Why is this race even close?

Because George W. Bush has campaigned better, proposed more forward-thinking programs and proved, in the end, that he's smarter than Al Gore.

By Andrew Sullivan

Nov 6, 2000 | If anyone had told me back in February that I would be endorsing George W. Bush for president in November, I wouldn't have believed it. I was a McCainiac back then, and an Al Gore sympathizer. You can check my columns to see that I'm not making this up. I wrote several zingers on Bush, especially after Bob Jones and the refusal to meet with Log Cabin Republicans. I'm not a Republican. I'm a small-government independent: fiscally conservative, socially pretty liberal, with libertarian leanings. I supported President Clinton in 1992. I'm gay, and it is hard to forget the vile gay baiting that has passed for social policy among some of the Republican right in the past decade or two.

Sure, I became a Clinton critic in the mid-1990s, but I never extended my contempt to Gore, whom I always took to be a decent, earnest man. I found the social agenda of the Republican Congresses of the 1990s to be disgusting -- from their anti-immigrant posturing to their gay baiting. And I found much that the New Democrats did -- from welfare reform to the expansion of the earned-income tax credit to NAFTA -- to be admirable government policy. I also believed that the New Democrats represented a good start toward undoing the identity politics of the previous years, a politics that has done nothing but further marginalize minorities in a well-meaning attempt to help them.

So why George W. Bush? The answer turns out to be a pretty simple one. When I look at what he is proposing to do, I agree with him far more than I do with Al Gore. For me to support Gore on his current big-government, leftist platform would simply mean renouncing most of the principles I have long believed in and cherish. Let me explain.

The surplus. Bush's tax cut is too big for an already overheated economy. But I do believe that the bulk of the surplus should go either toward paying down the debt or toward reducing tax rates for all of us. Leave that money in Washington and it will be guzzled up by a thousand pork-barrel projects or by the bottomless pits we call Medicare and Social Security. Gore has no real tax cuts. He merely has a bunch of new tax shelters, designed to pander to certain constituencies. Our tax code is already way too complicated without adding another layer of micromanagement.

Gore also wants to funnel most of the rest of the surplus into an unreformed Social Security system. To my mind, that's money wasted. Social Security was a system designed in the 1930s, and the way it siphons vast amounts of productive capital into low-paying government investments is explicable only in the context of a country terrified of another Great Depression. It should, in my view, be privatized along the British model, a part-public, part-private system that has led to a transformation in that country's fiscal standing. Bush's plan is half-assed and vague. With any luck, it will be improved and fully analyzed before it is ever implemented. But at least Bush has put reform on the table. If he's defeated, we won't have a chance to revisit it until it's too late. Gore's know-nothing response to the looming Social Security crisis, his desire to keep it as an election issue and his pandering to the elderly to preserve it have basically cost him my respect.

Healthcare. It's quite clear now where Gore wants to take the country -- toward a government-controlled medical system. His support for a new prescription drug entitlement under the existing Medicare program is the surest sign of this. He wants to give a benefit that's soaring in price to the wealthiest group in society: the already pampered elderly. Apart from winning Florida and Pennsylvania, Gore's aim in this is surely to increase the federal government's leverage with the drug companies and thereby force drug prices down. The next step is price controls, and a slowly expanding federal role in medicine.

All of this would, in my view, be disastrous. We would hear another giant sucking sound as Medicare costs, unrestrained by HMOs, soared. We would see a swift decline in research and development as the drug companies saw their profit margins clobbered. We would move one step closer to the socialized healthcare systems of Europe, where everyone gets the same, crappy care, except for the superrich, who can escape. I feel particularly strongly about this because I have HIV. Gore's attacks on the pharmaceutical industry -- and by extension, the industry's research -- represent a far bigger threat to people with AIDS than anything Bush is proposing. But the AIDS establishment is so intermeshed with the Democratic money machine that it will never tell HIV-ers the truth.

Next Page: The sharper one? It's not who you've been told

• View blog reactions