Political Margin Measured in Miles From D.C.

Get away from Washington. As far as you can. As fast as you can.

So far that looks to be the winning ticket in the 2000 presidential race. After a bitter impeachment battle that bloodied both President Clinton and the Republican Congress, the presidential contenders with the most momentum are those with the least connection to business as usual in the capital: former Sen. Bill Bradley on the Democratic side and, among the Republicans, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and, to a lesser extent, maverick Arizona Sen. John McCain.

“People talk about ‘Clinton fatigue,’ ” says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who’s not affiliated with Bradley or Vice President Al Gore. “But what we’re really seeing is Washington fatigue on both sides.”

Even amid a surging economy, this disillusionment with Washington has been strong enough to upend expectations for the race. With no long-time party leader like Bob Dole in the field, Republicans were anticipating a wide-open contest for their nomination. Meanwhile, after scaring off all potential opponents but Bradley, Gore was expected to cruise to a coronation as the Democratic nominee.

Instead, four months before the first voters react in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s the Republican race that’s looking like a coronation. Implicitly separating himself from the GOP Congress with his rallying cry of “compassionate conservatism,” Bush has pulled away from the field on every significant measure of strength, from money to endorsements to the polls. On the other side, Gore is struggling against an unexpectedly strong challenge from Bradley--a cerebral former New Jersey senator who touts his life outside of politics and is promising to restore trust in government.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the two contenders with momentum, Bradley and Bush, were both far away when the Republican Congress and the Clinton White House savaged each other last winter. “There are no winners coming out of impeachment--the only winners are the people who are as little associated with it as possible,” said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Bush’s dominance and Bradley’s rise are linked in a second sense as well. One reason why Bush has attracted so much support from Republicans is that early polls for next year’s general election consistently show him with a double-digit lead over Gore. Conversely, those same polls are generating support for Bradley among Democrats who fear that Gore may not be able to beat Bush in a general election.

“If Gore were 12 points ahead of Bush instead of 12 points behind, we never would have heard of Bill Bradley,” Garin says. “And if Gore was ahead, there would be a race on the Republican side as well. That’s what is driving everything.”

Momentum Builds for Bush

By any standard, the surge in the GOP toward Bush is remarkable. He’s collected far more endorsements from other elected officials than his father George Bush did in 1987 as a sitting vice president seeking the presidency. He’s raised more money, more quickly, than any presidential candidate in history. And in national polls, his lead over his next closest competitor stretches to as much as five to one.

Bush, 53, was always expected to be a formidable candidate. But a year ago few expected that he would achieve such a commanding position. To many GOP analysts, the key to Bush’s rise was the decline in the public approval rating for the Republican Congress during the early stages of the impeachment battle. In rapid sequence, that process produced the stunning mid-term House losses for the GOP in last fall’s election, the resignation of combative former Speaker Newt Gingrich and a general panic in the GOP.

“The election of 1998 really crystallized it all,” says Brian Kennedy, formerly the chief strategist for Lamar Alexander, one of the four GOP hopefuls already forced from the race by Bush’s strength. “The Republican Party felt it had lost its way and there was a desperate search to find an alternative to the Republican Congress as the leadership of the party.”

That instinct was especially powerful among the 31 GOP governors, many of whom had grown uneasy with the polarizing, ideological tone that the congressional wing was setting. Michigan Gov. John Engler took the lead in organizing his colleagues to support Bush and enjoyed remarkable success. Twenty-three of the governors have coalesced behind Bush, adding their weight to the backing he was already drawing from the Bush family political network and building a foundation of financial and institutional support that dwarfs the resources available to any other candidate.

As he stepped onto the field, Bush, meanwhile, positioned himself virtually as the anti-Gingrich. Generally, Bush has minimized direct criticism of Congress. But in ways large and small, he’s signaled that he would set a different tone and elevate different priorities than the congressional GOP.

Of all the GOP contenders, Bush kept the lowest profile during impeachment. His slogan of “compassionate conservatism” contains an implicit acknowledgment that many voters did not see the current GOP leadership as compassionate; last week he made the implicit explicit when he publicly opposed the congressional GOP plan to restructure the earned income tax credit for the working poor. In a testament to his influence, the plan now looks dead.

At various points, Bush has also praised bipartisanship--an idea heretical for many capital conservatives. One source in Bush’s campaign says his television advertising is likely to heavily feature a line from his stump speech that subtly contrasts him with both Clinton and the Congress--the passage where he calls for “a fresh start after a season of cynicism.”

With Bush holding so many high cards, his rivals are settling on two distinct lines of attack against him. From the right, millionaire publisher Steve Forbes and conservative activist Gary Bauer are looking to mobilize conservative voters by insisting that Bush is too moderate; from the center McCain (and, more decorously, former Red Cross president Elizabeth Hanford Dole) are questioning whether Bush has enough experience to serve as president.

Analysts like Kohut believe the latter argument has a better chance, but almost all agree that neither is likely to work unless Bush himself inadvertently cooperates. “Bush’s candidacy will not fail because someone else in the race bangs him hard enough,” says a senior advisor to another candidate. “It will fail if he personally implodes--if he’s not ready.”

Like Bush with Congress, Bradley has almost entirely avoided direct criticism of Clinton. But the turmoil in Washington has been the backdrop against which he’s drawn a contrasting picture of himself as a small-town boy, a “citizen-politician” who has “had a life outside of politics” and a reformer who will “restore trust in public service.”

The tightness of the Democratic race has been as surprising as the one-sidedness of the Republican contest. Gore still has many assets: he holds a two-to-one lead in national surveys (a figure that hasn’t changed since May in CNN/USA Today/Gallup Polls), he has far more support from elected officials and other party institutions and he’s raised more money overall than Bradley. But Bradley has surged into parity with Gore in surveys in several Northeastern states (most important, he leads the vice president in the latest poll in the critical first primary of New Hampshire); he raised slightly more money than Gore in the past three months; and, because Bradley has run a leaner campaign operation, he may have a bit more cash on hand than the vice president--an incredible position for a challenger.

Bradley’s support has been strongest among well-educated, and independent voters, especially men. He’s also benefiting from disillusionment with Clinton over the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal. Among Democrats who like Clinton personally and like his policies, Gore leads Bradley three to one in the latest Time/CNN national survey; but among Democrats who dislike Clinton, whether or not they like his policies, Gore holds just a three-point advantage.

Bradley Challenge May Be to Hold On

For Bradley, the challenge in the coming weeks may be to hold his support among moderate and independent voters as he lays out a campaign agenda (like the $65 billion health care plan he proposed last week) largely tilted to the left. Rather than accusing him of being too liberal, Gore last week began to challenge Bradley from the other direction, citing Bradley’s Senate votes for Ronald Reagan’s 1981 budget and school vouchers to question in so many words whether his rival is a real Democrat. In the coming weeks, Gore officials say, they’re likely to also challenge Bradley’s positioning as an outsider and reformer.

“This guy has a lot of risks, and I don’t think our campaign is going to choose one over the other,” said one senior Gore advisor.

Gore, of course, has his own risks: questions among Democrats about his ability to inspire, to project leadership--and to catch Bush in the polls. “An awful lot of people [interested in Bradley] are looking at who they think can win,” says Gale Kaufman, the Bradley campaign’s senior California advisor.

Despite all the frenzy on the campaign trail, polls show relatively few Americans are paying close attention to the race. That means, in both parties’ contests, all these factors could change significantly, and even reverse, in the months ahead. Yet when Gore announced last week that he was moving his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville, he seemed to underscore a central truth in the race so far: After impeachment, the most promising roads to the White House are those that begin the farthest away.