Austin
HERE ARE TWO obvious issues that have worked famously in past Republican campaigns: gays in the military and “big spending liberal.” These issues have one thing in common: George W. Bush does not intend to use either one to undermine Al Gore and go on offense. The Supreme Court ruling on the Boy Scouts makes the gay issue exploitable again. But Bush “just won’t do it,” says an aide. And emphasizing the word “liberal,” another Bush adviser explains, spotlights “an ideological fissure that the American public isn’t interested in.” So Bush is taking a counterintuitive approach. His main target now is Gore’s prescription drug plan for Medicare patients. Gore believes this is his most popular proposal, and polls back him up. So what’s Bush up to?
An unanticipated but clever departure in the Bush campaign, that’s what. If all had gone well and Bush had found himself leading Gore on Labor Day, he surely would have stuck with the five positive issues he’s been touting all year. You know: education, Social Security, defense, taxes, and the next step in welfare reform. Gore’s late summer surge made that strategy untenable. So, Bush needed a hot issue. While formulating his own, less sweeping prescription drug plan in August, he found one. Now, two TV ads aired in 17 key states, one from the Bush campaign, one from the Republican National Committee, zing Gore’s proposal and extol Bush’s.
This defies both conventional political wisdom and the thinking of congressional Republicans. The normal view is that health care in any form is a Democratic issue that Republicans should stay away from. This simple calculation says: If it’s on the table, GOP candidates lose. Believing this, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been terrified by the prescription drug issue for several years. Its popularity has spooked them, its ability to cause Republican defections has weakened them. They’ve tried to steer clear of it, even as Democrats and President Clinton pound them on the issue. One of their current fears is Clinton will demand they enact a Medicare drug benefit as the price of averting a budget impasse and government shutdown.
In the past few weeks, Bush strategists have gradually, and with some trepidation, come to see the issue far differently. They regard it as the converse of the issue Gore has targeted as most important, Bush’s record as Texas governor. “If they can undermine Bush on the Texas record,” says a Bush strategist, “they can undermine [our entire campaign]. And if we can undermine Gore on the prescription drug benefit — since he supposedly owns the issue — then he’s got a problem, a real problem.” A humongous problem, actually. The Bush camp believes Gore can’t win if the Medicare issue is turned against him, and they might be right.
The historical precedent for all this is the Clinton health care plan that collapsed in 1994 without a vote in the House or Senate. The Clinton presidency fell apart and Republicans won a massive victory in the off-year elections. ClintonCare, the product of a task force headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, was extraordinarily popular at first, and Republicans feared the public would demand some version of it. Then, over the winter of 1993-94, the measure was scrutinized by health care specialists and political experts. It turned out the devil really was in the details. GOP senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania produced a chart that showed ClintonCare as a Rube Goldberg scheme, vast and unworkable.
This August, the Bush campaign’s policy staffers began developing a plan to modernize Medicare, including the addition of a prescription drug benefit. They hoped, at best, to neutralize the health issue. For weeks, Gore had been taunting Bush to produce the specifics of his drug benefit. The day after Labor Day, Bush announced his program in a speech in Allentown, Penn. Much of what he said wasn’t new. He has long favored allowing Medicare recipients to get out of the government-run program and receive their benefits through private insurance firms. The fresh part of the speech was his attack on the Gore drug benefit. He noted seven specific “practical problems.”
Many of these had been brought to the campaign’s attention by a young Bush policy staffer named Sally Canfield. As she worked on the ingredients for Bush’s plan, she examined Gore’s scheme, which is the same as Clinton’s. “When we looked at it closely, we said, ‘This thing stinks,'” Canfield says. In effect, the Gore plan would put seniors in a government-run HMO. They’d have to pay $ 600 annually for the plan in 2008. They’d only have one chance to join up at 64 and one-half years old. And more broadly, Gore is not offering catastrophic health care insurance, covering all medical expenses in excess of $ 6,000, as Bush is. Canfield also came up with a flow chart like Specter’s that shows the crazy complexity of government controls in the Clinton-Gore plan.
Bush’s political advisers weren’t instantly persuaded the drug benefit could be used against Gore. Canfield and the campaign policy chief, Josh Bolten, had numerous talks with Karl Rove, the chief Bush strategist, and others. The Bush team watched a television ad by Republican senator Spence Abraham of Michigan, lambasting the $ 600 fee — an ad that has catapulted Abraham to a 12-point lead in his reelection bid.
Mark McKinnon, who produces Bush’s TV ads, worried that Bush would be attacking a Democratic “hill” in vain. But he came around. Stuart Stevens, also a Bush media consultant, concluded that Bush couldn’t defeat Gore if an issue as big as health care was stacked 80-20 against him. Which meant Bush had to fight back.
The more he heard about the Gore plan, Rove says, “the more it had the odor of HillaryCare, a sweet smell at the beginning but it very quickly turns bad.” He says the issue, if handled deftly by the Bush campaign, could be devastating for Gore. “If you destroy his strong point, then you undermine the rationale of his candidacy.”
It wasn’t until after Bush’s speech, outlining his own prescription drug benefit, that his campaign decided to step up the attacks on Gore’s version. What persuaded them was the reaction of focus groups to a Bush ad that contrasts — favorably, of course — his position with Gore’s on Medicare drug plans, taxes, and education. It cites the HMO argument. To the surprise of Bush advisers, the focus groupies (mostly soft Gore supporters) thought it was a positive ad, not an attack ad. (The separate RNC ad is devoted solely to the drug benefit.) “I thought the federal HMO thing would sell like hotcakes,” one adviser says, and it did. “When people hear the details of the plan, they start to leave [Gore] very quickly.”
The test now is whether Bush will bet the ranch on this issue, as Republicans did in 1994 in defeating ClintonCare. Only then might millions of swing voters react as they did against Clinton. It’s risky, but sometimes history really does repeat itself.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
