Bradley gets the "treatment" with AlGore's ruthless lies:
November 19, 1999
Gore Gives Bradley
The Newt Treatment
By PAUL A. GIGOT
Now Bill Bradley knows how Bob Dole felt. He's learning what it's like to run against someone who will say and do anything to beat you.
The lanky, languid liberal thought he could attract Democrats by expanding government health insurance for children. But to do so he dared to propose replacing the bureaucratic, faltering Medicaid program with subsidies so more of the poor could buy private insurance. According to Al Gore, this makes Mr. Bradley the moral equivalent of Newt Gingrich.
"If a Republican had proposed to eliminate Medicaid, every Democrat in America would be up in arms," the vice president likes to say, in what has become a remarkable daily strafing of his fellow Democrat.
The Bradley plan is also anti-black. Why? Because more minorities than whites are on Medicaid, the Bradley reform "has serious complications and risk in the African-American community," Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile said on CBS's "Face the Nation." Mr. Gore has since added Latinos, the disabled and even the "HIV-positive" to the discrimination list.
And don't forget Mr. Bradley also wants to destroy Medicare. How so? He once contemplated raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility age first set at 65 when American life expectancy was only 65. (It's now 76.5.)
This is all demagogic, when not flat-out false, but then it was never true about Mr. Dole either. The Gore campaign knows that in the Age of Clinton facts don't matter. What counts is ruthlessness.
It's no accident Mr. Gore has assembled, with too little attention, a Murderer's Row of political aides. Ms. Brazile is a race-baiting specialist who resigned from the Dukakis campaign after accusing George Bush of having an affair. Adman Carter Eskew wielded his machete for Big Tobacco. Consultant Bob Shrum is sharper than Edward Scissorhands.
Mr. Gore is unlike Bill Clinton in his personal life. But he is eerily Clintonian in his political faith that absolutely anything goes in order to win. This is the most important lesson Mr. Gore has learned from his mentor, and why he's still the favorite to win the Democratic nomination.
All politicians stretch the truth, but Mr. Clinton's talent has been to make lying glibly routine. Mr. Gore has shown a similar bent. For example, he likes to impress black crowds by talking about the lesson he learned watching his father lose his Senate seat over "civil rights." Just one problem: Al Gore Sr. voted with Strom Thurmond against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
When Time magazine reported Naomi Wolf's $15,000-a-month salary, Mr. Gore first denied it. "No, it's a third of that," he said -- which was true at that moment, but only because her salary had just been cut. This is "definition of is"-style dishonesty.
Or recall from 1996 how he exploited his sister's cancer death to attack Big Tobacco, even though he'd accepted donations from the same crowd, only to turn around this year and rehire tobacco gun-for-hire Mr. Eskew.
But the audacious Clintonian twist came this week when the Gore campaign attacked Mr. Bradley because one of his unpaid advisers once chaired Young & Rubicam, which once (for two years when he wasn't chairman) had R.J. Reynolds as one of its 5,000 advertising accounts. The spin worked, because the whiz kids at the New York Times played it as news.
Mr. Gore's attack on the Bradley health plan also comes straight from the 1995-1996 Clinton playbook: First endorse the popular goal your opponent has pioneered (in 1996 it was the GOP balanced budget). Then seize on a detail to distort and demagogue as "extreme" or heartless.
The irony here is that while Mr. Bradley is described by the media as the more "liberal" candidate, Mr. Gore is employing the hoariest liberal attack lines against him. The veep is using both race and entitlements for the elderly to frighten the Democratic Party's liberal base.
This is nasty enough as a campaign tool, but it also has consequences for a Gore presidency. The supposed New Democrat is declaring himself against reforming the most troubled Old Democratic programs. He's the candidate in hock to the status quo left.
Mr. Bradley's conceit, or at least his gamble, is that he can box by Marquess of Queensbury rules even while Mr. Gore plays Mike Tyson. "That kind of attack strategy is becoming more apparent, and the public doesn't want it," says Bradley spokesman Eric Hauser.
The harshest Mr. Bradley gets in response is to say he's "disappointed," or that it's "sad" to see the veep distorting his civil-rights record. Mr. Bradley's new TV ads are soft biography spots; one says his "campaign will try to be different" in focusing on issues.
But there's also evidence the attacks might be working. Mr. Bradley has dropped even the thought of raising the retirement age, a sign he was getting hurt. Mr. Gore has also stopped his slide in national polls and he's regained a small lead in New Hampshire.
As it happens, George W. Bush's strategists also believe voters will reject the Clinton-Gore politics of attack. But at least they have the luxury of seeing if Mr. Bradley survives it first.
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