VP Hopefuls Square Off in Danville
— -- Vice-Presidential candidates Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, in their first and only debate, attacked each other’s budget proposals, but still managed to sound civil.
ABCNEWS.comOct. 5— The vice-presidential candidates, Republican Dick Cheney and Democrat Joseph Lieberman, opened their first and only
showdown with a flurry of numbers as each tried to paint the other’s budget proposal as reckless.
Cheney tried to portray Lieberman and his running mate, Al Gore, as “old way” tax-and-spend liberals who would blow projected federal budget surpluses on expanding government programs.
“Gore promises $900 billion in spending over and above the surplus,” Cheney said, promising a “new era.”
Choice Cuts
Echoing his running mate, George W. Bush, Cheney said his campaign would take “one quarter of the surplus and return it to the taxpayer.”
“The average American family is paying about 40 percent infederal, state and local taxes,” Cheney said. “We think it is appropriate to returnto the American people so that they can make choices themselves in howthat money ought to be spent,”
By Lieberman’s math, this would require that “they raid the Medicare trust fund to pay for … their tax cut and other proposals they can’t afford to pay for.”
Lieberman warned Bush and Cheney would spend $1.6 trillion (the Bush price tag of $1.3 trillion plus the projected loss of interest from less taxes coming in) of the $1.8 trillion surplus on tax cuts, bringing the nation “back down the road to higher interest rates, to higher unemployment.”
Two days after Bush and Gore met in the first of three presidential debates, Cheney and Lieberman sat just inches from one another for their debate. But the traditional vice-presidential role as the “hatchet man” on the ticket was not in evidence — at least at the policy-heavy start of their debate. In fact, both candidates opened by vowing to be positive.
