James A. Thomson is president and chief executive officer of RAND and chairman of the board of RAND Europe.

Some might say we're asking for trouble. Or revealing our biases. Or "politicizing" our research. By clarifying how our research might pertain to a presidential campaign, we risk being accused of crossing the line between policy analysis and political advocacy.

RAND has always tried to avoid crossing that line. Our clients and the public rely on us for objectivity. Advocacy or partisanship is not part of our game plan. But this is not to say we eschew making recommendations.

Our job is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. We do that in many ways. Sometimes, we develop new knowledge to inform decisionmakers without suggesting any specific course of action. Often, we do more by spelling out the range of available options and analyzing their relative advantages and disadvantages. On many other occasions, we find the analysis so compelling that we advance specific recommendations. We find that these chances to help are especially rewarding.

When we advance recommendations, we do so with the full knowledge that we are not the decisionmakers and that we cannot take into account everything they must take into account. We do not have to balance competing interests across vastly different domains. (For example, we do not have to choose whether to expend political capital on either a RAND recommendation or a new highway bill.) We normally do not have to struggle with a bureaucracy reluctant to implement new solutions, although we are sometimes part of those struggles.

Our job is to give decisionmakers the best possible advice we can based on what we have been able to study. We advance our recommendations confident that they are the best we can develop--but also humble with regard to the broader complexities faced by decisionmakers. Political decisions often involve factors that are beyond the reach of the analyst.

Why, then, this issue of the RAND Review? President Truman is reputed to have said it best to one of his advisers: "Just tell me what's right. I'll do the politics." There will certainly be a lot of politics in the coming campaign. What we hope to do is to provide a foundation for the political debate by informing people and the candidates about the facts and about what the analysis suggests is the best way to proceed.

The job of the next president of the United States will be no small order. It will be his charge to remedy lingering social and institutional ills at home and to define a coherent American role in a transforming world. In domestic affairs, a plenitude of proposals have been put forth to improve our educational and health systems, and the competing proposals have become central to the campaign debates. Some proposals look promising. Some don't. In foreign affairs, a whole new world of challenges and shifting alliances awaits the next president. Those challenges will need to be met by comparably dramatic shifts in defense planning as well as in diplomatic practices.

Of course, it will also be the charge of the next president to command a military force undergoing enormous transformations of its own. RAND conducts extensive research on defense policy, but we will reserve our detailed recommendations on defense policy for a future RAND Review that will coincide with the nation's quadrennial review of defense and security policies in 2001.

Regarding the domestic and foreign policy recommendations outlined here, we suspect that both major candidates could find support for some of their positions in some of our recommendations. We also suspect that both candidates could find other recommendations less welcome. Ideally, both candidates would embrace the bulk of our recommendations and use them to refine their own presidential platforms and eventually the next administration, be it Democratic or Republican.

At the same time, we recognize that our research cannot address every salient campaign issue. We have done no research, for example, on current proposals for Social Security, gun control, tax cuts, campaign finance reform, or the Middle East peace process. The recommendations that follow cannot determine and rank every national priority, but they can suggest what should be done about the priorities addressed here.

So with that, let the partisan race proceed, but let it be informed, as much as possible, by nonpartisan research and analysis.