It’s been said that Americans "vote their pocketbooks." We’ve also been reminded for the past eight years that we are living in the best of times, economically.

This despite the fact that one of Bill Clinton’s first official actions was raising taxes on virtually every functional American.

If you ask most Americans whether we, as a nation, are financially better off than we were when President Bill entered office, I suspect we would offer a resounding, "Yes!"

But my gut hunch tells me if you asked most of us whether our own individual financial picture has improved much during the Clinton years, the percentages would not appear nearly so rosy.

Why? Because numbers can be cooked and people persuaded that any lie is true if it’s repeated often enough.

Things have been unraveling a bit for the Gore campaign of late because the oft-heralded Dow Jones Average has come to its senses in the last few weeks and gone into its typical October swoon.

The question I must ask at this point is…if Americans DO vote their pocketbooks, why do we continue to support political pickpockets who take our money and stuff it into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt US lackeys like Boris "I never met a bottle of vodka I didn’t like" Yeltsin.

For years, we’ve sent 100 million dollars per day in crisp US currency by air freight from JFK airport to the Russian insiders.

I wonder how I can get my name added to the White House gift list.

Also, why have we bankrolled international interventions that squander our military strength, cost millions of taxpayer dollars…and more importantly, the lives of our sons and daughters in the US military?

How many more barracks bombings do we need? Weren’t the Muslim terrorist attacks in Beirut and Saudi Arabia enough? The assault on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors last week brings those painful questions right up to the present.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are spent to defend the likes of Kosovo, South Korea, Germany and Japan. How about spending some of that money to protect our own southern border against an invasion of illegal aliens, attacking our welfare system and changing the very fabric of the culture we inherited from our forefathers.

This November, if we really do intend to vote our pocketbooks, we need candidates willing to offer up some truly conservative answers. But first, we need to care enough to ask them the right questions.

Like…are you willing to put America first?

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