Republican Vision? Keep Shopping

By: Paul Vitello

Is it too late to get that recount? I was just wondering. The 2000 presidential election is almost a year in the past. The Supreme Court gave Bush the benefit of the doubt, and we never did get that hand recount of the Florida votes.

A consortium of media companies, including the one that owns this newspaper, spent most of the past year recounting those votes. The overvotes, the undervotes. Remember the dangling chads of Palm Beach County? To think - the country hung by those confetti dots for a few months. How poignant it was, in retrospect.

Reporters crisscrossed the 67 counties of Florida for months, gathering tallies. They were going to show us how all the permutations would have added up: who would have won with undervotes counted and overvotes discounted; who would have won with the vice versa; who would have won with hanging chads, and without...

It promised to be a hell of a Sunday morning in the living rooms of America when that report came out. It had been slated for September or October.

But after Sept. 11, the news industry decided to put a hold on its recount for now. It is considered a bad time to bring up the question. Whether George W. Bush really won the Florida vote or not, he is the president, and we really need a president now. So amen and pass the gag to the person on your right.

Maybe it is not a good time to ask this question. I'm not going to argue with my own industry.

But as a person with no ambition to achieve a national security clearance in this lifetime, I would like to state for the record that it would be better for us all - Republicans, Democrats, independents, nonvoters, millionaires and working stiffs alike - if the White House were occupied by a Democrat.

Any Democrat. Al Gore would be the one, I guess. But, no offense to Al, it could be any one of a dozen honest Democrats.

Americans have not needed their government so much since, roughly, 1941, and Democrats are not afraid of their own government. Republicans, who for the past generation have defined themselves as people who distrust government, are essentially afraid of their own government.

Just look at the shape of the debate in Washington.

Will the government take over airport security? Republicans, including Bush, say no, because taking over the job of screening passengers and their baggage would create another dreaded government "bureacracy." Imagine a country that sent mercenaries into battle rather than "create another bureacracy" by raising an army of its own.

Democrats say yes, federalize airport security because the government should take the responsibility for protecting the public.

Will the economy need help in what seems to be an inevitable coming recession? Both Republicans and Democrats say yes.

But the Republican House of Representatives passed a bill last week that gives most of that help directly to corporate treasuries, no strings attached. Corporations can spend it on bonuses for their executives if they like. On chocolate bonbons.

The help is in the form of tax rebates and credits - an estimated $1.4 billion for IBM; $671 million for General Electric, which earned $9.8 billion in the first three quarters of this year, according to published reports. To name a couple.

Democrats cried foul. Though they were just as eager as Republicans to give $15 billion to the airline industry, no strings attached, can anyone imagine them repealing certain corporate taxes retroactively to 1986, as the Republicans' bill did?

Individuals get some tax relief under the House bill passed last week. But it is only a third of the benefits of this $100-billion stimulus.

Which is not the point, anyway.

Giving more money to individual taxpayers is not what we necessarily want from the government right now.

How about a simple call to service and sacrifice? Asking not what your country can do for you; asking what you can do for your country. Remember that? Everybody loves the quote. How about the spirit of it?

So far, Bush says all we can do for our country is shop.

That's the Republican vision of sacrifice: an electorate that buys and consumes to the limits of its income and beyond.

If sacrificing is too strong a word for them, what about "conserving"? If nothing else, the war in Afghanistan has shown us how unstable the governments of the Middle East and Central Asia really are. Saudi Arabia is revealed as a theocratic fascist state. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Syria - all hold power by force and repression.

Would it be a good idea for Americans to prepare for $5-a-gallon gasoline by acquiring different habits of consumption now, rather than when Islamic extremists and other explosions of rage take over the whole region?

Of course it would.

But how can a Republican, who believes in the redeeming power of private capital, urge Americans to curb their consumption of anything? How can a president who was elected with great heaps of money from the gas and oil industry - who is an oil man in his heart of true hearts, to give him credit for sincerity - help from gagging on such a thought?

He will not be asking you to do anything in the coming months except to keep your head down and to keep spending. That's the sum so far of W's vision thing. It's the Republican vision thing.

I don't know about you. It just doesn't feel right to me.

Can we have that recount please? I would just like to know.

Maybe it is perverse, but I'm curious about whether we're having a bad couple of months or whether our country has been officially star-crossed since about this time last year.