Election Paradigm Is 1988 (Sigh)

Here’s a chilling comparison for the White House to contemplate: About the same number of Americans label President Bill Clinton and Richard M. Nixon unethical. For Clinton, the figure was 47% in a Gallup poll taken last weekend. For Nixon, 50%.

What’s surprising is that Clinton’s job-approval rating is still pretty high (55%). That’s partly peace and prosperity--he’s doing his job. And it’s partly the fact that voters have had doubts about Clinton’s honesty and integrity all along. But voted for him anyway. Twice. These controversies are nothing new for Clinton. But they are for Vice President Al Gore.

Gore is bearing the brunt of the impact of “sects, lies and videotape.” The number of Americans who feel Gore is “honest and trustworthy enough to be president” has dropped 12 points in the last month, to 45%. Compare that with the 53% who say the same thing about Clinton.

We’ve passed a milestone: Gore is seen as less honest and trustworthy than Clinton. Throughout this administration, Gore has always had the edge over Clinton on integrity. Gore used to be seen as “Clinton, with character.” Now he’s just--Clinton. How bad is that? We’ll see soon enough.

Election 2000 is looking more and more like the mirror image of election 1988. 1988 had a popular incumbent president presiding over a good economy. Then it was a Republican. Now it’s a Democrat. In 1988, the vice president was the heir apparent for the incumbent party’s nomination. Just like now.

In 1988, the vice president was tarnished by scandal. Remember how George Bush claimed he was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra? We could have another vice president tarnished by scandal in 2000. Are you sick of seeing video footage of Gore begging for alms at the Buddhist temple? Or hearing him say, “There was no controlling legal authority”? You’ll see and hear those things about 10,000 more times once the next presidential campaign gets underway.

Sounds unendurable, right? Well, take heart. The 1996 presidential campaign was one of the dullest on record. But the way it looks right now, campaign 2000 should be a corker.

It’s an open race. No incumbent president is running for reelection. Elections with no incumbent are becoming rare. We’ve only had four since World War II: 1952--communism, Korea and corruption; 1960--talk about a squeaker!; 1968--that one almost went to the House of Representatives; 1988--Donna Rice and Willie Horton determined that outcome. All pretty interesting races.

Another wounded vice president means that in 2000, as in 1988, we could see wide-open contests in both parties. Remember the line-up of Democrats running in 1988? People called them “the seven dwarfs”: Bruce Babbitt, Michael S. Dukakis, Richard A. Gephardt, Gore, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon. That’s how they looked in comparison with the first choice of rank-and-file Democrats, the candidate who had real national stature but who chose not to run, New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

We’ve already got 12 Republicans showing some degree of interest in 2000. “The dirty dozen”? Lamar Alexander, Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Jack Kemp, Rep. John R. Kasich of Ohio, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Dan Quayle, Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Gov. Pete Wilson of California. None of them has the impressive stature of rank-and-file Republicans’ first choice for the nomination--Colin L. Powell. But he shows no interest in running.

The rule is, if a party can’t renominate the incumbent, it nominates the vice president. He instantly becomes a weak standard-bearer because he’s not his own man. Remember Bush’s problem with “the wimp factor” in 1988? Well, every vice president has that problem. It comes with the job.

Bush solved his wimp problem with a one-two punch. First he took on CBS News anchor Dan Rather (“It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?”). Then Bush beat up Dukakis. Dukakis discovered that if you let the wimp beat you up, the wimp problem becomes your problem.

Will Gore have a wimp problem? Sure. It was captured on tape this year in Beijing, when he raised a toast to the butchers of Tiananmen Square. Memo to Gore: Find someone to beat up.

1988 marked the emergence of the religious right as a force in the Republican Party. Pat Robertson startled everybody by coming in second in the Iowa caucuses. “The question that’s been raised repeatedly during this campaign,” Robertson said the next day, “is whether the silent and invisible army was really out there. Well, it turned out.”

Robertson’s army got crushed in 1988. But it’s still around to fight another war. Last month, Robertson told the leaders of the Christian Coalition in secretly taped remarks, “We said that by the year 2000 we’d have the presidency. That’s to me the next goal . . . . We are going to have a pro-family conservative sitting in the White House, so help us God.”

Outsiders were big in 1988. Hart was an insider who got thrown out and came back in as an outsider. But the Democrats’ outsider slot was already taken that year, by Jackson. GOP outsider Pete DuPont tried to ambush the insiders, Bush and Bob Dole, by needling them to sign a “no new taxes” pledge in New Hampshire. Bush did, Dole didn’t. Bush won.

Same thing for 2000: Insiders are trying to turn into outsiders. At a GOP cattle show in Indianapolis last month, Quayle and Forbes attacked Republican congressional leaders for selling out on the budget. “Our congressional leadership is neck-deep in compromise, captive to its doubts,” Forbes said.

Gephardt, the ultimate congressional insider, is positioning himself as an outsider by opposing Clinton and Gore. Gephardt voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement, against welfare reform and against the balanced budget deal, Clinton’s three biggest legislative achievements. Now Gephardt’s leading the fight to deny Clinton “fast-track” authority to negotiate new trade deals. This is the Democratic leader in Congress leading the fight against a Democratic president, on issue after issue.

The fact that Gephardt has rematerialized as the spokesman for traditional Democratic values is a bit surprising. He was the first chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council back in 1985. That makes him, not Clinton, the original New Democrat. But even in 1988, Gephardt was a populist on trade, and that issue repositioned him on the left.

In 1988, Democrats rejected Gore because they were on the left and he was too far to the center. Gore was New York Mayor Ed Koch’s candidate, for goodness sake. Democrats thought they were moving to the center by nominating Dukakis, a man of great technocratic virtues. Now the Democratic Party has moved in Gore’s direction, and the left is on the outside. People like Gephardt, Jackson and Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota may run as anti-establishment outsiders trying to reclaim the Democrats’ great tradition after the Clinton-Gore sell-out.

The economy was pretty good in 1988, good enough to keep anti-establishment sentiment contained. In the end, both parties nominated establishment candidates. The GOP nominated a pragmatist who pretended to be an ideologue (“Read my lips: No new taxes”). The Democrats nominated an ideologue who pretended to be a pragmatist (“This election isn’t about ideology, it’s about competence”).

The 1988 election could have gone either way. At one point, Dukakis was leading by 17 points. How did Bush turn it around? With a tough, negative campaign that exposed his opponent as a liberal outside the mainstream. That’s the bad news: 1988 was one of the nastiest campaigns on record.

But remember, Bush won. So there’s hope for Gore, even if he, too, is a weakened figure.

Like Bush, Gore hopes to rely on a strong economy and the popularity of the incumbent. But he’ll probably have to do what Bush did--run a tough, negative campaign against his opponent. Especially if the Republicans nominate a conservative who can be depicted as outside the mainstream.

In politics, as in life, what goes around, comes around.