade or more rings hollow.

The Middle East peace process is falling apart. The imperial ambitions of Iran and Iraq burn as strong as ever. The Korean peninsula remains a tinderbox. When our troops finally are withdrawn from Bosnia, that corner of Europe will descend again into genocidal violence. Russia could go into a deadly power struggle if Boris Yeltsin’s health continues to deteriorate.

After World War I, democracy was triumphant in most of Europe. But the kind of passivity and ineffective ad hoc approach that is the Clinton hallmark today helped create conditions that led to democracy’s general collapse, most ominously in Germany.

We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to make a Dole-Kemp victory possible.