McCain lite

The key to Gore's success? John McCain. Bush has failed to capitalize on
McCain's blueprint for success with swing voters -- so Gore co-opted the issues

by Seth Gitell

Early one week after Labor Day -- the unofficial start of the presidential campaign -- Democratic candidate Al Gore has a solid lead in the polls over GOP challenger George W. Bush. The secret to Gore's success? Arizona senator John McCain.

Officially, of course, McCain is supporting Bush. But by running a strong campaign against Bush in the primaries, McCain provided a blueprint for success with the much-talked-about independent swing voters. These voters -- who number around one million -- are seen as the key to victory in November's election. With his speech at the Democratic convention and throughout his campaign since then, Gore has courted them by co-opting the key elements of McCain's message: railing against powerful political interests, fighting for "working families," and promoting broader "American values" that speak to the center of the electorate. And it's working. Gore went into the Democratic convention 10 points behind Bush in most national polls. His numbers bounced back immediately after the convention and, to the surprise of pundits and pollsters, have remained strong.

Bush, meanwhile, has completely ceded the ground defined by McCain in the primaries. The Republican convention was an orgy of corporate largesse -- half-a-million-dollar parties, a Republican candy-eating fest (the "Death by Chocolate Social"), private fishing trips for big donors with House Speaker Dennis Hastert. With his vice-presidential pick, Dick Cheney, Bush formed the first double oil-tycoon ticket in history. And although he calls himself the "Reformer with Results," we haven't seen much from Bush on reform these days. He has yet to utter a syllable about campaign-finance reform -- except to make fun of Gore's visit to a Buddhist temple (more on that later). What's more, when Bush puts Cheney forward to act as his surrogate, all the focus is on the millions of dollars in stock options that Cheney stands to earn during the next presidential term. The problem is so acute that it was the focus of a devastating column by conservative columnist Robert Novak on August 31, in addition to articles by other influential conservatives, such as Robert George and Ramesh Ponnuru on NationalReview.com.

The bottom line? In rejecting McCain's message, Bush has squandered his political lead and is now stuck in a Dukakis-like spiral. This leaves us with three questions to keep in mind between now and November 7. Can Bush recover? Will Gore keep his advantage? And what, if anything, does this mean for John McCain?

GORE HAS completely taken McCain's message," says Ken Weinstein, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Hudson Institute in Washington. "Gore's message is, at heart, of the people versus the powerful. This was McCain's message: `let's take on the special interests and send them home.' "

Consider this passage from Gore's convention acceptance speech: "I know one thing about the job of the president. It is the only job in the Constitution that is charged with the responsibility of fighting for all the people -- not just the people of one state, or one district, not just the wealthy or the powerful -- all the people, especially those who need a voice, those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up so they are never left behind. . . . If you entrust me with the presidency, I will fight for you."

It's strikingly similar to McCain's announcement speech on September 27, 1999, in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he outlined the "new patriotic challenge": "It is a fight to take our government back from the powerbrokers and special interests, and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve. If we are to meet the challenges of our time, we must take the corrupting influence of special-interest money out of politics."

Gore has even adopted the calling card of the McCain presidential effort -- campaign-finance reform. "If you entrust me with the presidency, I will put democracy back in your hands, and get all the special-interest money, all of it, out of our democracy, by enacting campaign-finance reform," Gore said during his convention speech. "I feel so strongly about this, I promise you that campaign-finance reform will be the very first bill that Joe Lieberman and I send to the United States Congress."

Some conservatives say that Gore's embrace of campaign-finance reform is an unusually effective weapon against Bush. "It's fashionable in Washington to deprecate the importance of campaign-finance reform," says the Weekly Standard's William Kristol. "But it reflects for voters a certain commitment to clean up the process. Republicans can snicker about that and talk about the Buddhist temple. [But] I think it helps Gore. He's at least appropriated some of McCain's elements."

And that's not all: Gore has even usurped McCain's theme of patriotism. During his convention acceptance speech, Gore emphasized his service in Vietnam. "I enlisted in the army because I knew if I didn't go, someone else in the small town of Carthage, Tennessee, would go in my place," he said. "I was an Army reporter in Vietnam. When I was there, I didn't do the most, or run the gravest danger. But I was proud to wear my country's uniform." That pride was evident a few weeks later when Gore donned his Veterans of Foreign Wars garrison cap to proclaim "an unshakable national commitment to our veterans" -- another one of the hallmarks of McCain's campaign.

Even Gore's choice of a vice-presidential nominee reflects the McCain influence. On the surface, McCain, the war-hero scion of an all-American military dynasty, and Lieberman, the professorial son of an Orthodox Jewish milkman, don't have much in common. But in the Senate, Lieberman and McCain worked closely in many matters relating to foreign policy and defense. Each is the type of senator to whom the other party can look for support on specific issues. That kind of bipartisanship has become extremely rare on Capitol Hill, but it is welcomed by the American public, particularly swing voters. To be sure, nothing in Lieberman's portfolio can come close to McCain's status as a war hero, but his staunch moral and religious background elevates him above the usual Washington hack. In this way, again, his selection is a nod to what political scientists used to call "the vital center."

"The choice of Lieberman is a choice that transcends the two parties," says the Hudson Institute's Weinstein. "Lieberman is someone who stands there with some form of moral authority. His religion, while not really heroic, shows he stands for something beyond naked political ambition." In other words, beyond Clinton.

One Washington-based Republican insider, requesting anonymity, says that he, too, has noted the similarity between the new Gore and McCain: "The most important aspect of his appeal is the fight against special interests and [for] campaign-finance reform. Gore's tone is much more potentially appealing to the independents. A lot of people in Republican ranks underestimated his ability to capture that message to appeal to the swing voters."

Indeed. "The big surprise is I did not think the Gore people would be smart enough to do this," says Democratic consultant Michael Goldman, "and even if they were smart enough, I did not know if Gore himself would have the guts to do it."

Even as Gore has displayed the wit to take wisely from McCain, Bush's campaign has blundered by arrogantly acting as if it were above learning from the senator -- even though McCain attracted more of the type of voters that a candidate needs to win the general election. "Bush seems to have made no effort at all to appropriate any of McCain," says Kristol. Take foreign policy. When the Kosovo war broke out last year, Kristol notes, McCain gained notoriety for boldly supporting US military involvement and criticizing the Clinton administration for not going far enough. Now Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, is calling for the recall of troops in the Balkans. "What launched McCain was Kosovo," says Kristol. "Bush and Cheney sound more like congressional Republicans who opposed Kosovo. If you were attracted to McCain because he was for a strong national defense and a muscular America abroad and campaign-finance reform at home, you might not be attracted to Gore, but you wouldn't be won over to Bush by anything Bush is doing."

NOT EVERYONE believes that Gore's strategy of borrowing from McCain's message will attract swing voters to his candidacy. Ed Goeas, the Republicans co-architect of the respected "Battleground" poll, which gives a detailed voter analysis of swing areas, contends that Gore has not received a post-convention bounce at all. "I'm seeing that he hasn't gotten a boost," says Goeas, arguing that the other polls have over-counted Democratic and union stalwarts because the polls are conducted on weekends. (Goeas contends that such weekend polls over-count union members as a general rule.) In addition, says Goeas, his polling numbers show Bush leading Gore among white ethnic Catholics, the kind of Reagan-Democrat swing voters who gravitated to McCain. Goeas further notes that the debate over the McCain phenomenon overstates the issue because such a small percentage of the electorate actually voted in the presidential primaries. "It's a trap people always get into saying who these voting groups were during the primaries," he says.

Chris Ingram, a senior vice-president with Luntz Research Companies, another Republican polling firm, agrees. "It's too early to say that Gore has nailed down the `McCain middle,' as we like to call them," he says. "Gore's picked up a little bit of steam with women and your other traditional Democratic minority groups." Nothing will be clear, Ingram adds, until after the debates.

Nevertheless, a detailed analysis of voters published September 3 by the New York Times emphasizes Gore's wisdom in playing to McCain voters. In surveying a series of different polls, the piece summed up the characteristics of those voters who still haven't made up their minds about whom to support in November: "More than half consider themselves independents. They are mostly married, between the ages of 45 and 64. They hold moderate stands on issues." These voters diverge from those who supported McCain in the primaries in that "more than half are women." But this is where Gore's inherent advantage as a Democrat comes into play. Because women generally come home to the Democratic Party in general elections, Gore is playing up just enough of McCain's message to capture the undecided men while remaining enough of a Democrat to draw the women.

IT'S IMPORTANT to remember one critical point about Gore's embrace of McCain: he's only taking McCain's message, not his strategy. When Bush got into trouble against McCain, he went negative. The Bush team -- lead by strategist Karl Rove -- eviscerated McCain in South Carolina. And the former Navy pilot failed to fight back until it was too late. Gore won't make that mistake.

One of the advantages enjoyed by the Gore campaign is a professional, finely tuned war room and research department that can quickly respond to any negative allegation. As reported in the August 31 Novak column, the Gore camp deftly countered Cheney's claim that his Halliburton stock-option problem mirrored the difficulty faced by Robert Rubin, who owned a piece of Goldman Sachs when he was appointed to Clinton's cabinet. Rubin did not continue to hold stock options during his tenure as secretary of the Treasury. Instead, he transferred his holdings into debt -- and lost millions of dollars when Goldman went public, according to Novak. Rubin certainly did not reap the financial rewards of the Wall Street boom he presided over -- although if he had, given the way so many people have profited in recent years, it would have been much fairer than it would be if Cheney won millions of dollars on the back of some Bush-inspired foreign-policy/oil-money boondoggle.

Last week, Bush approved an ad attacking Gore for his role in the Democratic fundraising scandals of 1996. The commercial blasts Gore for his visit to a Buddhist monastery during Clinton's election fight against Bob Dole. By running the ad, Bush has broken a pledge not to engage in negative campaigning. And Gore has wisely decided to sit back and let the press bash Bush -- he's even encouraged the media criticism with no fewer than two press releases detailing his rival's broken promise. Almost no one is talking about the substance of the ad, which marks Bush's only foray into the issue of campaign-finance reform. They're talking about what the ad says about Bush.

"When it came to fighting back against George Bush in the primary campaign, John McCain failed," says Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh. "The Gore campaign, on the other hand, knows one thing well: how to fight back."

Meanwhile, one Washington Republican insider who's partial to Bush says, "They've got to do something. They don't have a winning game plan. People in Washington are saying he needs new blood. The Bush team is terrific -- when they don't have an opponent who fights back. Where they have problems is when somebody fights."

If Bush continues his downward spiral and Gore prevails in November, McCain might yet get his chance to run as the Republican nominee. But not until 2004. Until then he'll just have to hope that Gore as "McCain lite" has the magic and strength to prevail. That's the way things look now.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.