SEEMS TIME FOR A BREATHER. By sewing up their respective nominations in the first days of March, vice president Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush have booked themselves the longest general election campaign in American history. It’s eight months until November, and the candidates have already spent most of their money. Gore is down to $ 4 million, awaiting $ 7 million more in matching funds. Only $ 6 million remains of Bush’s once-Croesian war chest. Aside from that, they’re stuck with what they raise until each gets a federal infusion of $ 67 million after the parties’ summer conventions.
Much as Republicans might like it, there will be no breather. The Gore campaign is working on the assumption that this election combines elements of both 1988 and 1996. It’s 1988 in that it pits a two-term vice president from a successful administration against a governor who’s earned his stripes in a state easily cast as outside the American mainstream. It’s 1996 in that Democrats can run on peace and (mind-boggling) prosperity against a party undergoing an identity crisis.
The present political configuration leaves the Gore camp cocky. Bush has yoked himself to the most distrusted group in American politics, the southern Christian right. That could undo him in the swing states stretching from Illinois across Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to New Jersey. It may harm him even in the southern border states of Missouri and Kentucky. Bush is being driven hard to the center by a revolt against his own party’s fealty to special interests monied and moral, and hard to the right by fear of a Pat Buchanan Reform candidacy that could chip away at the pro-life voters who have for decades been the most solid part of the Republican base.
Gore’s advisers see Bush as particularly vulnerable to issue-based attack ads (a la 1988); some even think an early barrage can wrap up the race by convention time (a la 1996). Out of these considerations is emerging a clear Gore strategy for making short work of Bush. Here are its elements:
1. Start the general election immediately. Bush complained that he let himself “get defined” during the primaries; now’s the best time for Gore to define him for the general electorate. Issues are more propitious for Gore than they’re likely to be again. The coming weeks could see a crisis in Taiwan, a market crash, a new Clinton money scandal — who knows? But today, the election is about Bush’s embrace of racially atavistic Bob Jones University, and the misleading ads bankrolled by political crony Sam Wyly — who, thanks to Bush, enjoys usufruct of Texas’s pension investments. Bob Jones taints Bush as a “Pat Robertson Republican.” Wyly taints him as a southern back-scratching pol of a decidedly Clintonesque variety. Wyly has also helped drive out of the papers the recent campaign finance conviction of Gore’s China-linked fund-raiser Maria Hsia.
2. Cast Bush as the anti-McCain. McCain’s uprising may promise an eventual new majority (as Reagan’s candidacy did in 1976). It may be the route to a new marginality (as Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s candidacies were for Democrats in 1968). Either way, a huge bloc of voters has come unmoored, and must be wooed in new ways. Gore realizes this more than Bush does. Exit polls showed that the entire increment in this winter’s record Republican primary turnout was due to the McCain candidacy, and 35 percent of “McCainiacs” (41 percent in Virginia) say they plan to vote for Gore in the fall. Not without reason. Gore spent the first hours after his Super Tuesday victories noting that he favored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill (as did Senate Democrats, 45-0), and that Bush opposed it (as did Senate Republicans, 7-45).
If Gore can hold on to a third of those McCain voters, this race is already over. That’s why Gore’s campaign will stage events as often as possible to highlight the candidate’s similarity to (and Bush’s difference from) McCain. Gore’s offer to debate Bush twice weekly and forgo soft money may be a “stunt,” but so were the Lindbergh flight and the moon landing. Nor does it matter that such a moratorium is constitutionally unenforceable. Until Bush finds a way to respond, he loses. Gore expects Bush to persist in the almost universal Republican delusion that a bad Democratic campaign-finance-reform plan can be defeated by a non-existent Republican one.
3. Heighten personal comparisons. Given the clout of liberal trial lawyers, there is little advantage for Democrats in giving up soft money. For Gore, the real payoff of the debates-and-money-bans deal lies elsewhere. It would allow him to appear again and again in close proximity to his considerably less verbal rival. Gore is an overrated debater. He ran circles around Ross Perot in 1993 and Jack Kemp in 1996, but was bested by Dan Quayle in 1992. Nonetheless, his advisers are right to see the gravitas gap between the two candidates as wide enough to make Bush an even harder sell than he already is. Outside of the South, wherever voters have gotten to know Bush, his majorities have eroded.
Even Gore’s very worst liabilities, the thinking goes, can be defused if the candidates are kept in close proximity. The one blunder of the primary season that truly haunts Gore’s advisers — his suggestion that top Pentagon officials be vetted for their attitudes towards gays in the military — will hurt him if Bush raises it in ads. In debates, Gore can swiftly shift the focus to his own military experience and Bush’s lack thereof.
4. Mess with Texas. Bush’s Texas is as exotic and unsettling to most Americans as Dukakis’s Massachusetts was in 1988. Ask Gore’s backers whether Texas is an issue, and they’ll reply, “Boy, is Texas an issue. In half the black section of Houston, the streets aren’t even paved! It’s like an advanced Mexico City! The barefoot and brain-damaged kids of the Rio Grande, the encephalitis kids, smog floating over the state . . . ” Since education is the only domestic issue Bush feels genuinely comfortable talking about, one can expect the Gore campaign to promise New Jerseyites and Missourians that a vote for Bush will allow their children to be taught creationism like a real Texan, etc.
What makes Texas an even bigger liability than Massachusetts is oil. Not only Texas’s culture but also its economic interests are at odds with most other states’. Gore’s people plan to pressure Bush to back a release of oil reserves that would drive down prices and help the country at the expense of Texas.
That is the game plan, but at root, Gore’s team doesn’t think it has to do much. They are not worried that Bush will try to parry their “Pat Robertson Republican” message with symmetrical attacks on Al Sharpton, assuming, perhaps correctly, that a southern Republican treads on racial turf at his political peril. At any rate, Gore has been considerably more circumspect than either Bill Bradley or Hillary Clinton about appearing in public with Sharpton, and went to great pains to keep from being photographed when the two met privately weeks ago.
Nor is there much worry that Bush will “wrap Bill Clinton around” Gore. The Lewinsky baggage is easily enough shed. If Gore responded to a mild criticism by deploring adultery in general and Clinton’s in particular, what part of the Clinton years would Bush’s team then be able to “wrap around him”? The precipitous drop in crime rates? The economic boom that Gore helped preside over and George Bush proposes to tinker with? Gore has belittled every Republican tax-cut proposal of the last five years as a “risky tax scheme”; he clearly doesn’t think that rhetoric is failing.
There’s a glimmer of hope for George W. Bush. There is a recent presidential race in which the party that held the White House went into a general election campaign with the same hubristic overconfidence Gore now exhibits, the same unwarranted smugness, the same electorate-repelling cockiness — and wound up absolutely stunned when the voters repudiated it on Election Day. If Bush is lucky, this election will resemble not 1988 or 1996, but 1992.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
