Politics 88 : Gore Seen as Needing Big Victory in South but Trails Jackson There

Albert Gore Jr., exhausted from a grinding day of campaigning and fund raising in three states, slid wearily into his bed at the Dunes Hotel and Casino here one night recently, declining to join his campaign aides as they headed across the street to gamble at the Aladdin Hotel.

It was an understandable decision. After all, how much of a thrill could the gaming tables offer to a man whose entire presidential campaign is staked on a single roll of the dice?

The 39-year-old Tennessee senator is betting everything on March 8, Super Tuesday, when 20 states, 14 of them in the South, hold Democratic primaries or caucuses, and the Democratic candidates will divide up about 1,400 delegates, more than a third of the convention total. Of that number, 1,109 delegates are in the South.

Unless Gore can strengthen his hand considerably within the next week, party officials say, the odds are against him.

Favorite-Son Candidacy

Gore defied political wisdom by forgoing the Iowa caucuses and essentially ducking the New Hampshire primary, the traditional testing grounds for presidential aspirants. He is concentrating on the South, where he hopes to capture the largest share of Super Tuesday delegates as a favorite son, catapulting his candidacy to the front of the Democratic field.

“If it works, he’ll be the smartest guy in the streets,” said Al Lapierre, executive director of the Alabama Democratic Party. “If it doesn’t, a lot of people will say: ‘You goofed.’ But politics is a game of calculated risks.”

Every presidential nominee in the last 12 years has won either Iowa or New Hampshire and finished no lower than second in the other. Gore’s rivals figure that history will repeat itself. Gore hopes otherwise.

“It’s a new ballgame,” he contends. “With 20 states all selecting delegates on the same day, it amounts to a national primary.”

Hundreds of Endorsements

To that end, Gore has already spent twice as much time campaigning in the South as any other candidate. The day after the Iowa caucuses, he began television ads across the South. He has lined up an impressive array of endorsements from hundreds of state legislators, state elected officials, mayors and other local officials in Super Tuesday states and beyond.

Some have turned their local staffs and volunteers over to Gore.

“Those endorsements are not just endorsements,” said Larry Harrington, Gore’s political director. “In Arkansas, we have an elected official who is going to do yard signs all over the state for us, and we don’t have to pay for that. We have 100 volunteer phone bank operations in Georgia organized by those local officials. Newspaper ads are being placed in small daily and weekly newspapers all over the Super Tuesday states, and those are being paid for by those local officials.”

Recent polls place Gore second overall in the South to the Rev. Jesse Jackson--who is widely regarded as likely to collect more Southern delegates than anyone else on Super Tuesday--and in first place in Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas.

But most party officials believe Gore needs to have a commanding lead in the South. The conventional wisdom is that he must win big there if he hopes to seriously compete when the race heads north into Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

He has his work cut out for him. In Louisiana, for example, the contest appears to be a three-man race among Gore, Jackson and Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, according to Phillip Jones, executive director of the state Democratic Party.

Trailing in Texas

In Florida, Gore has support in the northern part of the state, but Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis is considerably stronger farther south. In Texas, although Gore has improved his standing considerably, he is still behind Jackson, Gephardt and Dukakis, party officials say.

And, though Gore has attempted to portray the earlier contests as unimportant, the momentum and media attention generated by Gephardt and Dukakis from their Iowa and New Hampshire victories has strengthened them in the South, particularly in Florida and Texas, the states with the largest numbers of delegates.

“Gore may have underestimated the power of the press and the television media,” said John Henry Anderson, Georgia Democratic Party chairman.

In Arkansas, early polls showed Gore with a commanding lead, but, said Kip Blakely, executive director of the state Democratic Party, “Dukakis and Gephardt have made a lot of gains coming off their wins. It’s tightened up quite a bit.”

The same holds true in Georgia, where party Chairman Anderson said the race shapes up as a virtual dead heat for second, with Gore, Gephardt and Dukakis clustered together behind Jackson.

Gore has said repeatedly that by “Super Wednesday” he expects to be in first or second place in the delegate count. However, Harrington, his campaign director, said: “We’re not so much concerned with winning states as we are in doing well in the delegate count.”

‘Doing Well’ Isn’t Enough

But party officials say that “doing well” won’t be good enough for Gore.

“He needs to win here,” Georgia’s Anderson said. “Even if he comes in second, it’d better be a good second. If he comes in third, I believe he can go back and tend to his senatorial duties.”

Ed Martin, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, agrees.

“If he’s second here, it has to be so close to first that it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “If he’s far back, he’s in big trouble.

But the South is just part of Gore’s problem. Because he fared so miserably in the early primaries and caucuses, political analysts say, Gore has to show some strength outside the South on Super Tuesday.

“In order to be a viable candidate, you have to hold your base and you have to get votes outside of your base,” said William Schneider, Times political analyst. “His showing poorly early makes him look more and more like a Southern favorite son. . . . He’s really made it tougher on himself by shirking the other contests.”

With that in mind, Gore is hoping to take Nevada, where Democrats hold caucuses on Super Tuesday and where he and his family have campaigned heavily. Democratic Party Chairman Beecher Avants said Gore now leads Dukakis in the state. Gore hopes to score well in Washington state’s Super Tuesday caucuses also.

Big Bankroll for the South

So far, there is one significant difference between Gore’s campaign and those of previous unsuccessful candidates who also targeted the South: money. Unlike 1984 also-rans John Glenn, Ernest F. Hollings and Reubin Askew, for example, Gore is crossing the Mason-Dixon Line with his bankroll largely intact. He heads into Super Tuesday with more than $2.5 million to spend, second only to Dukakis among the Democrats, and he plans to put it into television ads.

“He’s making a big TV buy, and I mean BIG in capital letters,” said Martin, the Texas party chief.

And, as he campaigns through the South, Gore--although Washington-born and Harvard-educated--is constantly invoking his Southern roots and the family ties of his father, Albert Gore, a congressman and senator from Tennessee for 32 years, and his mother, Pauline, to enhance his favorite-son status.

In Greenville, N. C., where tobacco is king, he reminds listeners at a barbecue that North Carolina and Tennessee were once the same state, and he describes how he himself grew tobacco on the family farm in Carthage, Tenn.

Before a joint session of the Oklahoma Legislature, he tells legislators that his family has sold cattle in Oklahoma and that a distant relative, T. K. Gore, was an early U.S. senator from that state.

In El Paso, he reminds a largely Latino audience that Sam Houston, the “father of Texas,” was originally from Tennessee and that, when Tennessean Davy Crockett lost reelection to his home state legislature, his parting words were: “To hell with Tennessee, I’m going to Texas.”

“He gets some looks for being from the South,” said Bernard Craighead, Southern political director for the Democratic National Committee. “But he has to prove himself.”

One thing he has proven is that he is a good debater. In the numerous presidential debates, he has scored well, hammering away at his opponents’ positions and frequently ending up the focus of the next day’s headlines.

But he has had less success in getting his own message across. As he jets from city to city, the press in tow, he frames his campaign in broad outlines of “economic growth, social justice and a strong, intelligent role in the world,” often plugging in issues of regional concern but seldom offering details on his overall plan.

Takes Hawkish Stance

He attempts to appeal to the more conservative voters in the South by selling himself as more hawkish than his rivals on defense and foreign policy issues, but generally his record in Congress is that of a mainstream Democrat.

Standing Boy Scout-straight, often rising on tiptoe when he tries to accent a point, Gore clearly delineates his concerns--the budget deficit plan, education, homelessness, jobs, environmental protection, drugs, AIDS. But only in the question-and-answer sessions does Gore disclose the kind of detailed grasp of issues for which he is most praised in Congress.

“There’s no doubt that he’s a terribly intelligent individual,” said Texas party chief Martin. “When he leans forward and gives you a hard specific, that Al Gore you know is qualified to be President. If we see that Al Gore, the one who does have knowledge of government, he fares well.”

In laying out specifics, Gore’s budget reduction plan calls for reforms in government procurements, where he expects to see savings primarily on the military side. He advocates reforms in medical diagnostic testing, which he says can yield about $40 billion in savings a year. He calls also for an end to below-cost sales of federal assets and elimination of federal subsidies for junk mail and says he will explore the possibility of limiting federal entitlement programs for the wealthy.

Envisions ‘Breakthroughs’

Then there are what Gore calls “structural breakthroughs.” New commodity agreements with South American countries, for example, could pave the way for sharply lower federal agricultural subsidies. Savings in conventional arms might be feasible if another round of arms agreements can be reached with the Soviet Union.

“Granted, some of the savings I’m projecting are far from birds in hand,” Gore says. “They require work and leadership, and I’ve said, if they don’t suffice, if they don’t produce the savings that are needed, then new tax revenue will be necessary, but absolutely as a last resort.

“And I haven’t shied away from that. But I don’t think you rebuild a consensus in our current political environment by proposing a tax increase right off the bat.”

Gore’s allies in the South, meanwhile, note that the most consistent leader in political polls so far is “undecided.” Thus, there is plenty of unclaimed ground for Gore to stake out before Super Tuesday.

“It will all boil down to organization, momentum and money,” Blakely of Arkansas said.