NATIONAL REVIEW: WASHINGTON BULLETIN

It's a bedrock truth of American politics, so fundamental that it's rarely remarked on: More Americans are Democrats than Republicans. Republicans can still win national elections because there are far more conservatives than liberals. But in any partisan showdown, Democrats have a built-in advantage of around 4 percentage points. Which means that — as the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996 dramatically showed — Republicans are more dependent on independent voters than Democrats are. One thing we think we know about independents is that negative campaigns turn them off from the two-party system: It makes them less inclined to vote, and more inclined to support third parties if they do.

These facts are a problem for Republicans, because they have a powerful urge to run a negative campaign against Al Gore. Liberals don't quite understand this. They think conservatives are just in a Clinton-hating frenzy and have irrationally transferred their personal animosity towards him to Gore. They don't realize that a lot of conservatives actually loathe Gore more than than they loathe Clinton. They see Gore as Clinton without the humanizing weaknesses.

George W. Bush clearly has disdain for Gore. Dan Balz and Terry Neal report in the Washington Post that in an interview yesterday, Governor Bush alternated between expressing his desire to run a positive campaign and making unprompted criticisms of the vice president. Other Republicans, including the RNC, have been relentlessly pounding Gore over his role in the campaign-finance scandal of 1996 and in the cover-up that's been going on ever since then.

Gore deserves every bit of the criticism. Republicans ought to make an issue of Gore's untrustworthiness and the likelihood that he will continue this administration's lawlessness. It also made political sense to raise the issue in early March. Republicans could hardly ignore the news of Gore ally Maria Hsia's conviction and the resurfacing of the LaBella memo on the administration's botching of the campaign-finance investigation. The Republican primaries had just ended amid bad press, and this news presented the GOP with an opportunity to keep Gore from starting the campaign with a head start.

But Republicans cannot spend the next seven months talking about a Buddhist temple. A constant drumbeat would be more likely to desensitize the public than to anger it, as happened during the Lewinsky scandal. (As William Saletan wrote in NR at the time, "Outrage isn't dead, but it's mortal.") Scandal and character issues didn't work for the Republicans in 1992, 1996, or 1998. True, the case was not made well or, sometimes, made at all. But that track record does not give much reason to hope that running against Gore on ethics will work in 2000.

It's also worth noting that the Democrats increasingly mobilize their base with a message of partisan fear. Add this tendency to their numerical superiority and the predilections of independents, and the truth of the matter becomes pretty clear: A tit-for-tat negative campaign benefits the Democrats.