Noticeably absent from last week's presidential and vice-presidential debates was any reference to what one might have thought would be one of the most compelling differences between the two tickets: their disagreement on the deployment of a national missile defense. The silence is all the more striking given President Clinton's hasty, Friday-before-Labor-Day-weekend announcement that he had decided to not decide about deployment, thus passing the issue to his successor.
The Bush campaign has called for making national missile defense a top security priority, recognizing the threat posed by states such as Iraq and North Korea. Gore-Lieberman, by contrast, would almost surely continue in the Clinton administration's footsteps of reluctant deployments of limited defenses. One might think Bush and Cheney would elaborate on this contrast.
Before the next debate, the Bush campaign may want to brief their man. They could turn to an important new report by a Senate subcommittee on international security and proliferation, chaired by Thad Cochran of Mississippi. The lion's share of the report is simply a catalogue of missile-defense-related developments from 1991 to the present. What's made painfully clear is that while the threat has escalated dramatically the Clinton administration has just as dramatically scaled back the funding requested for developing both national and ballistic missile defense.
The report is titled "Stubborn Things: A Decade of Facts About Ballistic Missile Defense." Given the administration's head-in-the-sand response to real missile threats, it could just as easily have been titled "While America Slept." With any luck, the two campaigns at least will wake up and address the issue.