Date: 28 Jan 2001 18:02:24 -0800
From: "Carl Ellison" <cme@acm.org>
To: president@whitehouse.gov
Cc: cme@acm.org
Subject: avoiding Clinton's mistakes

Dear Mr. President.

Personally, I found it pathetic and even sick that Bill Clinton would
steadfastly refuse to admit to a truth that everyone else in the world knew.

I was hoping that you, after campaigning against Clinton even more than
against Gore, would not fall into that mistake.  However, I still hear you
refer to having won the election, as if you had a mandate from the voters for
the platform you ran on.  The truth that all the rest of us know is that
although you were legally elected and are now our president, you did not win
the vote and the majority of voters did not vote for your platform.

I just heard This American Life's show entitled "Two Nations, One President".
I commend it to your attention.  I wrote to them to thank them for the
careful, balanced presentation of the division in this country.  At the end
of my message to them, I wrote:


>To me (in the computer business, specifically doing security), the purpose
>of the election is to get an objective result by rules decided ahead of time
>that put an end to the campaign rhetoric.  This election, by being closer
>than the voting mechanism error rate (between 3 and 5%, depending on the
>source you read) can not be over.  Since it wasn't over in November, we got
>to see the ugliness of campaign rhetoric building up to no deciding event
>but rather trying to sway a decision by rhetoric alone.  So, the rhetoric
>keeps escalating, and with it the anger.
>
>But the end of your show was perfect.  Given that this was an undecidable
>election and the current president got there in spite of the will of the
>people, he still has an opportunity to show that he was the man the majority
>of voters would have wanted to vote for, if they had only known what he was
>really like.  
>
>Of course, Ashcroft and Norton and tax cuts for the rich are not the way to
>show that.....

I believe you have an opportunity to be a great president -- and an
opportunity to be the most divisive, polarizing and damaging president we've
had, perhaps ever.  For example, taking money out of Social Security to let
people put it in the Stock Market, when the market is overdue for a crash
would be disasterous.  So would a tax cut.

I, personally, would benefit more than most from the tax cut you proposed. 
However, I would prefer to have no tax cut for anyone, if it means we could
pay the debt down to $0 within my lifetime (or, within your presidency,
perhaps), and then have a balanced budget amendment with real teeth in it --
and a Social Security fund that is not used to offset operating costs.

So, Mr. President, please reconsider the tax cut and devote yourself to
something important like education reform.

On that front, I applaud your effort, including vouchers.  I'm no fan of the
NEA.  But, I believe you're being too much of a wimp when it comes to
education.  It's time for someone to set a challenge that fires the
imagination the way Kennedy did with the moon landing.

We are almost last among industrialized nations in education.  How about
setting a goal that by the end of the decade we will be first among them. 
That would be a solid goal -- and a challenging one -- and one worthwhile
enough to get everyone talking about something other than ballot fraud and
presidential legitimacy.

I wish you luck.

Sincerely,

Carl M. Ellison