Analysis: Bush's disaster
Thursday, 24 August 2000 18:54 (ET)
Analysis: Bush's disaster
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- The Bush presidential election campaign is
reeling from a strategic disaster whose desperate nature still has been
overlooked throughout the news media.
Bush's people carefully crafted a campaign perfectly suited to defeat Bill
Clinton. But instead, they find themselves up against Al Gore.
It seemed like a good idea as recently as two weeks ago.
There was a sleek, understated confidence to the GOP faithful who thronged
to the First Union Center in Philadelphia to annoint Texas Gov. George W.
Bush as their champion in the holy crusade to finally bring down the dragons
of Clintonism.
With the slick, smooth magician from Arkansas finally forced to vacate the
White House thanks to that most Republcian of statutes, the 22nd Amendment,
the way seemed clear to restore the normal -- that is to, say, Reaganite
Republican -- order of things.
Neither Governor Bush nor his vice presidential running mate Dick Cheney
spent any time dealing with Gore or his likely campaign strategy in their
speeches at Philadelphia. They lambasted the past rather than spelling out
details for the future.
They harped on the shameful nature of the Clinton years. They lambasted
the Clinton administration for failing to upgrade and reform Medicare and
Social Security and promised to do so themselves as well as promising a huge
tax cut. But they gave very few details on either pledge. It was clear they
did not expect Vice President Gore to do so either.
And both Bush and Cheney went out of their way to condemn the politics of
personal destruction, although those same politics had saved the nomination
for Bush by traducing the record of his one formidable challenger, Sen. John
McCain of Arizona, during an unexpectedly hard-fought Republican primary
campaign.
All these maneuvers appeared to make perfect sense in terms of the
policies and political strategies Clinton had pursued during his two
administrations, especially the second one.
In his fighting vice presidential acceptance speech, Cheney even predicted
that a scurrilous campaign of slander and accusation would be waged by the
Demcorats against himself and Bush.
But now it appears that -- like particularly incompetent strategists who
fight each war as if it were the previous one -- Bush and Cheney were
preparing defenses against non-existent or obsolete threats while scrapping
the best weapons they had against the very real threats to which they were
blind.
And they compounded their errors by deliberately choosing to fight on
battlegrounds that suited their enemies rather than themselves.
For Vice Preisdent Gore has never been a charismatic politican nor one who
either liked, or was particularly adept at, scathing personally criticisms
of his opponents. He is a so-called "policy wonk" who likes to get his teeth
into the substantive details of the issues, especially domestic ones.
Instead, attack politics have repeatedly worked far better for Republicans
than for Demcorats.
They worked for Richard Nixon when he politically destroyed George
McGovern in the 1972 electoral landslide. They worked for Ronald Reagan when
he ridiculed Jimmy Carter and his admittedly vulnerable record in 1980.
And they worked for Governor Bush's father, then-Vice President George
Herbert Walker Bush, when in a single month in 1988 he reversed a
10-percentage point deficit into a 10-percentage point lead over Michael
Dukakis on emotive issues like Willie Horton's parole in a single month in
1988 and never looked back after that.
And they have always worked particularly well for Governor Bush himself.
They worked for him when he saved his father's presidential campaign in
1988 by bringing the GOP's fabled attack dog mastermind, the late Lee
Atwater himself, into the heart of his father's at-first uncertain campaign.
And they worked for him in the primary campaigns of South Carolina,
Michigan and New York this year when his supporters -- usually with at least
a fig leaf of plausible deniability for the governor himself -- deliberately
distorted Senator McCain's positions on such hot-button issues as breast
cancer research.
But by pledging to to stick resolutely to the moral high road in his
campaign against Gore, Bush threw away that key strategic political weapon
for the coming campaign.
He did it to pre-empt the kind of Democrat-inspired campaign of personal
revelations about family scandals or affairs that derailed or embarrassed
the careers of the likes of Reps. Robert Livingstone and Henry Hyde during
the 1998-99 impeachment crisis. But there has been no indication that Gore
had ever wanted or planned to go down that road anyway.
Instead, the only real effect of that Bush strategy has been to clear the
way for the kind of campaign that Gore wanted to run anyway -- one focused
on domestic reform issues.
And there, Bush committed two more giant strategic mistakes.
He offered a huge sweeping tax cut across the board worth $1.5 trillion
and focused the campaign on domestic reform issues like health
prescriptions, Medicare and Social Securities reform.
It seemed like a good time for a tax cut. After all, the economy continues
to boom and the federal budget deficit is in better state than in more than
20 years and shrinking by the year as the economy continues to prosper. And,
of course, like the good Reaganite he is, Bush shared the GOP faithful's
passion for tax cuts as the one sure cure for all political, economic and
social ailments including Original Sin.
But by proposing such an enormous cut, Bush allowed Gore to pre-empt the
traditional -- albeit pre-Reagan -- Republican ground of sound finance. And
that in turn allowed Gore to pose as the defender of fiscal responsibility
and of the sound finaincial federal policies that had made the great 1980s
economic expansion possible in the first place.
Amazingly, Bush's tax cut proposal was so vast and sweeping it allowed
Gore to counter-propose a smaller but still huge tax cut of around half a
trillion dollars while still being able to propose electorate-tempting
big-spending social reforms like guaranteed health care for all babies and
young children -- while still looking more realistic and responsible than
Bush.
It's not often that that the Democrats can indulge in their biggest big
spending fantasies and still luxuriate in presenting themselves as the party
of financial caution and responsibility. But Bush handed them that
squeeze-play on a platter.
The Republicans thought they could get away with all this because they
thought Gore was a nonentity, just as they thought Bill Clinton was for so
long before them. They were wrong about the formidably tough, energetic,
dynamic and ferociously intelligent president and they are wrong now about
his smart, power-hungry, focused, idealistic and exceptionally ambitious
longtime right-hand man.
George W. Bush was obsessed in Philadelphia with appearing presidential,
especially in contrast to the personal scandals and accusations that have
embarassed Clinton. Being presidential compared with Gore did not appear to
be a problem.
Republicans hypotized by the narcissistic mirror of sympathetic political
magazines and commentators have long bought into the idea that the American
public finds Al Gore as ridiculous as Dan Quayle. According to the evidence
of the opinion polls, until Gore chose Sen. Joseph Lieberman as his runing
mate, that idea was true. But the polls of the past week have clearly shown
that it isn't any more.
For in his speech on the last night of the four-day Democratic National
Convention in Los Angeles, Al Gore finally did what he had to do to have any
real hope of wining this election. He looked and sounded presidnetial. And
he outbid Bush in the "looks presidential" stakes. He was not just
intelligent, he was decisive. He was clear. And he was dignified.
Michael Douglas in the movie "The American President" and Martin Sheen in
the hit TV series "The West Wing" could not have done better. It is no
coincidence that both those fine actors played sympathetic liberal
Democratic presidents.
All of a sudden, Al Gore looks as if he could measure up to Michael
Douglas and Martin Sheen. That is a considerable achievement. Governor Bush
thought the area of dignity, image and public charisma would be his ace. But
Gore has now trumped it.
That means the central thrust of the Republican campaign attack plan has
been neutralized. Clinton's own vice president now appears a more personally
attractive and credible alternative to the lack of dignity and gravitas of
the Arkansas Gang than the GOP's carefully chosen and crafted presidential
candidate does.
The full extent of the debacle that has hit the Bush campaign has not yet
been reflected in either news reports -- which are either superficial or
cautious -- or in the opinion columns on the national op-ed pages, which
remain overwhelmingly dominated by syndicated Reaganites like Robert Novak,
George Will and Charles Krauthammer.
But all their automatic and reflexive contempt for Clinton and Gore cannot
hide the huge flaws that have appeared over the past two weeks in the Bush
campaign. And these problems are not merely tactical and fleeting. They are
strategic and structural. And there are still no signs from Austin that Bush
has come up with any effective new answers for them.
Bush had better come up with some new arguments soon. Today's generation
of voters may not remember Thomas E. Dewey, their uber-loser of 1948 who
fell to the populist attacks of President Harry S. Truman. But even they
have to remember their own generational loser Bob Dole four years ago. The
last thing George W. Bush wants is to look like him.
If he can't come up with some new counterblasts to the suddenly impressive
Vice President of the United States, he's going to.
--
Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
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