Campaign 2000 a Surprisingly Clean Fight

Somewhere between Machiavelli’s rules of political warfare and Emily Post’s rules of teatime comes Albert Arnold Gore Jr., the debonair warrior clamoring for the presidency without breaking all the china.

Before African American legislators in Baltimore, business executives in New Hampshire or steelworkers in Ohio, Gore readily picks apart rival Bill Bradley’s health care plan: “Squandering the budget surplus . . . ill-considered . . . leaving us without Medicaid.”

But other than that, says Gore, Bradley’s a really nice guy, just “a good man with a bad plan.”

The Republicans too are throwing each other verbal hugs.

“He’s a good man. He’s a good man,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush says of his chief rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. And Bush, McCain says, “is a fine and decent man.”

What is going on here?

In Iowa and New Hampshire this season, the weather has been mild, the politics milder.

Several months into the campaign, experts and veterans say the bitterness that quickly characterized presidential races since the mid-1980s has not yet surfaced.

In their rhetoric and, even more significantly, in their television advertising, the presidential contenders have largely kept the opening months of debate focused on issues.

Certainly, the candidates are feisty. They engage in long-distance sniping on the campaign trail and throw jabs in debates. Gore attacks Bradley. Bradley turns to a basketball aphorism--get an elbow, give an elbow--to describe the give-and-take of the political debate. News accounts dwell on any hint of attack. And, as the winter arrives and the campaign heats up, the tenor could well turn from competitive to nasty--at any moment.

Still, political consultants, campaign staffers and political scientists have all noticed the trend toward decorum this year. The public has had enough of attack ads and negative campaigning, which are depressing voter turnout, they say. And anyone who lobs the mud ball risks a nasty backsplash.

Consider this:

* Fifty-three percent of Americans think campaign “values and ethics” have gotten worse in the last 20 years, and 60% are “very concerned” that candidates attack each other rather than discuss issues, according to a survey released this month by the Institute for Global Ethics, a nonpartisan organization based in Maine.

* The campaigns of Bradley, Bush, Gore, McCain and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican, signed an agreement Dec. 15 that they would conduct their operations with “respect for their opponents” and pledged to avoid personal attacks that “demonize or dehumanize their opponents.”

* Under the headline “Friendly Crossfire,” the Hotline, a daily compendium of political coverage, noted in an account of squishy-sounding attacks: “Negative campaigning just isn’t what it used to be.”

* Aiming at the voters unhappy with partisan attacks, Republican McCain and Democrat Bradley staged a joint campaign event recently in New Hampshire to underscore that, despite their vast differences, they can work together on campaign finance reform.

“Something is happening now--a disaffection for politicians,” said Ray Strother, president of the American Assn. of Political Consultants, in an August article in the magazine Campaigns and Elections. “The combative mode does not work anymore.”

The tricky challenge for candidates is this: How do you instill doubts about your opponent without breaking the prevailing campaign commandment, Thou shalt not slash nor burn?

Gore says in an interview: “I am always careful to couple my effort . . . to point out what I regard as policy mistakes from 1/8Bradley’s 3/8 campaign with a reaffirmation of what a fine person I think he is. . . . I won’t ever depart from that.”

And Bradley, even as he accuses Gore of engaging in “negative attacks and distortion,” repeatedly tells would-be voters he is “trying to run a different kind of campaign,” one focused on policy proposals rather than on cutting down his rival.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the two Democratic candidates were as quarrelsome as they’ve been in any of their three face-to-face encounters. But they distinguished their policy critiques from personal criticisms.

“I have never launched a personal negative attack and I never will,” Gore declared.

On the Republican side, McCain has frequently brushed aside invitations to criticize his opponents. He said he sees reason, beyond etiquette, for speaking little ill of his competitors.

“Scorched earth Republican primaries will lead directly to an Al Gore presidency and to Democratic control of one or both houses of Congress. Don’t let us do it. Don’t let us go down the road of mindlessly destroying each other,” the senator said in a speech in February to the California Republican Party.

“There is such a public revulsion against politics in general,” says Doug Bailey, a former political consultant, “that at least at the presidential level there is certainly a hesitation about being the first to go negative.”

Bailey, who at one time made the sort of negative political commercials--for Republicans--that helped turn Americans against politics, now runs FreedomChannel.com, a Web site tracking the year’s political give-and-take.

He is not ready to bet that the campaign will stay as clean as it has been. But he wonders: Is there “something about the 2000 election, the millennium election? 1/8Perhaps 3/8 no one wants to sully it the way they have in the past?”

Modern political campaigns have been littered with nastiness dispatched in 30-second segments:

In the last presidential race, Steve Forbes rocketed into the nation’s political consciousness in the autumn of 1995 with a series of ads slamming Bob Dole--the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and ultimate nominee. The ads chastised Dole for voting “for 16 tax increases, raising income taxes, taxes on phones, gas . . . even Social Security.”

Dole responded: “A cheap-shot attack-ad campaign.”

In 1992, Bill Clinton had to fend off reports of an affair with an Arkansas nightclub entertainer and questions about how he avoided military service. He also engaged in a series of attack and counterattack ads with his Democratic rivals that grew so vicious the candidates finally discussed a truce.

And in 1988, the elder George Bush so angered Dole that Dole demanded of his rival: “Stop lying about my record.”

Bob Beckel, a political consultant who ran Democrat Walter F. Mondale’s campaign in 1984, agrees that, so far, the campaign tone this year has been far more benign than in past campaigns.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Beckel says, 80% of the ads he produced were positive. But that changed in the 1990s. Until this year, Beckel said, “the percentage of budgets spent on negative campaigning 1/8in the 1990s 3/8 far exceeds that of any previous decade.”

Beckel traces the benign tenor this year to multiple factors: a response to the nasty relationship between the Clinton White House and congressional Republicans, the attention devoted in public discussion to attack ads, evidence that negative campaigning has lowered voter turnout, and what he said was “the wretched partisanship” that has marked the last three congressional sessions.

One other factor that may work against the campaign turning overly negative this year: Front-runners--in this case Bush and Gore--have the most to lose if they are perceived as running nasty campaigns, and, although an underdog may have more leeway to be aggressive, McCain and Bradley have built their campaigns around the idea that the nation’s politics need a dose of integrity.

But will the kinder, gentler tenor hold?

“I’d like to think we can go through in this high-minded style,” Beckel said. “But this dog has been around the track too many times to think that’s true.”

* Times staff writers Matea Gold, Maria L. LaGanga, Anne-Marie O’Connor and researcher Robin Cochran contributed to this story.