From: gurd@next06csc.wam.umd.edu (Daffy Duck)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Ideal Candidates Platform
Date: 11 Apr 92 02:06:30 GMT
Reply-To: gurd@wam.umd.edu

In todays Washington Times (April 19), there was a interesting colunm by  
Tom Peters titled "America needs a fantasy platform".  I thought it had  
some intersting points!  So here it is for the benefit of net readers.

"America needs a fantasy Platform"
On Excellence by Tom Peters

This hour brings an almost unprecendented global opportunity.  Are our  
leaders and would-be-leaders up to it?  Here's more of my election-year  
fantasy.
1.  Maintain a strong defense.  The end of history it ain't.  Mindless  
defense cutbacks that mimic the past are a mistake.  On the other hand,  
force restructuring provides a marvelous opportunity to examine military  
effectiveness.  Organizations like Business Executives for national  
Security argue for dramatic pro-competetive shifts in procurement policty  
that could give us plenty of bang for a lot fewer bucks.
2.  Take advantage of "good" regulation.  Regulation can spur exonomic  
growth!  Draconian environmental standards can make us, like Germany,  
leaders in the burgeoning environmental products, and services market (Not  
even information technology is growing faster.)
     More stringent product-safety standards leads to more cmpetitive,  
high-quality products fit for the creasingly stadards-concsious, global  
marketplace.  Geting behind the spirit as well as the particulars of the  
new American with Disabilities Act will allow us to tap along  
underutilized extraordinarily energetic part of the work force.
2.  Conserve!
   Our waste of resources is disgraceful.  Incentives to conserve, not tax  
breaks for drilling the Artic tundra, will repa gargantuan long-term  
economic benefits.  Begin with a five-year move to an added  
dollar-a-gallon gas tax.
3.  Spur inner-city economic development.
   Housing and Urban Development Secratery Jack Kemp is our most  
articulate advocate for creating economic opportunity in the distraught  
and dangerous inner cities.  We should act on what he says.  Fast.
5.  Strike a new budget deal, and stick to it.
   A balanced budget amendment and lime-item budget-veto authority for the  
president have always sounded extreme.  But now I wonder.  After all  
California, has long prospered with the line-item veto -- and it's hardly  
turned governers into emperors.  Columnist Georg F. Will says we've gone  
from "tax and spend" Democrats to "borrow and spend" Republicans in the  
White House.  He's right, and a pox on both their houses.
6.  Curb the drug war's fearful excesses.
   A federal warden says that if our prison population continues to grow  
at the current rate, half of us will be in the slammer by 2050!  It sounds  
funny, but it's no joke.  We can't jail everyone.  (More than a million of  
us already behind bars already.)  And our military has no business chasing  
coa planter in Latin America.  The answer is clear:  the politically  
incorrect L-word.  Legalization of marijuana for starters.
7.  Embrace immigrants.
   The matchless of energy o Southern California, and Silicon Valley, is  
due in large measure to immigrant energy -- e.g. over 10,000 immigrant  
engineers in Silicon Valley.  Immigrants, in short, bring more solutions  
that problems.  They are arguably America's chief source of renewal and  
vitality.
8.  Keep pressing for civil rights.
   The 1960's was a turbulent, terrifying decade.  But when I think back  
on my childhood in Annapolis, MD.  (with "colored" and "white" toilets at  
the local service station), I am most proud as an American of the strides  
we've made in civil rights.  We are a much healthier country in 1992 than  
in 1952 as a reslut.  Let's not stand idly by while the clock is turned  
back by reactionary courts.
   And for heaven's sake, dust off the Equal Rights Amendment.  It is  
absurd -- and sickening -- that women do not have total equality  
guarenteed by the U.S. Constitution.
9.  Buy quality.
   To make the U.S. more competetive, we need to push our producers harder  
to make the best products in the world.  The only way to do that, as  
consumers, is to insist on -- and purchase -- the best at any given price  
level.  Whether the producer's factory is in Dehli, Bangkok, Osaka, or  
Gary, Ind., is immaterial.  And forget the idea that less expensive  
foreign goods result from below-cost dumping.  It's baloney:  For  
starters, read James Bovard's "The Fair Trade Fraud" on the inanity of  
almost all dumping charges.
10.  Take the moral high road.
   Politics is good stuff, all-American.  Elections have always been  
marked by expedidency.  On the other hand, I yarn for one more leader in  
my lifetime who will inspire me.  I have never been so ashamed to be an  
American as when Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina told his  
disgusting Hiroshima "joke."  It was bad enought that workers clapped,  
mcuh worse that a respected member of the U.S. Senate -- not rabid David  
Duke -- uttered the joke in the first place.
   Mr. Holling should be removed from office, then tarred and feathered.   
(I hereby volunteer to heat the tar)  But did you hear a single  
presidential candidate at the time, only four days before the South  
Carolina primary, say anthing about Mr. Holling's remark?  I didn't.
   I never thought I'd sing in praise of a cigarette company.  But the  
same week that Mr. Hollings disgorged his racist bile, RJR Nabisco  
announced an enormously progressive plan supporting a college education of  
workers's children.  Hats off to Chairman Lou Gerstner.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The reason I took the time to type the column in, is I HATE Pat Buchanan!
This platform is exactly the opposite of Mr. Buchanan's stupid platform.   
What a choice coming up in Novemeber either Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, or  
George Bush.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,ca.politics,ba.politics,alt.politics.homosexuality,soc.motss