THE MAN TO WATCH NOW is George W. Bush, not John McCain. He starts the eight-month presidential campaign against Al Gore on a note of uncertainty: McCain may or may not become a full-throated Bush supporter. So Gore is a slight favorite at the outset. But Bush has it within his power to seize control of the campaign and defeat Gore. He starts with one important advantage. Even in his worst appearances — the gig on the David Letter-man show, for instance — people like him. With Gore, even on his best days, folks have trouble warming to him.
To put his campaign on the road to victory, Bush has three tasks to accomplish, and they aren’t all that daunting. First, he’s got to reconcile with McCain. The easiest way is to ask McCain to be his running mate. Absent that, Bush still has many other ways to make his candidacy attractive to McCain. Second, he’s got to retool his basic message for the general election. This means more talk of reform, less of compassionate conservatism. And third, he’s got to prepare himself and his allies for the expected assault by Gore. Indignation worked for Bush when McCain likened him to President Clinton on trustworthiness. But this won’t be sufficient in warding off Gore’s slings and arrows.
Accommodating McCain may be the least of Bush’s problems. McCain loathes Gore and doesn’t want him to win the presidency. And Bush needs his active help in winning over McCain voters to make sure Gore is defeated. Exit polls on Super Tuesday showed that Bush has nearly a 3-2 advantage over Gore in attracting the McCain bloc. To beat Gore, however, Bush must capture McCain voters by a 2-1 or even a 3-1 margin. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, says Bush “may have most of that already.” Not all, though. McCain’s help could put Bush over the top.
It’s ironic that former president Gerald Ford has offered to mediate between Bush and McCain, because the tentative plan of the Bush campaign is to do exactly the opposite of what Ford did in 1976. Ford instantly accepted word from Reagan’s camp that Reagan, whom he had just defeated for the nomination, didn’t want the vice presidency. Then Ford declined to adopt any of Reagan’s campaign themes or pick a Reagan ally as his running mate. The result: Reagan endorsed Ford, but mostly sat on his hands during the fall campaign.
Bush needs an active McCain. Offering McCain the vice presidency, even in the face of indications McCain isn’t interested, is the surest way. Bush is bound to remember the salutary impact the selection of his father as Reagan’s running mate had on the GOP campaign in 1980. It made moderates, independents, and conservative Democrats feel better — and less scared by Reagan. It showed Reagan wasn’t in the pocket of the hard right. Picking McCain would defy the media’s caricature of George W. as wholly owned by the religious right. And while some Christian conservatives would squawk, they wouldn’t consider abandoning Bush. Besides, McCain would add foreign policy heft, which Bush lacks.
What if McCain says no? Then it’s time for Bush to do again what Ford didn’t — embrace one of his opponent’s policies. The truth is, Bush’s view on campaign finance reform is far from McCain-Feingold, but not that far from a compromise position that McCain has often said he’d accept. Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a buddy of McCain, has packaged such a compromise in a bill that would put a cap on soft money, raise the ceiling on hard money to $ 3,000 per donor while indexing it for inflation, and put stringent disclosure requirements on independent expenditures (like those anti-McCain ads run by rich Texans in the primaries). McCain’s advisers have informed the Bush camp that McCain requires no quid pro quo for endorsing Bush. But agreement on a few principles of campaign finance would tell McCain his reform spiel is being taken seriously, while not amounting to capitulation by Bush.
Another policy area where Bush could reach out to McCain is the Pentagon. Asking McCain to head up the Bush administration’s effort to reform the military establishment makes enormous sense. McCain could perform this as veep, defense secretary, or outsider. And it wouldn’t look as if Bush had knuckled under to McCain. He’d merely be picking the best guy for the job. In short, Bush doesn’t really have to do anything out of character to woo McCain. He needs to be solicitous, not triumphal, but that’s Bush’s nature anyway. “I’ve reached out to people who may not agree with me all the time,” he told Jay Leno last week.
The other part of Operation McCain is for Bush to name a McCain associate as running mate. Hagel comes to mind. As Bush knows, he’s been urging McCain to cool his rhetoric and come to terms with Bush. So has Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, also a McCain backer. Thompson has the added advantage of comprehensive and detailed knowledge of the Clinton-Gore campaign finance shenanigans of 1996. This should not be discounted, given Gore’s attempt to posture as one who has learned from his “mistakes” in 1996 and is now the real campaign-finance reformer in the race.
Developing an exciting message for the general election is Bush’s trickiest task. He doesn’t want to veer sharply from his primary message, but he does need to demonstrate that he’s the reformer and Gore’s the establishment, status quo guy. Also, Bush needs to show he’s not a dim bulb. “We’re going to do reform,” says a Bush adviser. “We’re going to do it on our issues. We’re going to paint Al Gore as an obstacle to reform on our issues.” These issues include education, Social Security, Medicare, taxes, and the military. “By the time of the conventions, George Bush will be seen as a different kind of Republican, not as an establishment Republican,” the adviser insists.
Bush copied McCain’s reform rhetoric after losing the New Hampshire primary. It generally worked, and Bush didn’t have to change any policy positions. He simply packaged his programs differently. Once part of a compassionate conservative agenda, they became elements of a reform agenda. There’s more repackaging to come and some fresh proposals. As much as anything else, Bush wants to surprise people with his ideas. “He’s not going to be typical,” says a Bush aide. We’ll see.
The conventional wisdom about the Bush campaign is that it will wither in the face of Gore’s fusillade of accusations. My guess is probably not. Rove says the fight with Gore will come down to “hand-to-hand combat.” And the Bush team is ready with some volleys of its own. The mild stuff will be criticism of Gore for “failed opportunities” to carry out reforms, especially ones that would have helped the middle and lower-middle class. The heavy artillery will be aimed at Gore’s ethical lapses and what a Bush aide calls his “difficulty in telling the truth.” The aide says, “There are ten different ways to attack Gore. We have to decide.”
Bush’s greatest gift is that when he’s tough, or even bumbling, he’s still likable. The day after Bush went on Letterman, pollster Frank Luntz showed a tape of it to a focus group of a dozen people in Orange County, California. Though the press trashed Bush’s performance, “every time Bush laughed at himself the reaction was positive,” says Luntz. Chatting a few days later with Jay Leno, Bush was asked if he’d ever thought about putting down a beer during his college years because he might be running for president some day. “No,” Bush deadpanned, and the audience loved it. “Likability cannot be over-estimated,” Luntz says. “Gore has a fundamental problem. He’s just not likable and Bush is.” Which is one reason Bush may win the White House after all.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
