Morton Kondracke
Executive Editor, Roll Call

If you’re looking for who might be the Democrats’ nominees for president and vice president in 2004, look for Dick Gephart and Bob Graham. If you’re looking for issues that will define the campaign, look for national security and health care.

Those were but two of the insights veteran journalist Morton Kondracke offered in his keynote address to attendees at the NCPERS annual conference.

Kondracke said that President Bush, who promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House and to bring a nonpartisan tone to Washington politics, succeeded with the former and failed with the latter. Yet sensitive to the issues that undid his father’s attempt to win a second term, the younger Bush “won’t let what happened in 1992 happen to him,” Kondracke said. “He would like to change his political parentage to be seen as the son of Ronald Reagan” and to reproduce the campaign of 1984, when Reagan ran on tax cuts and Mondale ran on tax increases.

“He [Bush] believes that if you cut taxes for the rich, prosperity and jobs will follow. He’s not going to be knocked off his game by Democrats--and I think he’s going to succeed at least this year.”

Echoing the opening remarks from Elmer Khal, Kondracke said that health care “will be a major issue in the campaign.” Solving the health care problem “is going to cost a lot of money, and we have to figure out how to control costs.”

Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, a feisty Capitol Hill newspaper, and the host of “National Desk” on PBS.

© 2003 National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems

 http://www.ncpers.org