We’re told that the new warp-speed news culture will give us nonstop politics from now until November. This is fatuous. Politics has become a cable event, like cooking or old movies, but even in cableland the interest is already flagging. Unlike Bill Clinton and John McCain, neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore is even mildly entertaining, which means they’ll soon get zapped by our collective remote.
So it’s President Gore? The political class seems to think it’s all over but the shouting. McCain’s mutiny left Bush without enough support from the independents and crossover voters essential to any victory. The presumptive GOP nominee is callow and smirky and will wear poorly over time. Meanwhile the Democrats are more united, and have spent the past eight years inoculating themselves against all the old “wedge” issues (soft on crime, big spenders) that killed them in the past. Even the Republicans agree that Gore is fit for high office, a point they tacitly admitted during the impeachment vote last year, when they seemed all too willing to make him president.
But Bush has eons of political time to reposition himself in the center while maintaining his solid Southern base. In fact, the NEWSWEEK Poll shows him leading by 11 points among self-described independents. It’s as silly to think of Gore as a sure winner now as it was for Sen. Pat Moynihan and others to think of him as a sure loser six months ago. The vice president is a better candidate this year, but earth-toned suits, a Nashville address and alpha-male primary victories haven’t given him a personality transplant. Bush will get his innings. With a couple of clutch hits (or poor economic quarters), he can win.
Bush is not as smart as Gore, a handicap in a world that increasingly belongs to the swift. But the Synapse Gap also greatly lowers the expectations for Bush. For all of Gore’s vaunted debating skills, Dan Quayle held his own against him in 1992, partly because expectations for Quayle were nonexistent. And Bush is no Quayle; he routinely bested McCain in later primary debates. Gore, meanwhile, has to worry about looking like an Eddie Haskell. Even if he wins the debates on points, Bush might prevail overall with some well-timed one-liners.
Buddhist-temple jabs and Internet-creation jokes may get stale, but Bush will have other material. His campaign manager, Karl Rove, already previewed one retort for me: should Gore say, as he often does, that his administration “grew” the economy, Bush will turn to the camera and reply: “If you believe they ‘grew’ the economy, vote for them; if you believe that you–American entrepreneurs–did it, then give us a chance.” This won’t neutralize the Democrats’ big advantage on prosperity, but it could soften it.
It’s even possible that education–traditionally a winning Democratic issue–will cut this year for Bush, who knows what he’s talking about on the subject. The governor has a nice line about “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and a modest voucher plan for poor parents that voters in the NEWSWEEK Poll seem to favor. Gore’s “revolutionary” education plans (which include universal pre-K) still leave him vulnerable to the charge raised in the Democratic debate in Harlem–that he’d deny to poor black parents the school-choice options available to him and his family.
At first glance, taxes appear to be a good issue for Democrats. Polls show greater support for the Gore-McCain position of using the surplus to pay down the debt and save Social Security before a huge tax cut. But with surpluses growing every day, Bush will fare better than Bob Dole in 1996 with the argument that there’s enough money to do all three. Gore’s “risky tax scheme” gibe may ring hollow.
Even abortion and gun control aren’t sure Democratic winners. Abortion continues to divide the country right down the middle, while so-called “partial-birth abortion” (favored by Gore) is distinctly unpopular. And gun control is tricky. It’s easy to envision the ads crucifying Bush for signing a Texas bill allowing concealed weapons to be carried into church. His argument that “first we should enforce the gun laws already on the books” is hypocritical, considering that Republicans in Congress have done all they can to cut the enforcement powers of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even so, there’s a reason the NRA was untouchable for so long. Gore’s support for registering all new handguns (depicted as wimpy by Bradley) could hurt him in pro-gun swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
This is the year when blue blood runs cold. Like Victorians in a brothel, both candidates separate what they do in campaigns from their sense of their own integrity. This lets them rationalize the seamy side of politics. Gore’s always been a street fighter, but Bush is proving he can slum, too, and still show up at the garden party the next day. After sliming McCain, Bush was delighted to find that exit polls showed voters thought McCain (who wasn’t even running any negative TV ads) was the more negative candidate. Bush played the victim skillfully, suggesting that McCain had called him an “anti-Catholic bigot” when McCain had merely pointed out that he appeared at anti-Roman Catholic Bob Jones University. This aggressive aggrieving will come in handy. If Bush can make a war hero look bad, he shouldn’t have any trouble casting Al Gore as the heavy.
