Which is why, at that very moment, the researchers in Al Gore’s Nashville “kitchen” were in action. Working feverishly from an advance text made public minutes earlier, his war-room aides picked apart Bush’s speech and spat it back to Philly via e-mail and fax. Bush’s talk of inclusion was a sham, they charged. In fact, he was proposing budget-busting tax breaks for the rich, a dicey experiment with Social Security and a prescription-drug plan that relied on greedy drug companies and HMOs. Gore himself remained silent, mulling over his choice for veep and watching the speech while vacationing beachside in North Carolina. But he was eager to offer his own definition of the baby boom’s societal duties–one that stresses fiscal prudence, programs for working families and high-tech savvy. “Bush is trying to sound like one of us, like a Democrat,” Gore privately told one confidant the next morning, “and I’m not going to let him.”
And so begins the first all-boomer presidential campaign–a potentially savage affair launched, appropriately enough, in Philadelphia, home of the Constitution, “American Bandstand” and Rocky Balboa. The contest starts at a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace. Issues are more muted and managerial than cataclysmic. Voters are deeply cynical–and very bored–with politics. The race seems, at first glance, like the world’s largest student-body election, a low-stakes affair pitting the gregarious chairman of the Inter-Fraternity Council against the earnest president of the Science Club.
Still, perhaps for those same reasons, the Bush-Gore race could likely turn into one of the nastiest campaigns on record–a furious race to the middle in which values and truthfulness trump other issues after the Party Weekend known as the Clinton presidency. Bush, learning from the president’s own mainstreaming strategy in 1992, is shrewdly adopting Democratic themes of inclusion and outreach–while insisting that Gore must be rejected as Clinton’s moral co-conspirator. “Our generation has a chance to reclaim some essential values–to show we have grown up before we grow old,” Bush told the cheering throng in Philadelphia’s First Union Center. “But when the moment for leadership came, this administration did not teach our children, it disillusioned them. They had their chance. They have not led. We will.”
While Bush preaches from the pulpit, Gore pounds on the kitchen table. He doesn’t dare defend the president’s personal behavior, but argues that the economy has never been better, that only he can keep it humming–and that the GOP convention was a “masquerade ball” that calls Bush’s true intentions into question. The morning after the last confetti fell in Philly, Gore was in Chicago, making his populist case. “It’s not time to give in to the big drug companies,” he told a ballroom full of firefighters. “It’s not time to give in to the big insurance companies.” He added a swipe at his foe’s father, President George H.W. Bush, who was driven from office by an economic downturn. “It’s not recession time in America,” Gore said, “like it was back in 1992.”
So far, Bush is winning the debate. Post-convention poll “bounces” are evanescent. Still, Bush got one–not from the obsessively choreographed (and little-watched) convention as a whole, but from his cogently argued speech on the last night. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Bush extended his lead over Gore from 7 percentage points (47-40) to 11 (49-38) in a four-way race with Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. That was a two-day average. Among those interviewed last Friday (the day after his speech), Bush’s lead grew to 50-36.
Quietly methodical in his way, Bush knew that the prime-time address was his political coming-out–the crucial next step toward establishing a level of national trust. He and his aides worked on the speech for months, through 17 drafts and a dozen practice sessions. Schooled to avoid his famous smirk and his “just kidding” shrug, Bush was almost grim-faced as he called for a new “responsibility era.” Still, those who saw him liked it: 37 percent said they were “more likely” to vote for him after watching it, compared with only 7 percent who said they were “less likely.” Only one other GOP speaker in Philadelphia scored better: Colin Powell, of course. The reception accorded vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney was muffled, but still positive.
Bush is running against Clinton even as he uses the president’s strategy: fight the war on the other party’s ground. As a Democratic governor in the South, Clinton survived the conservative Reagan years by neutralizing GOP issues. He was for the death penalty, welfare reform and targeted tax cuts, and kept a distance from Big Labor. After winning the nomination in New York in 1992, Clinton (and Al Gore) campaigned through the Ohio River Valley heartland, an ancestrally Democratic area Reagan had won over to the GOP column. They won the region–and the White House.
Bush’s campaign (and recent political career) is a mirror image of Clinton’s in 1992. Bush, too, is a Southern governor, elected in the time of a charismatic president from the other party. Bush, too, has been forced to rethink his party’s vulnerabilities. Bush, too, has assembled a thick book of position papers. It’s less meaty than Clinton’s was, but substantive enough to lend an aura of wonkery to his basic idea: that free markets and community-minded “willing hearts” can be harnessed to improve education, ameliorate poverty, strengthen Social Security and give prescription drugs to seniors.
Ronald Reagan didn’t try to make that case. But after 17 years of a bull market, the country may be ready to consider it. The NEWSWEEK Poll shows as much. Asked which candidate would do a better job of handling Social Security, 45 percent said Bush–compared with 40 percent for Gore, an astonishing (and potentially historic) reversal of party identities.
The same is true on other traditionally Democratic issues. On education, Bush bests Gore by a 48-39 percent margin, a sign that the long conservative campaign to subject public schools to competition is winning, and indeed may have won. Bush is fighting Gore to a near standstill on health care in general (he trails Gore 42-44). Bush still trails on what both sides agree is the Democrats’ best issue: prescription drugs. The vice president is seen as the better candidate on that matter by a 45-40 margin, a number Democrats hope is big enough to drive an election through.
To sell his case, Bush set out from the GOP convention on a trip through the Democratic heartland. First stop was Pittsburgh–a traditional early stop on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign schedule. From there it was on to Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. Bush strategists were claiming privately that they had a “lock” on some 200 of the 270 electoral votes they needed. They planned to fight from now through November in the usual “battleground” states, and even make a bold run at California.
But Gore has just begun to fight. The first order of business, his aides say, is to reintroduce the vice president to the country on his own terms. They insist that Gore’s story is compelling. A “bio” film, produced by one of Gore’s best friends–media consultant Carter Eskew–will chronicle the vice president’s stint in Vietnam, his years as a reporter in Nashville, his boomeresque search for meaning and strong marriage to Tipper. In the semi-science of campaigns, Gore’s handlers have to raise his “positives” before sending him out on a people’s crusade against Bush. “Let’s face it, there’s a personality bar we’ve got to jump over,” said a top Gore adviser.
The next order of business is to award Bill Clinton his gold watch–and get him off the campaign stage. It won’t be easy. The Gore campaign and White House aides devised a symbolic “handoff” for early next week. Bill and Hillary Clinton will address the Democratic convention in Los Angeles next Monday–while Gore is talking about prescription drugs and Social Security in the Harry Truman heartland of Independence, Mo. On Tuesday Gore and Clinton will meet on the relatively safe ground of Michigan for a ceremonial “passing of the torch.” Democratic operatives can’t wait. Bush, one worried, is “going to take Bill Clinton and wrap him around our necks.”
Not every association with Clinton is fatal. The economic record of the Clinton-Gore years is impressive, and Gore advisers think they can still make a convincing case for Democratic stewardship in the White House. Bush’s attacks on economics won’t work, Gore told NEWSWEEK in an interview last weekend. After watching Bush’s speech, he said, he concluded that his foe was “trying to construct a view of the last eight years that will be hard to sell to the American people.” In other words: times are good; people know it.
But Gore and his advisers are under no illusions about their main strategy: attack Bush’s Texas record and his new proposals. Democrats could spend as much as $20 million trying to portray the Lone Star State as a heartless death row of pollution and uninsured children. “We’re going to turn Texas into a Third World country,” vowed one top Democratic fund-raiser. Gore, meanwhile, will take on the task of picking apart Bush’s proposals. The main critique: his tax cuts and defense spending undercut his commitment to education and health care and Social Security. Bush’s speech, Gore said, “opened a huge gap between their rhetoric and their budget priorities.”
In the end, Gore’s strategists know, the campaign won’t be decided by budget numbers. Bush is riding high, and, for now, much admired. It’s up to Gore to demonstrate that Bush’s ideas won’t work, and that the cheery, multicultural pageant in Philadelphia was a cynical ploy. “I thought I was watching the ‘Magic Kingdom’,” groused Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley. “They did everything but sing ‘It’s a Small, Small World.’ We have to remind voters that it’s Al Gore who’ll fight for working families. We have to get back to reality.” Bush was the star last week. Now it’s up to Gore and his running mate to prove that W’s Philadelphia story was a fiction.
