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Goodbye, cruel world
Video footage made by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold leaves unanswered questions about whether their parents could have stopped the massacre at Columbine.
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[12/14/99]

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[12/13/99]

Take-home test
Gov. Bush says he has been reading a biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Here's a reading comprehension exam for the GOP front-runner.
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[12/13/99]

A quiz that matters
Foreign-policy experts come up with the real questions George W. Bush should answer.
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[12/13/99]

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A letter from an old friend stirs up passions from one of the most disturbing, yet little-known, crimes of the New Left era. It happened exactly 25 years ago.
By David Horowitz
[12/13/99]

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I'm not quite sure who decided that GOP front-runner Gov. George W. Bush had completely blown his first two debate performances. He was perfectly adequate, if uninspired. But now that the third full debate is over, one in which he performed more sure-footedly, headlines will no doubt reflect the return of the man to his mighty hype.

Viewing all through the prism of the front-runner, pundits in the media room could be heard observing the performances of publisher Steve Forbes and Arizona Sen. John McCain as comatose and lackadaisical, respectively, and since they think it, it must be so.

But in the eyes of Iowans, it's just reporters hungry for a fight. The most recent Mason Dixon poll of likely Iowa GOP caucus voters conducted over the weekend had Bush with 49 percent, Forbes with 22 percent, and McCain with 8 percent. (McCain does not have a campaign operation in Iowa, focusing his limited resources on New Hampshire and South Carolina.)

Indeed, all eyes were on W. as caravans of reporters and cameramen invaded the 30th most populated state for the last Republican debate of 1999. (The next is scheduled for Jan. 6.) The day before the debate, held Monday night at the Greater Des Moines Civic Center and sponsored by WHO-TV and NBC, shots were fired by three contender wanna-bes on the Sunday chat shows.

On CNN's "Late Edition," commentator Alan Keyes said that Bush doesn't have "the depth of understanding to articulate the relationship between this country's moral principles and the great serious practical issues." On ABC's "This Week," Christian activist Gary Bauer challenged Bush to rule out any running mate who doesn't share his anti-abortion viewpoint. Also on "This Week," Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch renewed his charge that Bush was too inexperienced to be president.

But when the dust had settled after Monday's 90-minute debate, host Tom Brokaw had finished thanking the candidates, NBC finally cut to a commercial, and the candidates were shuttled in one after the other to offer their post-mortems, Bush had temporarily silenced them -- on camera, at least.

As is so often the case, the media room is where the real interesting stuff went down Monday night. It's a shame that NBC didn't just rerun "Law & Order" during the debate and secretly run the cameras when the candidates didn't think any real people were watching.

Bauer started gunning for more immediate short-term game, calling into question publisher Steve Forbes' commitment to banning abortion. McCain, put on the defensive during the debate by Bush on taxes, seemed flummoxed with a question on the subject and leaned too easily on his charm to deflect that fact. And Alan Keyes clarified that he hadn't answered "Jesus Christ" for a question about who his favorite philosopher/thinker was because God is far more than just a philosopher/thinker.

Not that the debate itself didn't provide for some entertaining and illuminating back and forth among the candidates. As past formats had been criticized -- even by some of the candidates -- as too stilted and formal, Brokaw presided over a much freer-flowing night of discourse.

Candidates were not only questioned by Brokaw and WHO-TV news anchor John Bachman, but one segment required that they question each other. And as a pretty neat trick, Brokaw hauled out the Iowa Republican Party's ultra-conservative platform -- which opposes the involvement of women in the U.S. military, for instance -- and grilled the candidates on how much each agreed with the policy pronouncements of the organization hosting the night's debate.

The interesting subtext of the evening, other than the one about Bush's feet of clay, dealt with McCain, who is leading Bush in New Hampshire in some polls, and has made a point of not competing in the Jan. 24 Iowa Caucus.

McCain, who has been lapped by Bush in fund-raising at least six times, is choosing to focus his energies on a few early primary states, Iowa not among them.

"First of all, welcome to Iowa," Brokaw joked to McCain at the start of the night. But in typical fashion, McCain took full advantage of the freedom he has from not competing in Iowa to rail against the multimillion-dollar ethanol subsidy local farmers receive from the federal government.

"I'm here to tell you the things you want to hear and some of the things you don't want to hear," McCain said, playing the role of maverick he has cast for himself in this race. "And one of those things is ethonol." Bush and Hatch then jumped over each other to rush to the defense of the subsidy, a sure-fire applause line in front of Iowa Republicans.

Brokaw, ever the anchor, played his assigned role as well, leading with the day's top story, the Time Magazine report of the videotapes made by Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in which they discuss the video game their slaughter will mimic, and the film directors they'd like to present their life story.

Echoing the hopelessness felt by millions of Americans after the April 20 shooting, Brokaw asked what could be done. All of the candidates slammed our increasingly coarse culture. McCain alone raised the possibility of gun control, discussing "smart gun" technology along with Internet filtering systems -- though the bulk of his remarks derided the "pernicious influences being felt by our children" which robs them "of their most precious treasure that's their innocence."

Bush said he wished he "could make a law to make people love one another because I'd sign it," though he offered little in the way of legislative remedies.

Bauer, Keyes, Hatch and Forbes agreed that a culture where abortion is legal is already treading down an amoral path.

Next page | Do you renounce Christine Todd Whitman and all her works?