9/06/00 6:30 p.m.
Change the Tone
Some advice for Bush.

By NR's Editors

he campaign is going badly for George W. Bush. Thoughtful supporters will not, to be sure, be too disturbed by the polls that have him slightly behind Gore. Nor will they be especially troubled that the campaign has been off its stride, distracted by Dick Cheney's stock options and Bush's stray remarks about reporters. Even the best campaigns sometimes get wrong-footed, and the Bush campaign has a history of reacting poorly to a surge by its opponents before getting back on track.

The weakness of the campaign is not anything that happened in August. It is the strategy it has consistently followed. While we have long found much to admire in Gov. Bush's program, we have always questioned the wisdom of making "compassionate conservatism" the theme of his campaign. Its chief defect is that it does not provide a compelling reason for voters to make him president. His campaign has instead proceeded as though voters already wanted him to be president and its task were to prevent them from changing their minds. The strategy has been defensive, designed to make people like Bush and prevent them from associating him with what they dislike about Republicans. The Bush campaign was annoyed that Gore's attacks knocked it off its education message in late August. But Bush shouldn't have been spending so much time on education in the first place. A Republican is not going to win a tight election on such issues.

He will win it by making the public prefer a conservative to a liberal. Bush seems to pride himself on being a different kind of Republican, one who has transcended the old debates between Left and Right. But whether he likes it or not, the strongest arguments against Gore are not based on Bush's superior character or style; they are conservative arguments against Gore's program. These arguments Bush has been reluctant to make. He hasn't been pointing out that the Kyoto global-warming accord Gore favors would raise taxes on the middle class and make cars more expensive. Or that public financing of campaigns would amount to welfare for politicians. It is not enough to denounce Gore's antibusiness rhetoric as out of date. Bush should point out that by trashing the stocks of some of America's most successful industries, Gore is hurting millions of voters now. To shrink from saying so, on the grounds that Republicans are seen as apologists for venal businesses, is itself out of date in investor America.

Bush advisers seem to believe that the economy has been so good for so long, it is not a real issue in the campaign. So they do not take seriously Gore's attempts to persuade the public that Bush's tax cut would threaten the economy. They obviously pay more attention to polls that suggest the public is very concerned about a perceived moral decline in the country — but also disinclined to do anything difficult to address that decline, such as discouraging divorce. Hence Bush's soft rhetoric about starting a new "responsibility era." It's a shrewd tactic for a front-runner. But Bush is not the front runner. In a tight election, voters who are up for grabs can be found on the harder ground of the economy.

That means that Bush has to make the case for his tax cut and for opening Social Security to private investment not just in moral terms, but also in macroeconomic terms, explaining that they would prolong the expansion. And explaining that Gore's program, with its massive spending and its departures from Clinton's centrism, would threaten that expansion. (It's okay to "go negative" if what you're saying is true.) Cheney's recent speech on the economy, along with the campaign's lining up of 300 economists who support its agenda, is a good start — but only a start. Bush himself ought to come out for Microsoft and against Internet taxes. He has offered many detailed plans in this campaign, but his pitch to the electorate remains too vague. He needs to connect the dot-coms.