Politics

Navigating The Campaign Doldrums

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 3, 2000 / 10:09 AM EDT / CBS

Seeking support for the law-enforcement package he unveiled Tuesday, Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday the nation needs to do a better job or preventing drug and alcohol abuse.

"It's ironic that even in prison, a lot of the people who have been addicted remain addicted," Gore told CBS Anchor Bryant Gumbel on The Early Show.

"And when they get out, they're much more likely to go through the revolving door and come back into prison. I'm proposing a new plan to require drug testing in prisons and to institute a policy that you have to get clean to get out and you have to stay clean to stay out."

Gore says he has been concentrating in the last few months on holding open meetings and spends his days visiting public schools across the country.

"I'm fighting hard on a full range of issues, including how to reduce crime further," Gore said.

The vice president said it's traditional in the spring of an election year for voters to tune out of the campaign, especially one like this one that quickly narrowed to just two candidates.

"I'm fighting as hard as i know how to and putting a lot of issues into perspective," he said, "putting a lot of new proposals out there and I have challenged Gov. Bush to eliminate the 30-second TV ads."

Instead, he said he would like to debate Bush weekly until the election with a different issue tackled each week.

"I think that would build interest even at this early stage," he said, "and I think it would elevate our democracy as would campaign finance reform, which I'm for and which he's against."

The vice president denied he had shifted his stand on the handing of the case of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor whose father is seeking to take back to Cuba.

"My position, actually, has been the same for five months,"Gore said. "I know it's not popular. And I take this position, knowing that it's politically unpopular. But the principle that I have defended from the very start, including in Iowa just days after the boy was rescued, is the principle that this should be looked at as a custody dispute and should be solved on the basis of what is the best interest of the child, which means in a family court."

Gore stopped short of directly criticizing Attorney General Janet Reno, who ordered a predawn raid to take Elian away from his Miami relatives, with whom he had been living for five months, and turn him over to the custody of his father.

"I understand that my view is politically unpopular," he said,"but let me repeat that I would have handled it according to a different approach, by putting it into the family court process five months ago."

Gore also sidestepped the question of breaking up software giant Microsoft.

"I'm going to defer comment on that," he said. "The appeals are now pending, and frankly, I have not had a chance to thoroughly evaluate all of the deails of the proposal and what the analysts are saying of the effect."

Gore also said he believed the U.S. Navy should stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a military training ground. He did not say what should be done with the protesters who could be removed by federal agents as early as this week.