10/16/00 12:20 p.m.
How Bush Came Back
In five simple steps.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor

he Bush campaign is looking a lot better than it was around Labor Day. It's not just that the polls have improved, although they have. Bush has sharpened the argument for himself. He needed to do five related things to come back — and over the last month, he's done them.

Specifically, he had to:

1. Attack Gore on the issues. Bush had been campaigning as though the public already wanted to support him and reject Al Gore. He was spending his time trying to keep the public from changing its mind — by inoculating himself against the normal Democratic attacks on Republicans over education, for example. It wasn't a bad strategy as long as Bush was comfortably ahead. Once he wasn't, he had to start making an argument for himself, and against Gore. He did this, first by criticizing Gore's prescription-drug plan the week after Labor Day and later by broadening his critique to include the rest of Gore's agenda.

2. Drive a wedge between Gore and Clinton. For months, the prevailing theory of the election was that voters suffered from "Clinton fatigue." So Gore's task was to separate himself from President Clinton, and Bush's was to keep them linked. But whether because Gore successfully separated himself from Clinton at the convention or because there was never much to the theory in the first place, linking Gore to Clinton wasn't working for Bush. As Stephen Moore argued in NR, it made more sense for Bush to argue that Gore is to Clinton's left. Bush is now doing that. He points out, for instance, that Gore's proposing three times more spending than Clinton did in 1992.

3. Talk about the economy. For most of the year, Republican strategists said either a) that the economy would not help Gore because people took it for granted or b) that Bush could not win an argument over the economy because the economy was so good. Though these arguments contradicted each other, both converged on the pointlessness of Bush's contesting the issue. So Bush made the case for his tax cuts in moral rather than economic terms. Over the last month, though, Bush has been saying that Gore's new spending threatens prosperity. A speech on the New Economy is in the works.

4. Talk about the middle class. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was pitched, for the most part, to the poor. It was the underclass that would be rescued by faith-based charities and would be liberated from failing schools. It was the working poor who would get tax credits for health insurance and see the tollgate to joining the middle class lowered. In September, though, the Bush campaign issued a "Blueprint for the Middle Class" that made the case that Bush would serve middle-class interests better than Gore would.

5. Frame the race as a choice between limited-government conservatism and big-government liberalism. The Bush campaign had prided itself in having transcended what it regarded as the stale ideological debates of the past generation. Bush is still reluctant to use the word "liberal" — he's used it in the debates only to characterize the judges he wouldn't appoint — but in September he launched a tough ideological critique of Gore's big-government plans, both in a hard-hitting speech and in other remarks.

There has been a certain half-heartedness to each of these steps. That middle-class blueprint hasn't been followed up, for example. But what Bush has done has been enough to change the tone of his campaign. And because the public does seem disinclined to support Gore — that initial premise of the Bush campaign, at least, was sound — it may be enough to win the election.