Presidential Aptitude Test.

• Author: POMPER, STEPHEN
• Position: Trivial coverage of 2000 primary elections by news media

What you really need to know to pick a president.

CAMPAIGN FATIGUE. THERE'S ALMOST A year left in Campaign 2000 and we've already got it bad. In a November poll by Harvard University, twice as many potential voters described the presidential campaign as "uninformative" as called it "informative: Nearly two-thirds of those polled also found the campaign "boring:

Maybe that's because the media seem to find it boring too. Instead of looking for provocative angles on the issues that matter, too many reporters have been distracted by peripheral issues or allowed themselves to arrive at the premature conclusion that the candidates are all the same.

You could see this theme percolating on the fringes of respectable journalism as early as July when Arianna Huffington observed that, "In a sense we now have one corporate party. We have the pro-life corporate party and the pro-choice corporate party ..."

The National Journal then picked up the ball in October with a cover that depicted Al Gore morphing into George Bush and back again and a story tided "Gush and Bore" which ruefully proclaimed: "The nation's two political parties have become so much alike that they don't really stand for much any more:

And just after Thanksgiving, The New York Times' Richard Berke weighed in that "the public's impression of candidates may be more important than ever in the campaign of 2000 because there is a dearth of raging issues dividing the parties."

Now whose fault is that?

There's at least the potential for interesting debate on the issues. Everybody knows that Al Gore has written a passionate book about the environment, that Bill Bradley has proposed to reinvent health care, that John McCain wants to grab every Senator and hang him upside down until the change falls out of his pockets--and that George W. Bush seems happy to scramble around on the floor to scarf it up.

If that's all true, how can these guys really be the same?

The answer is that, of course, they're not. Sameness is a convenient fiction. It allows reporters to write fun softball pieces that distinguish the candidates on less than substantive grounds. They can even try on new professions like Walter Mitty. For example, in November, National Review's Richard Brookhiser channeled the spirit of Sigmund Freud to arrive at the conclusion that Al Gore is "depressed because he feels dead" and that this explains his focus on the environment. And U.S. News and World Report's Roger Simon recently took a turn as CNN fashion reporter Elsa Klensch to slash away at Bill Bradley for affecting suits that "look like they cost the lives of several polyesters" and shirts "of a bluish hue not found in nature: The guy wears had clothes and wants to be our president? Imagine.

Let's be clear: We don't expect the campaign press to spend the next eleven months performing regression analyses on the candidates' budget proposals. Of course the public is entitled to learn something about the personal qualities of the man who will occupy the most powerful office on the planet. But it's surely a stretch from this to the position that campaign strategy on matters like wardrobe is the same thing as campaign news. And there's a real problem with giving too much air-time to silly stuff: It crowds out attention to the more important issues and leaves the public unprepared to sort through them when the mud starts flying. Indeed, shallow coverage of the issues is almost an invitation for campaigns to take the low road. Read what a Gore staffer said to U.S. News' Simon:

"Bradley has authenticity? OK, so he's real, he's a great guy, he's the thinking man's candidate. But most voters don't vote that way. Everybody says negative ads are terrible and trashing somebody is terrible--but it works! ... The brie-and-cheese [sic] set, the thinking voters will always be there, and they'll be for Bradley. But heat wins elections, and Gore is going to put the heat on Bradley:

More than anything, that's an indictment of the press. After all, it's part of our job to help transform voters into "thinking voters." And the best way to do that is to hammer away at the issues.

Here's one attempt to do just that on a short list of issues that matter the most: How will the candidate pay for good government? Will he protect the uninsured? How will he save social security? Will he really be an education president? Will he be able to handle an international crisis? Will he fix our environmental laws? Is he in favor of auctions or elections? Can he run the government? In the spirit of competition, we've given the four leading candidates grades on each question. We gave points for the political courage, technical competence, and vision. Did we give extra credit for wearing natural fibers? Not a chance.

How will he pay for good government?

Government costs money. You've got to pay for air-traffic controllers, national infrastructure projects, and funding the Center for Disease Control. We've got to have an army; we've got to pay government lawyers to fight monopolies. We need billions of dollars to fix our health-care system and billions more to hire and train the teachers we need to turn our educational system around.

To many politicians in 1999, the budget surplus is the solution to funding everything the government needs to, and should, pay for New health-care system? We'll fund it out of the projected surplus. How about a middle-class tax cut? Just dip into that big tub of hypothetical cash.

But all this talk of surplus financing is misleading. Roughly two-thirds of the projected surplus comes from excess Social Security revenues that will have to be locked away for the day when the trust fund starts to run in the red. (See "How will he save social security?") As for the remaining third, we're not holding our breaths. For it to materialize, Congress will have to honor uncomfortably tight spending caps that it can easily blow through using accounting tricks, the economy will have to continue to perk along, and Medicare costs will have to stay under control.

You can't count on the surplus any more than you can count on Congress to keep its budget promises or the economy to stay strong. So, to run the government and to pay for the programs the candidates are proposing, the next administration will probably have to close tax loopholes, raise taxes, or both. Given their likelihood, we should be thinking about these options now.

Start with the loopholes: The tax code is riddled with subsidies that cost billions of dollars a year. Businessmen enjoy tax-deductible meals and entertainment to the annual tune of six billion tax-payer dollars; an 1872 law allows mining companies to purchase federal land for $5 an acre without having to pay any royalties back to the government; investors can rack up tax-free capital gains by purchasing their stocks through special accounts called Roth IRAs. These subsidies do little to redistribute wealth to the people who really need it. So get rid of them.

As for raising taxes, there's one group that's been doing quite well lately: the very rich. Ninety percent of increased wealth since 1977 has gone to the richest one percent of Americans and the top marginal tax rate on these families is only about half of what it was for most of the post-war era. During the same period, the poor have gotten 12 percent poorer. In our era of Seattle robber barons and NASDAQ billionaires, there's room to give more to the people who are really in need.

Gore:

The Gore campaign didn't want to talk about raising taxes in an election year so it molded its spending program to fit within the projected surplus. This let Gore serve up a trillion dollar spending program without appearing to cost American taxpayers one additional dime, but it also backed him into a corner. Health care, childcare, and education need to be fixed, regardless of whether the repair costs can be cooked into conformity with the surplus. If the surplus doesn't materialize, he would probably have to raise taxes--a position his campaign recently started to accept.

That said, Gore has a strong record on taxes and trimming fat. He voted for the 1986 Tax Reform Act that lowered taxes for the general public while eliminating real estate and corporate tax shelters. The '86 legislation was largely Bradley's work, but Gore did his rival one better: He supported an amendment that would have increased the top marginal tax rate from 28 to 35 percent--an amendment that Bradley opposed. Gore also voted for a 1991 increase in the top marginal rate. And he gets some credit for the administration's 1993 tax reform that raised the top marginal rate to its current level and was instrumental in reducing and eliminating the deficit.

Grade: B

Bradley:

Bradley's position on taxes is a bit slippery. Unlike Gore, he has never ruled out raising taxes to fund his ambitious spending program, but he won't say more than that. When we asked a Bradley spokesperson, Kristin Ludecke, whether the candidate was actually contemplating a tax raise, she said absolutely not--he's "completely confident" that his health-care plan wouldn't require it.

We then asked whether the tax increase was something he was holding in reserve in case the economy goes south. The answer was "no" again; under those circumstances, Bradley would favor actually cutting taxes as a way to stimulate the economy. So when would we be looking at a possible tax hike? "That's a couple of hypotheticals away from reality," she said.

Bradley's record is a similarly mixed bag. Bradley was the key man on passing the 1986 Tax Reform Act, but there's more to the story. The deal behind the Act was that Congress would close corporate loopholes worth tens of billions of dollars but give something back to the monied classes by lowering the top marginal tax rate to 28 percent, its lowest post-war level. The Act called for the rate to drop in stages, with the final dip to 28 percent in 1988. In 1987, however, the Senate...