6.16.00
Co-Opt City

6.12.00
Reform, Part II

6.09.00
Bipartisan with a Vengeance

6.08.00
What’s Wrong with the Gore Ads?

6.01.00
The Unbearable Lightness of Being W.

5.30.00
Cold Beer, (Not) Here!

5.22.00
One China's Glorious Day

irst, it was educational accountability, then Social Security accounts, now tax cuts — Al Gore is getting "riskier" by the minute. At this rate, Gore may move his campaign to Austin next week.

This rightward movement by the Gore campaign has produced gloating comments from the Bush folks in the press. Understandably — the Gore campaign is reading the same polls everyone else is, and it's clear that Gore honchos think the Bush message is working. But the Bushies shouldn't get too self-satisfied, because Gore's effort to co-opt his issues may be exactly the right strategy in the long run.

Much is made of the fact that Gore is constantly reinventing himself. But this in itself is not such a bad thing; reinventing makes sense, if you move from a bad position to a good one. Journalists and other insiders pay much more attention to HOW a campaign gets from Point A to Point B, while the public just cares about Point B.

So, what about the merits of Gore's current positioning? It makes a lot of sense. Bush's strongest card is his reform agenda — fixing public education, an imaginative solution to Social Security, tax cuts to provide insurance against a recession and to give some of the surplus back to "the people who pay the bills," etc. To the extent that Gore can neutralize this agenda by robbing it of its most attractive elements, he makes the campaign about other things.

For Gore, those other things should be 1) the strong economy and robust state of the country generally, and 2) the fact that Bush is inexperienced, so why trust him with the presidency? So, Gore will talk a lot about prosperity (just as Clinton did in 1996), and a lot about Texas, how Bush supposedly did a poor job in this out-of-the-mainstream, gun-toting Southern state. Gore had been trying to characterize Bush's positions as risky, now he will probably just try directly to label Bush himself as risky.

The thrust of this effort tracks exactly with how President Clinton fought Newt Gingrich in 1995-96: give on his best issues such as the balanced budget and child tax credits, depend on him developing no issues that you can't easily neutralize (such so-called "wedge" issues as race preferences, bilingual education, etc.), and demonize his political persona.

The two advantages Bush has this year are that Gore can't take his base for granted the way Clinton could in 1995-96 (Gore's support among liberals and Democrats is still lagging), and the Texas governor is just not as easily demonized as Gingrich. That, of course, is not going to stop even the latest version of the Gore campaign from trying.

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