Vice Presidential Seal These Days: a Bull’s-Eye

For weeks now, the story line of the Democratic presidential campaign has gone something like this: Vice President Al Gore is boring, ham-handed, dragged down by scandal, ripe for a pummeling. And his challenger Bill Bradley--did you see how much money he raised? And the crowds he’s drawing?

To veteran political activist Tom Rath, the simultaneous hand wringing and hype have all the makings of a comedy. One with a decidedly rueful laugh track.

Rath ran the New Hampshire campaign of the last guy stalwart or nuts enough to run against a sitting vice president--former Sen. Bob Dole, who was sideswiped in the 1988 presidential contest by George Bush. And he has some words of solace for Gore.

“He’s going to be the Democratic nominee,” said Rath, sighing as if he still bears the tire tracks of Air Force Two.

Veterans of the Bush-Dole struggle see Gore less as damaged than caught in a predictable vortex, suffering from what one of Bush’s aides in 1988 described as “veep disease”--an illness whose main symptom is insult.

Second Bananas Immediately Suspect

Every time a vice president plants his flag for the presidency, the same thing happens: The very traits that make for a respectable second banana are automatically suspect in a presidential candidate. And, now as in 1988, that fact fuels and in turn is fueled by the media’s instinctive desire to make a contest of the race.

“It’s the generic problem that vice presidents face,” said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Bush aide for whom the goings-on are all too familiar. “Good vice presidents are loyal, subservient soldiers to their president. And presidents aren’t supposed to be subservient. So . . . vice presidents lack some of the qualities you need to be president, in the minds of voters.”

And, he added pointedly, “there’s no sex appeal about writing, ‘It’s over and Gore is going to be the nominee.’ ”

This is not to say that Gore’s campaign has been seamless: Indeed, another symptom of veep disease is the often fumbling way that a vice president emerges from his constricting chrysalis, trying desperately to find his own wings after so many years spent trundling in the dirt.

Signs of trouble for Gore have been hard to miss. Earlier this month, he hired former California Rep. Tony Coehlo as general chairman of his campaign, hoping Coehlo will organize a campaign best known for fierce power struggles.

After the hiring prompted articles about Gore’s perceived failings, President Clinton underscored them by calling the New York Times to say he had advised the vice president to loosen up. That launched a new round of woe-is-Gore stories.

‘A Political Dead End’

The generic pessimism about vice presidents stepping into the top job is so rampant in political circles that even Gore himself once subscribed to the notion.

“A political dead end,” he sniffed of the office in 1988, as he wrongly predicted Bush’s defeat by the ultimately hapless campaign of Democrat Michael S. Dukakis.

In truth, the most recent sitting vice presidents have won their parties’ nominations, though history provides conflicting lessons for the general election. In 1968, shackled by the unpopularity of President Johnson’s Vietnam policy, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey lost to Nixon. Twenty years later, Bush won.

Needless to say, Gore partisans have seized on the Bush experience as the one which presages the outcome in 2000. Indeed, there are striking similarities.

Both started their efforts while Washington was in thrall of scandal--Gore’s with the Clinton impeachment and Bush’s with the Iran-Contra controversy.

Both were, at times, their campaigns’ worst enemies. Gore has been lampooned for alleging that he created the Internet and suggesting his formative experiences came on his family’s Tennessee farm--when he spent much of his youth in a cushy Washington hotel.

But Gore’s gaffes pale in comparison to Bush’s. The malaprop-prone Republican often seemed to have only a glancing relationship with the English language.

“Fluency in English is something that I’m often not accused of,” he once explained, unnecessarily.

President Bush daftly insulted auto workers before the Michigan caucuses and farmers before the Iowa caucuses. Not surprisingly, he never led in the polls until after the Republican National Convention in August.

That should ease Gore’s mind. Yet some experienced politicians caution against using history to handicap any presidential race.

Factors That Hurt Gore

Leon E. Panetta, the longtime California congressman and former Clinton White House chief of staff, said both the impeachment imbroglio and a maverick streak among voters are helping Bradley and hurting Gore.

“The problem he has now,” Panetta said of Gore, “is obviously while people are confident and do appreciate the economic benefits of this administration, they are tired of the scandals. That is not to say the vice president is implicated in any way--but he pays a price for the sense that people are tired.”

His comments were echoed by observers in several states hosting early presidential contests.

“That’s what’s happening,” said a Gore advisor with contacts in California and elsewhere. “There’s a group of people willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Bradley, too, has more substantive advantages than the average challenger. As the only other Democrat in the race, he is the sole recipient of anti-Gore sentiment. (Bush, in contrast, faced five serious primary challengers.) And as a forward on the championship-era New York Knicks and a former New Jersey senator, Bradley does not labor in obscurity like others running a long-shot campaign.

That allowed Bradley to amass more than $4 million in the first quarter of this year--less than half the amount raised by Gore but enough to kick-start the musings about a successful challenge.

Still, Gore holds the upper edge, by historic and current measures. The polls which have him losing general election contests--to Texas Gov. George W. Bush, son of the former president, or Elizabeth Hanford Dole--still have Gore handily defeating Bradley among Democrats. And during the campaign, he can count on his office to garner him attention--as it did May 20, when he broke a tied Senate vote on a gun control measure.

Political analysts suggest only isolated scenarios under which the vice president would lose the nomination: a massive economic downturn, a hot Gore scandal or a swiftly destructive escalation of the Kosovo war that would tar Gore as Vietnam did Humphrey.

“The only thing I’ve seen where a sitting vice president is [successfully] challenged is when that challenge has a sharp ideological aspect to it,” Rath said. “Right now, I don’t sense that there’s a lot of issue dissension between Bradley and Gore.”

Predictably, the Bradley boomlet is already segueing into a more sharply focused look at his candidacy--in particular the lack of detail in his self-described campaign of “big ideas.”

Political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe suggested that Gore may ultimately benefit from stumbles occurring now, when few voters are paying attention to the race. At this point, she said, Gore continues to control the race.

“Bradley’s momentum depends almost entirely on Al Gore and Bradley’s viability depends almost entirely on Al Gore,” she said, calling the race “Gore’s to lose.”

Panetta, who supports Gore, said the vice president’s most important task is to keep his bearings.

“He’s going to get an awful lot of advice from all different directions about this problem and that problem and pretty soon, as he tries to over-correct, it’s all going to look artificial,” Panetta warned. “He’s got to be comfortable with who the hell he is.”

Bradley has an even tougher duty: to convince voters that he is more electable than the man currently leading him in all the polls.

“Bradley’s biggest chore is to hang around, get taken seriously and really, at the end of the day, be looking for that moment of good fortune,” said Rath, reflecting on Dole’s loss to Bush. “I don’t know that their campaign is capable of creating it. We could never do it.”