The Presidential Debate : Excerpts: Candidates Square Off on Questions of Drugs, Taxes, Abortion

Here are excerpts from the Bush-Dukakis debate Sunday night:

Drugs and Noriega

Dukakis: “ . . . the question I would ask of Mr. Bush is how we instill those values, how we create this environment for the drug-free schools that we want in this country, if he or representatives of the Administration are either dealing with and involving people like Noriega in our foreign policy . . . .”

Bush: “It was the Reagan-Bush Administration that brought this man to justice. And, as the governor of Massachusetts knows, there was no hard evidence until we indicted him, and so I think it’s about time we get this Noriega matter in perspective. Panama is a friendly country. I went down there and talked to the president of Panama about cleaning up their money-laundering. Mr. Noriega was there, but there was no evidence at that time, and when the evidence was there, we indicted him and we want to bring him to justice. . . .”

Federal Deficit

Dukakis: “The thing I don’t understand about Mr. Bush’s approach to this is how he could possibly be serious about bringing that deficit down, given what he says he wants to do. He’s going to want to spend a great deal of money on just about every weapon system. He says he’s against new taxes, although he’s broken that pledge at least three times in the last year that I know of. He wants to give the wealthiest taxpayers in this country a five-year, $40-billion tax break, and he also wants to spend a lot of money on additional programs.”

Bush: “There are so many things I don’t know quite where to begin. When you cut (taxes on) capital gains you put people to work. John Kennedy proposed cutting (tax on) capital gains. . . . It’s not going to cost the government money. It’s going to increase revenues to the federal government and it’s going to create jobs, so that’s one of the things that I think makes a big difference between us.”

Dukakis: “What he’s proposing, after over a trillion dollars in new debt which has been added to the federal debt in the course of the past eight years--an IOU that our children and grandchildren will be paying for years--is a tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of the people in this country. . . .”

Passion and Patriotism

Dukakis: “. . . I care deeply about people--all people. Working people, working families, people all over this country who, in some cases, are living from paycheck to paycheck. Other cases are having a hard time opening up the door of college opportunity to their children. In other cases, they don’t have basic health insurance which, for most of us, we accept as a matter of course--assume we’re going to have in order to pay the bills that we incur when we get sick. I’m somebody who believes deeply in genuine opportunity for every single citizen in this country, and that’s the kind of passion I brought to my state.”

Bush: “Well, I don’t question his passion . . . and I don’t question his concern about the war in Vietnam. He introduced or supported legislation back then that suggested that kids from Massachusetts should be exempt from going overseas in that war. Now, that’s a certain passion that, in my view, is misguided passion. We have a big difference on issues. You see, last year in the primary, he expressed his passion. He said ‘I am a strong liberal Democrat’--August, ’87. Then he says ‘I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.’ That was what he said. He is out there on out of the mainstream. He is very passionate. My argument with the governor is do we want this country to go that far left?. . .”

Dukakis: “Well, I hope this is the first and last time I have to say this: Of course the vice president is questioning my patriotism. I don’t think there’s any question about that, and I resent it. . . .””

Abortion

Dukakis: “I don’t favor abortion. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think most people do. The question is who makes the decision, and I think it has to be the woman, in the exercise of her own conscience and religious beliefs, that makes that decision.”

Bush: “I think most people know my position on the sanctity of life. I oppose abortion and I favor adoption. And if we can get this law changed, where everybody should make the extraordinary effort to take these kids that are unwanted and sometimes aborted--let them come to birth and then put them in a family where they’ll be loved.”

Foreign Policy Experience

Dukakis: “Of course, that’s a charge (lack of of foreign policy experience) that’s always made against any governor who runs for the presidency. I think it was one of the things that Mr. Bush said about Mr. Reagan back in 1980. Remember that, George? And yet some of our finest presidents, some of our strongest international leaders were governors: Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt. It’s not the amount of time you’ve spent in Washington, it’s not the length of your resume. . . . The vice president has a long resume, but it didn’t stop him from endorsing the sale of arms to the ayatollah. . . . His experience didn’t prevent him from participating or involving or in some way being involved in the relationship between this government and Mr. Noriega and the drug-trafficking in Panama.”

Bush: “The governor was for a nuclear freeze that would have locked in a thousand Soviet intermediate nuclear force weapons, and zero for the West. And because we didn’t listen to the freeze advocates and strengthened the defenses of this country, we now have the first arms-control agreement in the nuclear age. . . . I’ve met Mr. Gorbachev. I met Mr. Shevardnadze and talked substance with him the other day. These people are tough, but now we have a chance if we have the experience to know how to handle it. But please, do not go back to the days when the military was as weak as they could be, when the morale was down and when we were the laughing stock around the world.”

Strategic Defense Initiative

Dukakis: “We ought to continue research into the strategic system at about the level that it was at in 1983. That’s about a billion dollars a year. But I don’t know of any reputable scientists who believe that this system, at least as it was originally conceived, could possibly work, this notion of some kind of Astrodome over ourselves that could protect us from enemy attack. . . . And, as a matter of fact, the system that the Administration’s now talking about is very different from the one that was originally proposed in 1983. So, I’m for continued research.”

Bush: “He’s got to get this thing more clear. Why do you spend a billion dollars on something you think is a fantasy, a fraud? I will fully research it, go forward with it as fast as we can. We’ve sent up the levels of funding, and when it’s deployable, I will deploy it. That’s my position on SDI, and I’ve never waivered a bit.”

Dealing With Terrorists

Dukakis: “ . . . If there’s one thing we also understand it is that you cannot make concessions to terrorists, ever. Ever. Because if you do, it’s an open invitation to other terrorists to take hostages and to blackmail us. And that’s the tragedy of the Iran-Contra scandal. . . . We’ve got to be tough on international terrorism. . . . We’ve got to use undercover operations. We have to be prepared to use military force against terrorist base camps.”

Bush: “He goes around ranting about Noriega. . . . He can talk about Iran-Contra, and also--I’ll make a deal with you. I will take all the blame for those two incidents if you give me half the credit for all the good things that have happened in world peace since Ronald Reagan and I took over from the Carter Administration.”