December 1, 2003

Candidates in MSNBC Debate
'Battle for the White House'

Virginia Wilber
CyberCaucus2004 Reporter
Drake University

DES MOINES, Iowa -- As the war of the press releases took place backstage, the "Battle for the White House" took place on stage among eight of the Democratic presidential candidates at the MSNBC debate Nov. 24.

All candidates, except for Sen. Joseph Lieberman, participated in the debate moderated by NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw at the Polk County Convention Complex. Sen. John Kerry and Sen. John Edwards participated by satellite from Washington, D.C. so they could be present for the Medicare debate. The debate started off with the timely issue of health care.

According to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, the Medicare bill facing Congress didn't make sense and wouldn't help people until 2006.

"It's a $400 billion charge to our grandchildren's credit card so that President Bush can be reelected," Dean said. "If this was such a terrific bill, why do you suppose the president put the enactment date in 2006? This is an election-year gimmick charged to the taxpayers, like so many other things that this president has done."

He later denied attacks from Kerry and Rep. Richard Gephardt that he cut Medicare in Vermont, claiming not one person lost Medicare while he was governor.

Former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun advocated her single-payer system of universal health care coverage and said the Medicare bill would end Medicare as "we know it."

"This bill is not only a Trojan horse," Braun said. "It's a turkey stuffed with goodies for the pharmaceutical and the insurance industries and a poison pill of seniors."

For Gephardt, all Americans having health care was a moral issue.

"It is immoral, in my view, and I think in most Democrats' view and probably even a lot of Republicans' views, to have people out there without health insurance," Gephardt said. "We have got to solve this problem."

Candidates also commented on the issue of same-sex marriage. Both Braun and Rev. Al Sharpton said gay marriage was a civil and human rights issue.

"Are we prepared to say that gays and lesbians are less than human?" Sharpton said. "If we're not prepared to say that, then how do we say that they should not have the same human rights and human choices of anyone else?"

Global trade was another hot topic that involved the candidates debating the effectiveness of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

Dean said he didn't believe gettind rid of NAFTA and the WTO was the solution.

"I think he solution to global trade is to demand as a condition of free trade that we have workers' rights, labor rights, human rights and environmental standards in every single trade agreement that we have," Dean said.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich disagreed with Dean and advocated a return to bilateral trade conditioned with such rights and standards.

"You'll never be able to address the underlying loss of manufacturing jobs, the 3 million jobs that have been lost since July of 2000," Kucinich said. "We will never be able to address the nearly $500 billion trade deficit we're looking at."

Bush received heavy criticism when the candidates debated the war in Iraq and the request for $87 billion.

Kerry said Bush did not go to war as a last resort and that he couldn't wait to get out of the U.N. process.

"The president took a legitimate national security concern, which was containing Saddam Hussein and how you get inspectors back in order to do that, and literally distorted it and abused it by misleading the American people with respect to everything that he did," Kerry said.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark said the Bush administration took America into war "recklessly and without need to do so." He claimed in the war on terror that Bush wanted to attack states not the real threat of terrorists.

"The real issue in front of us is that this president misled the American people and the Congress into war," Clark said. "It's wrong and if you wrote this script in a movie, it would be rejected as being outrageious."

Edwards criticized Bush for "failing to take American face off the operation" and giving the United Nations authority while Kucinich said the war was depriving the country of its lifeblood and ability to fund the domestic agenda.

When speaking about other foreign policy issues such as relations with North Korea and the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Gephardt said Bush "doesn't work well with others."

"We need to be engaged in the world, and we need a president that is willing to work with every country to solve tough international problems," Gephardt said.

Other issues that were touched on were agricultural sudsidies, the environment, race, religion and candidates' military experience.

Edwards urged all the candidates to remember Americans are tired of hearing politicians yell at each other and that the "American people are hungry for us to lead."

"We have to offer a positive, optimistic, uplifting vision for this country," Edwards said. "Americans want to know what we are going to do for their lives. And I, for one, I intend to offer them that positive vision."

Sharpton advocated focusing efforts on registering voters so that "rather than trying to pin the donkey on each other, we ought to slap the donkey and get it ready to defeat George Bush."

He said no one fights more with the other candidates than he does, but they all needed to work on addressing people's needs and showing the president is "worse than anybody."

"All of them in their worst night's sleep is better than George Bush wide awake that I know," Sharpton said.