Excerpts: Candidates Go Toe-to-Toe on Jobs, Health Care, Cities

Following are excerpts from Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate in Atlanta:

Opening Statements

Al Gore: Mr. Vice President, Dan, if I may . . . I’ll make you a deal this evening--if you don’t try to compare George Bush to Harry Truman, I won’t compare you to Jack Kennedy. . . .

Harry Truman, it’s worth remembering, assumed the presidency when Franklin Roosevelt died here in Georgia. Only one of many occasions when fate thrust a vice president into the Oval Office in a time of crisis.

It’s something to think about during the debate this evening. . . . Bill Clinton and I stand for change because we don’t believe our nation can stand four more years of what we’ve had under George Bush and Dan Quayle.

When the recession came they were like a deer caught in the headlights--paralyzed into inaction. Blinded to the suffering and pain of bankruptcies and people who are unemployed.

We have an environmental crisis, a health insurance crisis, substandard education. It is time for a change. . . .

Vice President Dan Quayle: There are two things that I’m going to stress during this debate: One, Bill Clinton’s economic plan and his agenda will make matters much, much worse. He will raise your taxes, he will increase spending, he will make government bigger. Jobs will be lost.

Second, Bill Clinton does not have the strength nor the character to be President of the United States. Let us look at the agendas: President Bush wants to hold the line on taxes; Bill Clinton wants to raise taxes.

President Bush is for a balanced-budget amendment; Bill Clinton is opposed to it. We want to reform the legal system because it’s too costly; Bill Clinton wants the status quo.

We want to reform the health care system; Bill Clinton wants to ration health care. Bill Clinton wants to empower government; we want to empower people. . . .

James B. Stockdale: Who am I? Why am I here? I’m not a politician--everybody knows that. So, don’t expect me to use the language of the Washington insider. Thirty-seven years in the Navy and only one of them up there in Washington, and now I’m an academic.

The centerpiece of my life was the Vietnam War. I was there the day it started. I led the first bombing raid against North Vietnam. I was there the day it ended and I was there for everything in between--10 years in Vietnam, aerial combat and torture.

I know things about the Vietnam War better than anybody in the world. I know some things about the Vietnam War better than anybody in the world. And I know how governments--how American governments can be courageous and how they can be callow. . . . That’s one thing I’m an insider on.

I was the leader of the underground of the American pilots who were shot down and in prison in North Vietnam. You should know that the American character displayed in those dungeons by those fine men was a thing of beauty.

I look back on those years as the beginning of wisdom--learning everything a man can learn about the vulnerabilities and the strengths that are ours as Americans. . . .

Jobs and the Economy

Stockdale: The life blood of our economy is investment and right now when we pay--we borrow $350 billion a year--it saps the money markets and the private investors are not getting their share.

What we do is work on that budget by an aggressive program, not a painful program, so that we can start borrowing less money and getting more investment money on the street through entrepreneurs who can build factories who will hire people and maybe we’ll start manufacturing goods here in this country again.

Gore: Bill Clinton’s top priority is putting America back to work. Bill Clinton and I will create good, high-wage jobs for our people the same way he has done in his state.

Bill Clinton has created high-wage manufacturing jobs at 10 times the national average. And in fact, according to the statistics coming from the Bush-Quayle Labor Department, for the last two years in a row, Bill Clinton’s state has been No. 1 among all 50 in the creation of jobs in the private sector.

By contrast, in the nation as a whole during the last four years, it is the first time since the presidency of Herbert Hoover that we have gone for a four-year period with fewer jobs at the end of that four-year period than we had at the beginning.

Quayle: You know, you keep talking about trickle-down economics and all this stuff about the worst economy since Hoover. It is a bad economy. It’s a tough economy.

The question isn’t who; it’s not who you’re going to blame. What are you going to do about it? Your proposal is to raise $150 billion in taxes, to raise $220 billion in new spending. . . .

You know what you’re doing? You’re pulling a Clinton. And you know what a Clinton is? A Clinton is when he says one thing one day and another thing the next day. . . .

The Environment

Quayle: You don’t have to have a choice between the environment and jobs. You can have both. Look at the President’s record. Clean air legislation passed the Democratic Congress because of the leadership of George Bush. It is the most comprehensive clean air act in our history. . . .

In the book (Gore’s “Earth in the Balance”) you also suggest taxes on gasoline, taxes on utilities, taxes on carbon, taxes on timber. There’s a whole host of taxes. And I don’t just believe--I don’t believe raising taxes is the way to solve our environmental problems.

Stockdale: I read Sen. Gore’s book about the environment. I don’t see how he could possibly pay for his proposals in today’s economic climate. . . .

And also I’m told by some experts that the things that he fears most may not be all that dangerous, according to some scientists. You know, you can overdo, I am told, environmental cleaning up. If you purify the pond, the water lilies die.

You know, I love this planet and I want it to stay here. But I don’t like to have it the private property of fanatics that want to overdo this thing.

Gore: Bill Clinton and I believe we can create millions of new jobs by leading the environmental revolution instead of dragging our feet and bringing up the rear. You know, Japan and Germany are both openly proclaiming to the world now that the biggest new market in the history of world business is the market for the new products and technologies that foster economic progress without environmental destruction.

This is a value--this is an issue that touches my basic values. I’m taught in my religious tradition that we are given dominion over the Earth, but we’re required to be good stewards of the Earth. . . .

Health Care

Stockdale: Well, we have excellent technical health care, but we don’t administer it very well. And the escalating costs top any other budget danger on the horizon, I think. And what Mr. Perot has suggested is that we try to look at the incentives.

The incentives that are in our current way of doing business are what are killing us. There is no incentive for a hypochondriac not to go to Medicare every day. There is no incentive for a doctor to curtail the expensive tests because he’s under threat of malpractice lawyers.

Gore: Bill Clinton and I believe that if a criminal has a right to a lawyer, every American family ought to have a right to see a doctor of their own choosing when they need to see a doctor.

There are almost 40 million Americans who work full-time today and yet have no health insurance whatsoever. We are proposing to change that. Not with a government-run plan, not with new taxes, but with a new approach called managed competition, we are going to provide a standard health insurance package, provided by private insurance companies, and eliminate the duplication and red tape and overlap.

And we are going to have cost controls to eliminate the unnecessary procedures that are costing so much money today. . . .

Quayle: You talk about increasing costs, but the President has had on Capitol Hill medical malpractice reform legislation for several years. Defensive medicine and health care today cost $20.7 billion. Defensive medicine defined as testing and treatment that is only necessary in case of a lawsuit.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to take $20.7 billion that we’re putting into our legal system and put it into preventive health care or women’s health care--or something else besides trial lawyers?

But no, you don’t want to reform the health care system to drive down costs of medical malpractice. What you’re doing, you are talking about a government program; your program is to ration health care. . . . When you start rationing health care there is going to be a waiting line to see a doctor unless it’s an emergency.

Stand on Abortion

Gore: Bill Clinton and I support the right of a woman to choose. That doesn’t mean we’re pro-abortion. In fact, we believe there are way too many abortions in this country. And the way to reduce them is by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, not vetoing family planning legislation the way George Bush has consistently done.

The reason we are pro-choice and in favor of a woman’s right to privacy is because we believe that, during the early stages of a pregnancy, the government has no business coming in and ordering a woman to do what the government thinks is best. . . .

Quayle: This issue is an issue that divides Americans deeply. I happen to be pro-life. I have been pro-life for my 16 years in public life. My objective and the President’s objective is to try to reduce abortions in this country. . . .

Why shouldn’t we have more reflection on the issue before the decision of abortion is made? I would hope that we would agree upon that--something like a 24-hour waiting period, parental notification.

Stockdale: I believe that a woman owns her body and what she does with it is her own business. Period. . . . I, too, abhor abortions. But I don’t think they should be made illegal and I don’t think it’s a political issue.

Helping the Cities

Quayle: Enterprise zones are important and it’s an idea that the President has been pushing, and there’s been very strong reluctance on, with the Democratic Congress. We’ll continue to push it. . . .

But when you look at the cities and you see the problems we have--crime, drugs, lack of jobs--I also want to point out one of the fundamental problems that we have in our American cities and throughout America today. And that is the breakdown of the American family. . . . The breakdown of the family is a contributing factor to the problems that we have in urban America. . . .

Where have we come if joining a gang is like being a member of a family? . . .

Stockdale: I think enterprise zones are good, but I think the problem is deeper than that. . . . Somehow, we’re going to have to get some love in this country between races and between rich and poor. You have got to have leaders--and they’re out there--who can do this with their bare hands, working with people on the scene.

Gore: George Bush’s urban policy has been a tale of two cities--the best of times for the very wealthy, the worst of times for everyone else. . . .

Bill Clinton and I want to change that by creating good jobs, investing in infrastructure, new programs in job training and apprenticeship, welfare reform--to say to a mother with young children that if she gets a good job, her children are not going to lose their Medicaid benefits, incentives for investment in the inner-city area, and, yes, enterprise zones.