CAMPAIGN 2000 IV: Fear Not Gore - Al Gore's presidential candidacy - Brief Article

National Review, April 3, 2000 by Kate O'Beirne

'NOTHING is the matter with Mr. Gore, except that he can't be elected president," Sen. Pat Moynihan flatly declared when he endorsed Bill Bradley last fall. Although the blunt assessment that Gore was a sure loser was widely shared just a few months ago, Wash ington oddsmakers now insist the vice president is the heavy favorite in No vember. The good news for George W. Bush is that the handicappers are wrong, and the sage of the Senate was half right. Pretty much everything is the matter with Al Gore as a candidate, and he faces formidable historic trends as he begins the general-election campaign.

Moynihan correctly noted that it is "rare and unusual" for a sitting vice president to be elected to the presidency; he pointed out that the only ones who succeeded were Martin Van Buren and Bush the elder (who, according to Moynihan, "really got Ronald Reagan's third term").

Gore faces the same problem Bush's father did, and trails W. in polls on the attribute of being a "strong leader." Also, Gore scores below his own boss's job-approval ratings by double digits. Together, these factors make it unlikely that he will win Clinton's third term.

The California primary results provide evidence that voters do, in fact, have a case of the Clinton fatigue that the media pretend has been cured. The 60 percent of California primary voters who disapprove of Clinton as a person voted overwhelmingly against Gore.

Past elections, too, indicate that Gore has a tough road ahead: Over the past 30 years, Democratic presidential candidates have performed dismally. Hubert Humphrey's 43 percent showing in 1968 has been about average for Democratic nominees, with only Jimmy Carter (in 1976) hitting 50 percent. In 1992, the Clinton-Gore ticket took only 43 percent of the vote, winning a majority only in Arkansas (and just 47 percent in Gore's home state of Tennessee).

In Clinton's pluralities, The New Republic's John Judis mistakenly sees the Democratic base of the '90s that Al Gore need only build on to coast to the White House. Judis's superficial statistical analysis complements the airy conventional wisdom that has given Republicans a case of the jitters about Gov. Bush's prospects.

But the GOP's own veteran demographer, John Morgan, counsels these nervous Republicans to ignore the scribes-from whom he expects eight long months of misleading cheerleading for Gore. He asserts that it's "liberals who should be panicked," because the notion of a Democratic lock on the electoral college is just "a nice myth." It ignores the fact that Republicans narrowly lost many states in 1992 only because of Ross Perot's candidacy.

As far as 1996 is concerned, Morgan attributes Dole's loss to his weakness as a candidate, the Democrats' early ad war against him, and the largest drop in voter turnout in history. In 1996, 9 million fewer people voted than four years earlier-as a result of the media's months-long trumpeting of a supposedly insurmountable double-digit Clinton lead. Even with this media support, Clinton garnered only 49 percent; in other words, a supposedly popular president couldn't even win the popular vote.

Looking at the electoral-college map, Morgan can't imagine how Gore can top Dukakis's 46 percent performance. A Republican candidate, he explains, begins the race with 200 electoral votes, from the states that mostly went Republican in the last two elections. This GOP base includes most of the South, the GOP Midwest, and western states like Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. Bush currently leads Gore in five of the six states (Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri) that, combined, would give him more than the additional electoral votes he needs to reach 270-the magic number.

Only a third-party candidate drawing over 10 percent of the vote would jeopardize the huge base that makes Bush the favored candidate.

Even though the media won't be helping his cause-he's not, after all, John McCain-Bush still has to be favored in a comparison of the candidates' most important attributes. The same analysts who maintained all last year that the single most important quality voters wanted in a candidate was "authenticity" are now claiming, implausibly, that the odds favor the android in the race. The inestimable George F. Will says that voters pick a president based on who they want in their living rooms for the next four years; by this standard, a nice guy like George W. Bush shouldn't finish last to a vicious phony like Al Gore.

John McCain, who pledged to cheering crowds that he would "beat Al Gore like a drum," appealed to voters who wanted "someone who fights for what he believes in" and would restore honesty and integrity to the White House. Republicans will attack Gore's reversals on issues like abortion, gun control, and tobacco, not as evidence that he's a closet conservative (as Bill Bradley absurdly claimed), but as examples that he will do or say anything to get elected. Gore began a recent RNC survey with a 44 percent unfavorable rating, which shot up to 62 percent when respondents were reminded of his flip-flops on issues, his dishonest representations of his record, and the Buddhist temple fundraiser.