McCain lite

The key to Gore's success? John McCain. Bush failed to capitalize on McCain's

blueprint for winning over swing voters -- so Gore co-opted McCain's message.

by Seth Gitell

One week after Labor Day -- the unofficial start of the presidential campaign -- Democratic presidential 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 in running a strong campaign against Bush in the primaries, McCain provided a blueprint for success with independent and swing voters. Those 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 in his campaign since then, Gore has co-opted 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 McCain covered 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 has formed the first oil tycoon ticket in history. And despite Bush's self-proclaimed moniker "Reformer with Results," we haven't heard much from Bush on reform these

days. He's 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 a surrogate for the Texan, all the focus is on the millions of dollars in stock options Cheney stands to earn during the term of the next presidency.

The bottom line? In rejecting McCain's message, Bush has squandered his political lead and is now stuck in a Dukakis-like spiral. Which 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?

G"ORE HAS completely taken McCain's message," says Ken Weinstein, a senior fellow at the non-partisan 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 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 in Nashua, New Hampshire last September 27, where he outlined the New Patriotic Challenge: "It is a fight to take our government back from the power-brokers 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 embraced 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 Gore's embrace of campaign-finance reform is an unusually effective weapon against Bush. The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, for example, says the campaign finance piece of Gore's program is key to his success. "It's fashionable in Washington to deprecate the importance of campaign-finance reform. But it reflects for voters a certain commitment to clean up the process," says Kristol. "Republicans can snicker about that and talk about the Buddhist temple. I think it helps Gore. He's at least appropriated some of McCain's elements."

But 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," said Gore. "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 scion of an All-American military dynasty and war hero, 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. Both are members to whom the other party can look for support on specific issues. Both reflect a strand of bipartisanship that has become extremely rare on Capitol Hill, yet 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. Nevertheless, his staunch moral and religious background elevates him above the usual Washington hack. In this way, again, his selection reflects a nod to what political scientists used to refer to as "the vital center."

"The choice of Lieberman is a choice that transcends the two parties," says 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 Republican Washington-based insider, requesting anonymity, says he, too, has noted the similarity in the new Gore and McCain. "The most important aspect of his appeal is the fight against special interests and campaign finance reform," says the Republican insider. "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."

Yet even as Gore has displayed the wit to take wisely from McCain, Bush's team blundered when it arrogantly acted as if it were above learning from McCain -- even though McCain attracted voters more like those needed in the general electorate. "Bush seems to have made no effort at all to appropriate any of McCain," says Kristol. Take the example of foreign policy. When the Kosovo war broke out last year, Kristol notes, McCain gained notoriety for boldly supporting the effort 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. Bush and Cheney sound more like congressional Republicans who opposed Kosovo," says Kristol. "If you were attracted to McCain because he was for a strong national defense and 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 explicitly from McCain's message will attract swing voters to his candidacy. Ed Goeas, the Republican co-architect behind the respected "Battleground" poll, which gives a detailed voter analysis of swing areas, contends that Gore has not received a post-convention bounce. "I'm seeing that he hasn't gotten a boost," says Goeas, arguing that the other polls have overcounted Democratic and union stalwarts because the polls are conducted on weekends. (Goeas contends that such weekend polls overcount union members as a general rule.) In addition, says Goeas, his polling numbers show Bush leading Gore among white ethnic Catholics, the kind of swing Reagan Democrats who gravitated to McCain. Goeas further notes that the debate over the McCain phenomena overstates the issue because so few people as a 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," Goeas 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," says Ingram. "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 only emphasizes the need for Gore to continue playing to McCain voters. In surveying a series of polls, the piece summed up the characteristics of those voters who still haven't made up their minds about who 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." Where these voters diverge from those who supported McCain in the primaries is 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 and remaining enough of a Democrat to get the women.

ONE LAST point about Gore's embrace of McCain that's important to remember: 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 pluses the Gore campaign has going into the general election is a professional, finely tuned war room and research department that can respond quickly to any negative allegation. As reported in an August 31 column by conservative Robert Novak, the Gore camp deftly countered Cheney's claim that his Halliburton stock option problem was the same thing faced by Treasury Secretary 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 Treasury Secretary. Instead, Rubin 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 this would be a lot more fair -- given the way so many people have profited in recent years -- than the idea of Cheney winning millions of dollars on the back of some Bush-inspired foreign policy/oil money boondoggle.

Last week, Bush signed off on 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 Robert Dole. By running the ad, Bush has broken a pledge not to engage in negative campaigning. And Gore's response to the ad has been very un-McCain like: he hasn't taken the bait. Gore has wisely decided to sit back and let the press bash Bush for having gone negative. Almost no one is talking about the substance of the ad -- which marks Bush's only foray into the issue of campaign-finance reform. Instead, people are 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 Marsh. "The Gore campaign, on the other hand, knows one thing well: how to fight back."

If Bush continues to 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, which is how things look now.

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