6.15.00
Double or Nothing

5.25.00
Free the Freeh Files

5.23.00
Free the Freeh Files

5.19.00
Cuddle & Huddle

5.16.00
Gore Has No Stocks!

5.11.00
Sink The Feminists, Not The Subs

5.05.00
O'Connor's Kindness, and His Faith

5.03.00
The Case for Hearings

 

  

6/15/00 7:45 p.m.
Double or Nothing
Why Bush should take Ted Forstmann up on his debate challenge.

Kate O'Beirne is NR's Washington editor.
 
ed Forstmann, the Wall Street financier and co-founder of the Children's Scholarship Fund, has offered the presidential candidates $500,000 each for their favorite children's charities, if they will join in a 90-minute debate on education issues. The offer presents Governor Bush with a terrific opportunity to capitalize on TV's top two shows, by boldly upping the ante — double or nothing, winner takes all.

A combination of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and Survivor could command a prime-time-sized audience for the first presidential debate of the season. In any other setting, the best education speech imaginable might get 20 seconds on the evening news, but a gutsy counter-offer from Bush would give him a much larger audience for showcasing his chief executive's record ("a reformer with results!"), and his popular reform agenda on one of his strongest issues. Recall that Al Gore's most uncomfortable debate moments were at the Apollo Theater, when he was asked to explain why only upper-income kids, like the Gores' own, should be able to choose private schools, while poor kids are stuck in a failing public-school system. Bush is on much firmer ground here: He presides over a system his daughters attended, while supporting the right of parents to choose private schools for their children.

There are good reasons why Governor Bush should have agreed to Vice President Gore's initial challenge to early debates (it would, for one thing, reduce the stakes in the fall debates). Now, Ted Forstmann's challenge is tailor-made for the Bush message. Bush would be debating for the benefit of poor kids (do you suppose Gore would give some of his winnings to his tenant children in Carthage?), and displaying a bold confidence befitting the executive in the race.

A mutually acceptable panel of judges would have to be chosen to decide the winner of the debate. But the most important audience would be the public — which would get a chance to hear Bush's reform ideas, and would surely give him points for showing imagination and initiative. Double-down, governor.

 
 

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