The existential dilemma.

• Author: Reed, Adolph Jr.
• Position: Making a decision about the 1996 presidential election vote - Crashing the Parties - Class Notes - Column - Cover Story

Here we are again--stuck with trying to figure out what to do about another Presidential election, another choice of a lesser evil in which the adjective gets cloudier and cloudier while the noun gets clearer and clearer. We all know the drill.

I voted for Clinton in 1992, and it was the most difficult vote I've ever cast. I stood in the booth for several minutes, trying to decide whether to do it.

On the one hand, Bush and Perot were at least as bad and certainly linked to worse, and I guess I was a little self-conscious about that Hubert Humphrey thing in 1968. I didn't want to feel that I'd help give the liberals a chance to whine some more about irresponsible ultraleftists aiding the Republicans.

On the other hand, I knew what Clinton was, what political forces he was aligned with, and that he would sell us out, though I didn't expect that he'd do it so soon and so thoroughly. So I toyed with not voting for a Presidential candidate at all and making Carol Moseley-Braun the top of the ticket--big statement that would have been! In the end, I voted a straight Democratic ticket, partly because not voting straight would have required more effort, partly because it seemed on balance necessary to elect even a nominal Democrat after Reagan and Bush.

But Bipartisan Bill has stretched the lesser-evil rationale to the border of absurdity. There's no need to rehearse the entire litany of his perfidies--just let NAFTA and the abominable "welfare reform" suffice.

The "welfare-reform" gambit is his 1996 version of Rickey Ray Rector. For those who have forgotten, or would like to, Rector was a hopelessly brain-damaged black Arkansan on death row in early 1992, and Governor Clinton flew home with great fanfare from the New Hampshire campaign trail to oversee Rector's execution. (When the barely articulate Rector was served his last meal, he saved the dessert, as was his habit--to eat later.) I wished then for a hell, so Bill Clinton could burn in it for that despicable sacrifice of another human being's life to his own ambition.

The Rector execution sent a message that most progressives who held out hopes for Clinton tried not to hear. If he would willfully kill an impoverished mental defective as an act of expediency in pursuing the nomination, how confident could we feel that he would cleave to any principle of justice or human decency? We got our answer: not at all. He won't.

Well, with the anti-welfare bill he may have hit a new low. It's bad enough he signed that abomination, which will do...