(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell)
GK: I had a hellish day yesterday trying to fly from Philadelphia to Minnesota, had one flight canceled, another flight overbooked and I got bumped because of an airline mix-up, so I spent four and a half hours at the airport in a state of mounting irritation and I'm just wondering what the candidates propose to do about this. Mr. Vice President----
TR (GORE): Call me Al. I know what you've gone through, I've been there myself, and that is why I am proposing a Passengers Bill of Rights, a bill that would level the playing field for you and other middle-class Americans who find themselves victimized by Big Airlines people like Bonnie Sue Harbinger who's sitting right there in the front row and who sat in a center seat between two other persons and was given nothing but stale pretzels while the plane sat on the runway for two and a half hours before the flight was canceled and the passengers were put on buses and driven to farms and forced to pick cotton for up to eight hours and then spend the night sleeping in the bed of a truck that was full of bullheads. I say, that's not right.
GK: Mr. Vice-President, what exactly does your Passengers Bill of Rights do?
TR (GORE): Al. Please. My Passengers Bill of Rights would make a big difference to folks like Ginny Ann Jensen, an ordinary working American who has come to our home and met with Tipper and I and shared with us her own personal feelings that I think are typical of so many people out there. Ginny Ann was stranded in the Houston, Texas, airport for 16 hours and the fluorocarbons in the air caused her to lose her eyebrows. I think we need to address those concerns.
GK: Okay, thank you, sir. Governor----
TR (BUSH): Let me just respond and say that I trust the American people to look up there at the flights on the video monitor and make their choice and not let government dictate to them. And is our children being educated? That's the question, and my answer is, let's build our schools, let's build good values, a strong economy, a strong military, and good marriages like mine ----- based on trust, and not everybody blaming other people for their own problems like you saw with people like Walter Mondale and Dukakis and McGovern and all those people. I don't believe in that.
GK: Okay, thank you----
TR (BUSH): I do believe that no passenger should be left behind. And if some of them are, then I believe in helping out with prescription drugs. But trust is the answer. Look at this what you got here, this situation with the time and clocks and so forth, here we are pretending it's an hour later than it really is. Why? I believe the government ought to give us back the hour it took away in the spring, and under the George Bush plan, that hour would be put into a plan so that in the fall you'd get back a whole afternoon.
GK: Mr. Vice President----
TR (GORE): Let me just point out that my opponent's program is to squander that time and by the year 2013 we'd be going backwards and I know it and so does Arnold Warlock of Des Moines, Iowa, who had to live on M&Ms and Peanut Clusters and take sponge baths out of janitors' sinks because the airline wouldn't tell him when the flight to Grand Forks was going to leave-----
GK: Right. But how does your program address this-----
TR (BUSH): We have to lead. That's the answer. As governor of Texas, I got results. I personally visited airports and planes got off the ground and into the air----
GK: But as far as your program for air travel goes----- how does it work?
TR (GORE): That's exactly what my program does. It works. I've seen it work on my own airline, El Al, and it can work on others. My opponent's program, on the other hand, would mean that the wealthiest passengers up front would enjoy 4-course meals ordered from menus while ordinary people in back, people like Elaine Bergstrom of Gary, Indiana, would be given reheated dog food with melted cheese, whereas under my plan she would be able to fly and get places and get the retraining she needs to support those four wonderful children of hers.
GK: Thank you, Mr. Vice-President.
TR (GORE): The pleasure truly was mine, getting to know and to meet people of all walks of life such as yourself. I may not be the most exciting politician there is but I am almost certainly one of the most sincere.
GK: Okay. Thank you. And thank you, Governor.
TR (BUSH): Well, to me, I just want to say, this is a great country. Where else can a boy from Midland, Texas, grow up to go into the oil business and marry a wonderful woman and find the Lord and buy a ball club and sell it a few years later for a profit of fourteen million dollars and get elected governor and then find himself running for president and winning the trust of countless Americans?
GK: Thank you very much. (PLAY OFF)
(c) 2000 by Garrison Keillor