SACRAMENTO, CA - The big political news on the eve of the final debate was the outrage of California Secretary of State Bill Jones and officials in other states about a website that was offering to sell votes to the highest
bidder. The chairman of the Chicago Board of Elections (yes, that Chicago, the one where dead people routinely
vote) solemnly charged that the website “impugned the integrity of our electoral system.” By the end of the
day, the site, voteauction.com, was shut down.

Too bad we can’t shut down an even larger vote-buying scheme: the Democratic Party. The Gore-Lieberman
campaign is starting to make the explicit appeal to elderly voters that they should vote for the Democratic
ticket because they will spend more money than Republicans for prescription drugs for the elderly--$500 billion to $180 billion. If this doesn’t count as vote-buying, it is hard to see what would. Once again we see the federal government acting as a monopolist, throttling any competition at its own game.

Voteauction.com must have been run by Republicans, though, because it was both inartful and parsimonious.
The bid for votes on voteauction.com had reached a mere $13 a vote--less than what you can get selling a pint
of blood. Democrats have the genius to bribe people with their own money, so they always come in with the
highest bid. Republicans, typically business-minded but confused about politics, act as though this kind of
electioneering is like a contract process where the low bid wins. If a Democrat says, “I’ll spend $100 on you,”
a Republican typically responds, “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll spend $50 on you!” Think of it as “low budget
liberalism.” No wonder the GOP is known as the Stupid Party.

Gov. Bush deserves kudos for attempting to put up some fight about this by appealing to younger voters about
the Social Security rip-off. As Andrew Sullivan points out in The New Republic, elderly Americans are the wealthiest cohort of our population, which makes promising elderly Americans still more booty from the federal treasury the most fiscally irresponsible act since Social Security and Medicare.

In other news, we were intrigued when we recently stumbled across the following statement about
environmental policy: “We believe that people know what’s best for their own communities and, given the
facts, they themselves will determine what is best to protect public health and the environment.”

Sounds like it came right from a George W. Bush speech about “empowering people, not Washington,” doesn’t it? In fact, the author of these words was none other than Carol Browner, administrator of the EPA and a long-time associate of Vice President Gore’s. Did we miss Browner’s endorsement of Bush?

Finally, as we near the vote on school choice plans in Michigan and California, it is worth recalling this
recent comment: “The standoff between vouchers and [teacher union] money is predictable. It is also
regrettable, because it prevents consideration of a most promising way to improve school performance… Why
not simply ‘voucherize’ all education funding and let students and their parents select where they can get
the best education?” The author of this comment? The charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy,
former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

- Steven Hayward