SACRAMENTO, CA -- “Never in living memory have American politics been so unfocused,” wrote Irving Kristol two
months ago. This lack of focus on the part of the electorate has been borne out by the wild swings in the
opinion polls over recent weeks. Norman Ornstein has quipped that the U.S. at the moment is “a hotbed of
social rest,” which is why The Kiss seems to be moving voters’ emotions more than any set of issues.

The one exception seems to be health care, where the agitation in favor of prescription drug benefits for
the elderly appears to be cutting hard against Gov. Bush. It was inevitable that once the principle was
established through the Medicare program that the federal government would absorb the major share of the
cost of health care for the elderly, that sooner or later the program would have to include the cost of
prescription drugs as pharmaceutical products became increasingly important to elderly health maintenance.
The pharmaceutical industry is in this sense a victim of its own success.

Gov. Bush’s response is understandable in the heat of a campaign, but nonetheless problematic. Bush is falling
into the old trap that doomed Republicans back in the 1960s, when the “Conservative Republican Alternative
Program” was known by the obvious acronym, CRAP. In other words, Bush is countering Gore’s full-throated
entitlement liberalism with low-budget liberalism: Bush will spend $158 billion over 10 years instead of Gore’s
nearly $300 billion. Faced with the choice of low-budget liberalism and the real thing, many swing voters will choose to go with the real thing.

Yet there is a difference in principle between the competing proposals that goes beyond just the dollar
amounts committed. Bush wants to have a means-tested program, so that the government isn’t taxing working
people to subsidize elderly people who in many cases are much wealthier and can easily afford prescription
drugs. In other words, Bush wants a “targeted” prescription drug program, while Gore wants to have a
universal entitlement. But when it comes to tax cuts, the positions reverse.

Gore wants a “targeted” tax cut aimed at lower income groups (which means essentially an income transfer or
no tax cut at all, since lower income groups pay a very small share of the income tax), while Gov. Bush wants a
universal tax cut, with most taxpayers receiving a cut in proportion to how much they pay in taxes. An
interesting issue, but Republicans tend to be very bad about arguing “fairness.”

Both issues also expose to the discerning eye a profound difference between the two parties that is easily lost in this age of centrism. Exactly four years ago in this space I wrote: “The ‘targeted’ tax cut philosophy that Clinton espouses represents the technocratic belief that government can ‘pick winners’ and fine-tune economic outcomes with the delicate scalpel of government tax policy.” It is the same today with the Vice President, not only with taxes but also with prescription drugs.

Last Saturday in Washington outgoing Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave a valedictory address to the
American Political Science Association, in which he warned that if a prescription drug benefit comes with
price controls (as Gore’s inevitably would), then “we’d better hope the Swiss [pharmaceutical industry] keep
working.”

- Steven Hayward