Why Not Now?
By Warren Beatty

New York Times
August 22, 1999

After 35 years of liberal activism as a Democrat, I am being urged by some people to spend 40 years of fame on a Presidential campaign.

Contributing whatever value that fame might offer to serve Rockefeller Republican Leadership in the Democratic Party is an unacceptable option for me. I choose instead to weather the cynicism toward ''bleeding heart celebrities'' and try to help persuade the slightly more liberal one of the two accounting firms we call our major parties to return to the principles of the Democratic Party of my youth.

I have no wish to diminish the capable, cautious centrists Al Gore and Bill Bradley, who have unselfishly devoted much of their lives to public service when they could so easily have enriched themselves in the private sector, as I have.

But when a Roosevelt-Truman-Stevenson-Kennedy Democrat, comfortably continuing a career of writing and directing movies, accepts the megaphone tossed to him, it will be to challenge the present party to admit its timidity in protecting those who need help most and to acknowledge the undeniable:

To achieve universal health care, to tend adequately to the 100 million Americans left behind in the prosperity of the global economy, to lift 35 million of our people out of poverty, a segment of our population that has remained virtually constant for 20 years, to give the 20 to 25 percent of our children who live in poverty a decent start in life, to protect our environment and improve our schools, to arouse the nonvoting half of our population to participate in public life, WE MUST HAVE COMPLETE PUBLIC FINANCING OF ALL FEDERAL CAMPAIGNS.

We can overcome the power of big money to corrupt our political system and the government it elects. At the rate of spending in '96 and '98, the people can buy their country back from big contributors for half the price of one movie ticket, per year, per person.

It will be possible for a President to arrest our slide from democracy to plutocracy only if he can free himself from fund-raising, disregard the polling, spend his popularity and mold public opinion rather than follow it.

Will the centrist Democratic Party face up to the responsibility for its failure to mold public opinion in resistance to big money?

Is it our party's position that we're rich enough to police the world but not rich enough to take care of our own?

When will our centrist challenger sufficiently differentiate himself from the centrist front-runner to justify his insurgency? To what does he object? About whom does he object? What will be his specific proposals? Will they come from the centrism of his Senate career?

Do we continue to wait in suspense while more big contributions pile up, until it's too late for a progressive challenge?

Do we wait for Jackson? For Kennedy? For Wellstone? For Mario Cuomo? For a crash in the market?

In the disparity of our prosperity, someone must rise to honor the historic mission of the Democratic Party. Why not Bradley? Why not Gore?

Why not now?

Stay tuned. We'll be back after this message.

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Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company