The Character of a Free People

The Character of a Free People
Bush and Gore quibble over policy proposals. Does either know what makes our country great?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, October 4, 2000 4:01 a.m. EDT

In one of the slicker moments of last night's presidential debate, Al Gore dismissed the question of character and told George W. Bush he wanted to focus instead on the issues. "I think we ought to attack the country's problems, not each other," said Mr. Gore.

For a man vulnerable on matters of character, it's a neat debating tactic. But it shrugs off a big question. Since when is character not a vital issue in judging who should be president of the United States?

Listening to the laundry lists of programs from both candidates, I kept thinking that the real challenge for viewers was less to total the arithmetic than to glean a sense of how these candidates would respond to a world that might stray from all this careful planning--as the world tends to do. Wars, financial booms and busts, new technologies and society's changing passions require not so much a perfectly refined blueprint at the start as a steady grip on guiding principles. And that involves, among other things, character.

One of America's problems these past eight years has been precisely how to respond to the character of the president to whom Mr. Gore has hitched his own fortunes. Between the trail of lies that ultimately got Bill Clinton impeached, the flotsam of convicted cronies, the unanswered questions about campaign money and the apparent lack of conscience, Mr. Clinton has sent the message that America's leaders are entitled to do pretty much anything they think they can get away with. Their big challenge is not to act with integrity, but to cover it up when they don't. Mr. Gore, with his own bouts of "no controlling legal authority" has gone along with Mr. Clinton tightly enough that even if we believe his claims that he is now his own man, it is worth wondering what kind of man that might be.

Mr. Gore's argument in last night's debate was that we should focus not on character, but on results. All right, let's give it a try. He was referring to such things as the economic boom--for which we can thank not the Clinton-Gore administration, but the American people. First, in 1994, for voting in the Republican Congress that stymied some of Mr. Clinton's more disastrous impulses toward bigger government. Second, for taking the risks and putting in the thought and sweat to create the wealth for which Mr. Gore now wants credit.

There are other results of the Clinton-Gore tenure, however, for which the president and vice president should take direct responsibility. Mr. Bush summed it up nicely when he quipped that they have moved Harry S. Truman's sign reading "The buck stops here" from the Oval Office to the Lincoln bedroom. That was not, as Mr. Gore would have it, an "attack" on character. It was more a description of how the system works these days, under custom reshaped by an administration in which it's not character that matters, only results.

It's an attitude all the more disturbing in Mr. Gore because this cavalier view of character in the White House comes coupled with a philosophy that says government is entitled to decide in exhaustive detail how people live their lives. This is the old central-planning fallacy according to which government knows best, now tied to the Clintonian notion that it's somehow not nice for voters, or political competitors, to demand that folks in government be accountable for what they do.

Worse still, Mr. Gore seems to see American prosperity as something to "use," like a pie now baked and ready to cut up and eat. But our prosperity comes from freedom, which, if defended against government grabs, will create far more wealth and spread it further.

That's not Mr. Gore's plan. If, for example, we get tax cuts, he will target them so as to shape our behavior--persuading us to do business as government deems best. If parents want better schools for their children, they will have to depend not on their own judgment about where federal funds for their kids should be spent, but on government decisions to shut down bad schools and reopen them under a state-dispatched "turnaround team," as Mr. Gore explained last night.

To suggest that character doesn't matter in a president is to imply little respect for the American people. To propose that a character-neutral presidency then micromanage their lives is to respect them even less.

In this debate, I kept listening for the moment when someone would draw together in one ringing statement such ideas as freedom, justice and basic respect--not patronizing compassion, but genuine respect--for fellow Americans. It never quite arrived. Mr. Bush threw out good sentences here and there, including what must have been a mind-bending notion to the current administration: "I think that people need to be held responsible for the actions they take in life."

Mr. Gore, under the impossible slogan "I will never let you down," talked about various strands in the vast paternalistic web of government with which he proposes to care for us all--except maybe those Americans rash and innovative enough to have made the mistake of doing something that earns them a lot of money.

But neither of them looked the American people in the eye and reminded them that this is a country built not on prescription drugs for seniors, or decisions about whether to explore for oil here or spend state money on clean-coal programs there. It is a country built on the principle that people given a framework of fair and impartial laws and the freedom to manage their own lives will do wondrous things. They will create wealth the world could scarcely have imagined, they will preserve a way of life dedicated to liberty and the pursuit of happiness--not as the government defines it, but as they individually choose.

Mr. Bush seems the better candidate to deliver this message. I hope next time he does.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."