Column: The party of compassion?

Has anyone been to the Republican National Committee's website recently? It features a hilarious Flash Movie, a cartoon showing Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and other pro-choice advocates walking into a hospital nursery with guns and shooting a third of the babies. The ad then makes the excellent point that voting for Democrats next month is equivalent to killing babies. Truth through satire. How brilliant.

If you are riled up right now, then I have both good and bad news for you. The good news is that the Republican Party is not really guilty of employing such a defaming and inaccurate scare tactic. But the bad news is that another major party is.

For more than a week now, the Democratic National Committee's official website, www.democrats.org, has been featuring a flash ad entitled "Social Insecurity," a cartoon critique of President George W. Bush's social security plan. A brief description of the ad shows it to be just as inappropriate as the fictitious baby killing one.

The ad begins with a man picturing himself as a senior citizen relaxing on a beach. "Ever think about your retirement? George W. Bush has," the narrator begins. "He's been pushing a plan to put your social security savings in the stock market." At this point, a cartoon depiction of Bush shoves the man into a wheelchair. The chair's wheels roll backward and the man rolls down a steep incline resembling a stock market graph. As the narrator inaccurately explains the economic ramifications of Bush's plan, the man begins flipping around in the air, twice landing on his head. "Instead of guaranteed benefits, your retirement would be tied to stock market returns. And wouldn't George Bush have gotten his way?" the narrator asks.

To make sure everyone knows that Bush didn't just make a horrible mistake, the ad shows him striking again. He walks behind a wheelchair containing a little old lady and gives it a good shove. The woman slides down the incline screaming. Her wheels then lose contact with the ground and she flies through the air before hitting the ground and bursting. How classy.

There are a few things I could say about the president's social security plan. I could say that it will help the economy. I could say that it will have absolutely no effect on the social security of current senior citizens. I could say it is no riskier than many of the other ways the government invests our money right now. And I could say that it merely allows those people who want to earn some interest on a small portion of their social security savings the opportunity to, as a person who did not want his savings invested in the stock market would not have them invested. These are the arguments Republicans have been making, and these are the arguments that Democrats should be trying to refute, either with logic or fact.

But with "Social Insecurity," the Democratic Party has once again shown that it would rather resort to name calling and scare tactics. Instead of telling us that Bush is misguided, misinformed, or even too stupid to realize how harmful his own plan would be, they've taken it another step further and depicted him as a mean spirited man who murders the elderly. Do they actually think that the average American will buy this?

The Democrats already tried this in the spring of 2001 when they accused Bush of putting arsenic in the water supply after he reinstated regulations to the level they were during the Clinton-Gore years. They tried again in May when, for about two days, they implied that Bush knew that Sept. 11 was going to happen. Both accusations fell on deaf ears. Forget that you're on a college campus for a minute and recognize that mainstream Americans, even if they disagree with him on issues, accurately see the president as an authentic and hardworking man who wants to improve our lives. You can say that he's wrong about how to do this all you want, but don't accuse him of being evil.