Have you seen this man? He's tall, stern, repetitious in speech and goes by the name of Mr. Vice President. He was last seen driving a Millennium Bug down an exit ramp on the Information Superhighway.
"The United States' economy, national security, and perhaps even its social order are threatened by the looming computer meltdown known as the Year 2000 problem or the 'Millennium Bug,'" warns Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. With press coverage of this impending global calamity growing daily, and the U.S. Senate establishing a special over-sight committee to address the Y2K problem, Gaffney is stunned by the failure of the Vice President to confront the issue.
"What makes Mr. Gore's absence remarkable," Gaffney contends, "is not just his determination -- as the 2000 campaign for the presidency gets under way -- to associate himself with every cause, no matter how trivial, that demonstrates his indispensability and leadership (or at least offers the prospect of publicity). More extraordinary, still, is the fact that the Vice President has made technology matters generally and computer technology in particular his personal responsibility within the Clinton Administration." Why, then, is there no controlling computer authority?
Gaffney suggests several possible explanations. Maybe the Information Highwayman has gone on the lam goaded by the guilty knowledge that "the United States finds itself in this mess in no small measure because of an absence of leadership on Al Gore's part since he came to office in 1993. After all," Gaffney explains, "what is involved here is one of the best understood and longest anticipated disasters in human history. Even though it requires the most massive software maintenance effort and hardware replacement initiative ever mounted, fixing the Y2K problem would have been a relatively minor task had a major national campaign been mounted to undertake it starting in 1993 or 1994 or 1995. Now, though, with [fewer than] 600 days left before January 1, 2000, it is a literally insurmountable one."
Gaffney cites Gore's goofy green globalism as another plausible explanation for his seeming indifference to the threat of worldwide computer crashes. The Vice President may think it would be all for the best, and that Mother Earth would reward us for renouncing the progress of the last several centuries.
There is yet a third explanation for Al's apparent apathy. Gaffney suspects that "he and his colleagues don't want to burst the bubble of economic good feeling that may help the Democratic Party (and his future electoral base) in the 1998 elections. The Vice President may be calculating that he can start talking about the coming potential catastrophe after November 3rd," Gaffney speculates. "Such a view," he warns, "is wrong, dead wrong."
Gaffney emphasizes that "we do not even have until the Year 2000 before the effects of the Y2K crisis will begin to become evident. On February 1, 1999, major American companies will begin their fiscal years 2000," he explains. "And the federal government will begin FY00 on October 1, 1999."
