A wish list for the coming year

The end of the year is almost upon us and while, like many people, I feel an almost desperate need to say something positive about the past 12 months, for the life of me, I can't manage to do so. Instead, let me offer a wish list for 2004 and hope:

that all those who think the capture of Saddam Hussein has made the United States and the world safer will find some way in the next 12 months to explain why, eight days after his capture, the terror alert in this country was raised another level, with the danger of an attack described by the homeland security secretary as "perhaps greater now than at any point since Sept. 11, 2001." Once more, Howard Dean is the only one who gets it right -- the flak he's taking notwithstanding -- that either the U.S. Supreme Court or the rest of the country will tell the state of Texas that it cannot continue to execute people at the rate of two per month and expect to remain part of civilized society. Texas accounts for more than one-third of all the executions in the United States since 1976. One would think such a barbarous public policy would make Texas the safest place to live in this country. It can hardly make that claim even though it persists in displaying one of the crudest features of the Old West of two centuries ago. Across the country (with some other Southern exceptions), Americans are beginning to have second thoughts about the death penalty; Texas ought to at least try and follow suit.

(speaking of the South), that Americans will have a chance to vote for someone other than a Southerner in the 2004 presidential elections. We've had a steady diet of Southerners in the White House; it's high time that this privilege of the presidency is passed around a bit, in recognition that those of us who live outside the biscuits-and-gravy belt might also like a say in how the country is run.

(speaking of elections), that the entire political spectrum -- the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, gay and straight -- will agree to take the issue of gay marriages off the table as an election issue in 2004. Wherever one stands on this matter, it is not one on which we choose presidents -- or ought to. At the least, liberals ought to confound the right wing by refusing to play its game of demanding a moral litmus test on an issue that will be properly decided by the courts, not the White House.

(also speaking of elections), that the Democratic Party, which faces the opportunity to defeat the most unpopular president since John Tyler, will have the good sense to abandon its circular firing-squad approach in selecting the party's presidential nominee and, instead, focus its ire on the object of half the nation's electorate.

(and closer to home) that Tim Eyman, who masquerades as defender of the taxpayer's purse, will have the guts to run for public office. If elected, he'd have the responsibility of finding ways to pay for services he's choked with his anti-tax initiatives; if defeated, we might rid ourselves of this blight on the political process. At the least, it would give all the voters -- not just his tax-slashing fanatics -- a chance to express an opinion about this fiscal fraud in faux-populist clothing.

(and closer yet) that the crew planning the monorail will come clean and tell us how they propose to build it with one-third the funds that we were told it would cost when the idea was being peddled to the public last year. It seems a sizable number of Seattleites have found ways to avoid paying the huge increase in auto license fees on which building the monorail depends. Since it passed by such a small margin of votes in the first place, maybe we should take a second look at this proposed cure for our transportation headaches.

May 2004 be kinder to us all!

Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

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