"NOTES FROM WILLOW"

by Joel Kovel

July, 1996--slightly updated for Sept, 96

My Top Ten Reasons to not vote for Bill Clinton

Forget Dole. Not age but a mean spirit, an empty mind, and loathsome values rule Bob Dole out. This is the man who says that tobacco is not addicting, and that the children of illegal immigrants should be denied public education. In short, a sleazy panderer--to big tobacco, to California racists, to whosoever has the power or wealth to get him into office.

Bob Dole is so awful that many people of liberal persuasion are proposing to hold their noses in November and pull the lever for William Jefferson Clinton. Yes, it is admitted, Clinton, too, is a sleazy panderer. But then comes a variation on the pronouncement made by Franklin Roosevelt about a certain Nicaraguan dictator. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch," said FDR, "but he's our son of a bitch." By the same logic, President Bill isour sleazy panderer: a bad egg, but politically better than the dreaded Dole, hence deserving of our vote.

But is he? I remember reading a witticism of sorts recently delivered by some Republican Party macher: "The good news is that we're going to have a Republican president in 1997. The bad news is that he's named Clinton." In short, voting for Clinton as against Dole confers no marginal political advantage to the left. In case you doubt, here is my personal checklist for the ten top reasons to not pull that lever next to the name of President Bill, not necessarily in order of importance.

  1. Clinton hustled shamelessly and around the clock for the NAFTA and GATT treaties, virtually giving away the store to cajole reluctant Congresspersons aboard. Neither of these brutal blows to working people and the global environment would have happened without him.
  2. Bill (and Hillary) betrayed the hopes they raised for reform of our horrendous health care system. By hopping into bed with big insurance companies, they took the only rational alternative, Single Payer coverage, off the board from the beginning of the debate. The Clintons thereby set back meaningful health reform back by at least a decade.
  3. Clinton and his Vice President Al Gore have defined a new phase in the ravaging of the environment by talking green out of one side of the mouth while selling off nature to big business from the other. They are way ahead of Bush, or any crude Republican operation, here. One example among many: Clinton preached unctuously about saving old growth forest while secretly supporting a "timber salvage" rider which mandates that the US Forest Service sell 5 billion board feet of old growth trees, without environmental restrictions and shielded from court challenges.
  4. No US president has had so vicious a Cuba policy. History will note that under Clinton's watch the cruel and illegal blockade has gone from being a rescindable presidential degree to the law of the land, thanks to his support of the Helms (as in Jesse)-Burton Act--all to win Florida back from the GOP. The tradition which Clinton carries to new extremes is worth noting: throughout the history of the cold war, Democrats often acted more aggressively anticommunist than Republicans, in order to beef up their bona fides.
  5. In a similar vein, this less-than-heroic figure, his manhood under perpetual doubt, strenuously embraces the death penalty and saw to it that Arkansas became a bellwether of state-performed homicide while he was governor.
  6. Clinton helped ram an anti-terrorism bill through Congress which could have been used to make support for the African National Congress a felony during the days of apartheid.
  7. His callous and opportunistic support of welfare destruction w