President-elect Ross Perot takes the oath of office on on January 20, 1997.
President Perot’s stunning upset victory in the 1996 presidential race was a clear repudiation of the Republican agenda. President Eastwood’s platform of social liberalism, free trade, and non-interventionism was soundly rejected by voters for Ross Perot’s program of top-down populism.
The first months of the Perot administration were extremely energetic, leading one prominent media figure to refer to the president as “Mr. High Energy”. The first act of the administration was the creation of a new anti-terror task force. Consisting of several hundred highly-trained military professionals, the organization was tasked with hunting down Vladimir Putin and destroying his Caucasus-based terrorist network. The mission has been relatively successful at rooting out low-level operatives but Putin’s whereabouts remain unknown, and several high-profile attacks have since taken place in the former DDR and Poland.
President Perot moved swiftly to pull the United States out of NAFTA. Congressional Democrats voted almost unanimously for “AMExit”. The shrinking Nationalist faction of the Republican party, led by senator Jesse Helms and newly-elected Virginia senator Pat Buchanan, lent their support to AMExit and put the motion over the top. The libertarian wing of the GOP, reduced to a congressional minority by the 1996 elections, was powerless to save the trade deal.
Perot extended an olive branch to the supporters of ex-president Eastwood by calling on Congress to pass the comprehensive Assault Weapons Ban Act that Eastwood himself had helped author. The bill passed, with 85% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans voting in its favour.
The Medicare For All Act of 1998 established single payer healthcare in the United States. Libertarian Republicans once again railed against the act in the House and Senate. The president, they claimed, had betrayed his campaign pledge to fight to reduce the deficit. Perot responded that the program would in fact be cheaper than the previous form of Medicare, and would be fully funded by a new series of revenue tariffs on European, Mexican and Chinese goods that would go into effect in 1999.
The president has found himself at odds with Vice President Moynihan by publicly withdrawing his support for a minimum income, calling it “total economic claptrap”. Perot has instead focused his energies on making deep cuts to discretionary programs, entitlements, and business subsidies while raising the income and business taxes of the wealthiest Americans. To help offset the costs of the massive infrastructure programs recently approved by Congress, a controversial ten-cent-per-gallon-per-year gasoline tax was put into force. The president’s deficit reduction plan will balance the budget by 2004… that is, if he is re-elected.
Your candidates for the GOP nomination:
CEO of Godfather’s Pizza Herman Cain made his entry into the political sphere by feuding with president Perot and the Democratic party over the steep raises to the corporate business tax. The centrepiece of Cain’s platform is his proposal to eliminate and replace the current system with a 8% business transaction tax, an 8% personal income tax rate, and a 8% federal sales tax. Cain, by his own admission, is uninterested in foreign affairs but generally favours a muscular foreign policy.
President of the Family Research Council Gary Bauer represents the last gasp of the evangelical wing of the Republican party. Bauer is stridently opposed to abortion, same sex marriage, drug decimalization, and “media filth”. Bauer’s platform includes an extensive school voucher program, increasing the number of boots on the ground in eastern Europe, and a 16% tithe-based flat tax.
Governor Bill Weld is the favourite of the mainstream libertarian wing of the party, and has been endorsed by president Eastwood and vice president Paul. A self-described social liberal, Weld supports Roe v. Wade, and would push for full legalization of both marijuana and same-sex marriage. The governor’s platform involves a repeal of Perotcare, a new trade pact with Mexico, and cuts to entitlements and spending to balance the budget. Weld has promised an immediate withdrawal of US forces from eastern Europe as soon as Putin has been captured or killed.
Senator Oliver North is a decorated hero of the Libyan War (1986-1988), a former insider of the du Pont administration, and the leading GOP hawk in the Senate. North has argued for a full occupation force to be deployed to the Caucasus, and if necessary, a declaration of war against the rump Moskva Republic rumoured to be aiding Putin. While generally favouring the reformist fiscal policies of former president du Pont, North has broken from the Republican orthodoxy by arguing against a balanced budget amendment, claiming that it is a hindrance on American national security.
CEO of McAfee Associates John McAfee is running on an eclectic platform of left-libertarian domestic policy, non-interventionism, and cybersecurity. McAfee argues that the US must develop a strong cybersecurity infrastructure to defend against the foreign and terroristic attacks of the new millennium. McAfee’s platform also includes an end to the war on drugs, a complete and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe, ‘fast-tracking’ the immigration process, and auditing the Federal Reserve.
Two days.
Poll
