In the meantime Gore and Bush have reversed roles. Now it’s the vice president who wants to freeze the playing field and sit on his lead until October; he insisted on no debates during the Olympics that might give Bush an early chance to stop his momentum. That’s why seemingly small incidents like the “a—–e” gaffe, the rats ad and the debate over debates were so costly to Bush. They ate up precious time he needed to change the dynamics of the race.
To compensate, Bush is working overtime to lower expectations before the face-offs, both consciously (he’s taken to calling Gore a “great debater”) and subconsciously (his series of verbal miscues, like calling subliminal advertising “subliminable”). Another good one came after author Gail Sheehy wrote a piece in Vanity Fair mistakenly suggesting that Bush suffers from dyslexia. “The woman who knew I had dyslexia–I never interviewed her,” Bush said, not realizing that reporters (who actually quite like Bush personally) were laughing at yet another mangled sentence.
The latest theory on the campaign trail is that all of this ridicule may end up helping Bush. The net effect could be something similar to what happened to Gore when he gave his convention acceptance speech in Los Angeles. The public, barely attentive until then, had assumed he was a stiff. When The Kiss and his zippy delivery showed he wasn’t, Gore surged. Now the public, stoked by a smirking press, may be assuming that Bush is inarticulate and intellectually shaky. If he delivers a polished debate performance, as he did against John McCain in South Carolina, it could give him a real lift.
Or is that just more lip-flapping by pundits who have been wrong a hundred times before? The problem with all of the handicapping is that it misjudges the size of the electorate. All year long at most 15 million Americans paid any real attention to politics. Cumulative cable-news ratings for politics are a tenth of that. But more than 100 million people will vote in November, and 80 million or so may tune in to the debates. The vast majority will watch, listen and judge with minimal preconceptions and expectations. These voters are not looking for what each candidate says about himself and the other guy (unless it’s conspicuously nasty), but for what Bush and Gore say about them and their families.
This seems like a fairly basic point, but the Republicans have too often forgotten it in recent years. They keep going back to “integrity” even when they know it’s a political loser. President Bush and Bob Dole both failed in character campaigns against Bill Clinton, and they had a lot more to work with than Dubya does with Gore. In 1992 and 1996, the voters trusted the GOP candidates personally–but they didn’t trust them to represent their interests politically.
Bush gets this now, and will bear down hard on the issues, probing for weaknesses in Gore’s positions that can then be turned into credibility issues down the homestretch. The danger is that in doing so, Bush could harm his own credibility. Last week, for instance, he unveiled a new ad that characterizes Gore’s Medicare prescription-drug plan as run by a “government HMO” (Bush does the same this week in an article for NEWSWEEK). That’s a stretch, to put it charitably. The polls tell him HMOs are unpopular and he knows his own plan relies heavily on them. So he’s trying to pin the HMO tail on the Democratic donkey before Gore can pin it on him.
A better bet might be to explain the merits of vouchers for poor kids. Because Bush sent his own children to public school (and Gore sent his to private), he’s well positioned to make the case. Imagine if Bush asked: “Mr. Vice President, why do your children have the option to escape horrible schools but you would deny that option to poor families, even on the experimental basis favored by Joe Lieberman?” Gore will respond by explaining that vouchers drain scarce money from public schools, and that he would invest 10 times as much as Bush would in improving education. Whoever wins that argument, the country will get a good education on the obstacles to real reform of the public-school system.
Can a vigorous fight on traditional Democratic terrain turn it around for Bush? Perhaps not. But if he loses, Bush might as well go down having taught the country something, instead of just barking like Bob Dole that the voters are blind to the character flaws of his opponent. After a real debate on the role of government, we’ll learn not just who won, but where the country wants to go.
