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June 12, 1990
Governor of Arkansas; Chairman, Democratic Leadership Council
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q. Of what are you most proud in your four years as governor, and how have perceptions of your state changed during that time?
A. My proudest accomplishment has been to try to elevate the importance of education in the minds of the people. The second thing I've tried to do is develop a global perspective in our state. That is much more difficult in a state with only 2.4 million people that is landlocked in the middle of the country. I still get attacked for traveling around the country and the world to recruit new business and new opportunities for our people, but I am convinced that we have to smash the last barriers of isolationism inside the minds of the American people if we are going to do what we need to do in the 1990s.
Q. President Bush likes to call himself "the education president." How do you rate him on educational issues?
A. I like George Bush, and I've worked closely with him on national education goals. He is limited by the political realities of the budget deficit. I also think that there is still too much happy talk on this issue. Most of the responsibility for education reform and for financing it should rest at the state and local level, but you should know that as a percentage of school spending the federal contribution is more than a third less than it was a decade ago, and there are a lot of targeted opportunities for investment where the federal government could make a big difference.
I do have to say that the president did recommend a $500 million increase in Head Start and a 50 percent increase in educational research. I'd give him an incomplete-the record's still out.
Q. Some suggest that education reform is taking place as though women and minorities don't even exist. Would you comment?
A. That's an accurate criticism, and we've got to work hard to bring more women and more minorities into decision-making roles in education and into the development of policy in education. That's tough if you look at who gets elected governor and to a lot of other decision-making positions.
Q. Why has the Democratic Party had so much trouble getting its candidates elected to the White House?
A. After World War II, the country became much more conservative in some ways. Democrats broke apart along the cultural divides of race in the South, the war in Vietnam, and other issues. People have preferred to keep a Democratic Congress in to attend to their particular interests, but to vote for Republican presidents to address larger issues-the management of the economy, national security, and the definition of the American psyche.
With the exception of Jimmy Carter, who won by a narrow margin in an unusual situation, we have not been able to win since 1964. The nominating process has tended to elect people who focused on specific narrow interests and issues rather than the larger themes that can unify the American people. There is a pool of very gifted people who could serve very well as president, and who, if given the chance to run, might well be elected.
Q. In light of recent oil spills, might this be a good time to re-examine nuclear energy?
A. I am not uniformly anti-nuclear energy. As a practical matter, however, the problem is that it takes forever to build a plant. Given the present legal, political, administrative, and energy realities, I don't know if it's even practical to re-examine that question. I also believe that we have not begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities for energy conservation.
Q. Wouldn't school-choice proposals discriminate against children in poor areas, since any middle-class parents who still have their children in the public schools would move them to the richer areas?
A. It doesn't discriminate against poor children at all if the state pays for transportation. In fact, the poor children need school choice the most. In large urban settings, an array of magnet schools have given poor children a range of choices they wouldn't otherwise have. The only way it would arguably discriminate is that poor kids are less likely to have parents who would make a reasoned choice.
Q. How vulnerable will President Bush be in 1992? Will Quayle be on the ticket?
A. I don't think George Bush is vulnerable today. If nothing bad happens to him, and we should assume that nothing will, the challenge for the Democrats will be to render him irrelevant. The only chance we have is to define the world in a different way, so that we render his extremely cautious approach irrelevant to the times in which we live. Quayle will be on the ticket.
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