Kerry’s statement was similar to what his running mate, John Edwards, had said a week earlier while debating his Republican opponent in Cleveland. These calculated remarks were additional signs of the coarsening and pornographication of bourgeois politics.

Debate moderator Robert Schieffer of CBS News asked the candidates whether they believed “homosexuality is a choice.”

“If you ask Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian,” answered Kerry, “she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”

Bush did not comment on the remark during the debate. But the administration did have a formal response later. “The president of the United States does not believe it was appropriate for Senator Kerry to bring up Mary Cheney at the debate,” said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

Kerry’s remark drew a sharp response from Vice President Cheney during a subsequent campaign rally in Florida. Saying he was a very “angry father,” Cheney described Kerry’s statement as that of a man who “will do and say anything to get elected.” His wife, Lynne Cheney, called Kerry’s remark “a cheap and tawdry political trick.”

Not stepping back at all from the coarse remark, Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, who is also active in the Democratic campaign, accused Lynne Cheney of “overreacting” and showing “a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter’s sexual preferences.”

The level of exchanges between the two campaigns sunk even lower in a second set of base remarks by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Appearing on the Jay Leno talk show October 12, Edwards was asked if he could beat President Bush in a foot race. Edwards said he played football as a student and that Bush was on a cheerleading squad. “Bush was on the side, with his pom-poms,” Edwards said. “I don’t know, can you run fast with those cheerleading outfits on?”

Such debasing remarks have more and more marked the political climate in the United States over the last decade. Their source is the steady offensive by the ruling class to push down wages, worsen working and living conditions, and attack social programs that working people have won in struggle in order to increase profits for the employers. This was also evident in the third Bush-Kerry debate.

On health care, for example, Bush reiterated his proposals to establish individual, tax-free “health savings accounts” to provide medical insurance based on individual coverage rather than employer-sponsored plans. Workers would receive tax credits for putting savings into these accounts. This proposal, along with a similar one establishing individual “retirement savings accounts,” forms the centerpiece of the rulers’ preparation for the next round of assaults on Social Security.

Kerry, who has been silent on Bush’s specific proposals, sketched in a few more elements of his own plan. It too reinforces the position that health care is an individual’s responsibility, not a social right. In exchange for the federal government taking over the cost of health care for children on Medicaid, Kerry said, the states would cover individuals with an income up to three times higher than the poverty line. No state would be obligated to do so. Individuals would also be allowed to “buy into the same health care insurance that senators and congressmen give themselves,” Kerry said.

Members of Congress, however, make more than $150,000 a year. Bush said the current congressional medical insurance costs the government $7,700 per family.

Kerry blamed rising health-care costs and growing numbers of people without any coverage—about 45 million now—on the president’s policies. But he said nothing about the deterioration of health care during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Bush’s proposals, in fact, build on the assaults on health care under Clinton. Speaking at the 1996 Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton, now a senator, praised a bill sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy and Nancy Kassebaum that included “portable” health insurance for people who change jobs. It also included an “experimental” component in which 750,000 people would buy “catastrophic” health insurance and set up tax-free individual accounts to cover routine medical expenses. By the end of the Clinton administration, an estimated 40 million people had no health-care coverage, 2 million more than when Clinton first took office. And that happened during the longest post-World War II economic recovery.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home