Gore’s Smart Campaign

This column christens a new acronym for the 2000 presidential race: PPPP, which stands for political press, pundits and professors.

PPPP, which is saturating the media with analysis of campaign 2000, is making experienced political operatives cringe. The latest PPPP insights, on the front pages of many leading newspapers last week, portray the dramatic changes in Vice President Al Gore’s strategy, from attack dog to smiling policy wonk, as of major importance. This confirms, say PPPP, the failure of Gore’s spring attack-dog strategy against Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

PPPP’s evidence: Gore’s negatives went up in the polls. What insight! Every politician’s negatives rise when they go on the attack. Listen carefully, 4Ps: 1) these negatives go down quickly, and 2) Gore’s attack message has begun to raise questions about Bush that could linger into the fall.

Now, it is true that the Gore campaign thought more damage would be done to Bush. They watched Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) attack Bush in the primaries and saw Bush’s numbers tumble. But there are two big differences between then and now. First, Gore is no McCain: He doesn’t have the larger-than-life persona McCain enjoys and, therefore, shouldn’t be expected to hurt Bush as badly. Second, McCain’s attacks occurred in the heat of the primary campaign, when voters were paying attention. They are paying no attention today and won’t until after Labor Day, if then.

PPPP’s conclusion that Gore hurt himself badly and was forced to change his approach virtually overnight is silly. That he shouldn’t have attacked Bush at all is just stupid.

Bush was moving into Democratic territory, folks: education, health care, Social Security, even gun locks. What did you expect Gore to do? Let Bush steal his issues the way Gore and President Bill Clinton stole some GOP issues in ‘92? It would have been stupid if Gore hadn’t attacked Bush. By the way, at this level of politics, the first shots are fired by the candidate himself if they are to be newsworthy. Sending surrogates to fight the first round never works. Now that Gore, despite picking up a few negatives, has softened Bush up, Gore surrogates can go in for some body punches and head butts.

The suggestion that Gore panicked and reverted to a nice-guy persona overnight is beyond naive. One major Washington paper suggested Gore had decided on a Friday that his attacks were backfiring and surrogates should take on Bush, and, by the following Monday, surrogates were doing just that. But Houdini couldn’t have pulled that one off. At the presidential level, the amount of time and strategic planning that goes into a move like that, even in this age of rapid response, still takes considerable planning to implement if it’s going to work.

Let me humbly suggest to PPPP that this plan has been in the works for weeks. The strategy to have Gore himself lead the early attack was the right one. It will pay dividends in the fall. Any negatives Gore picked up in the spring offensive will be gone by summer.

What PPPP lacks, beside any campaign experience, is a long view about why presidential campaigns make decisions like this. A good strategic group, and Gore’s is one of the best, develops these moves with an eye toward November results, not spring polling numbers.

What the 4Ps have missed, and the rest of you are now witnessing, is a strategy that, if pursued correctly, will bury Bush. Every point that Gore attacked Bush on this spring was not pretty, but it was right. Bush can talk the compassionate-conservative agenda all he wants, but Gore showed two strong weaknesses in the kinder, gentler George of the spring: 1) his record as governor, when exposed, shows a Bush whose only compassion was for his business buddies and, 2) the right-wing crowd that controls the GOP Congress doesn’t agree with Bush’s touchy-feely ideas and is already saying so publicly.

Gore may have some fund-raising problems and may suffer from his own poor campaign style and a few of Clinton’s negatives. But voters already know all this, and Gore is still even with Bush, who has lots of cash, a great last name and daddy’s big-shot friends to help him. All Bush’s advantages won’t mean a thing when his past actions as Texas governor clash with his new feel-good positions as a presidential candidate, and when the country realizes that even if Bush has had a compassion transplant, the Republican wing nuts that control Congress won’t let him do anything about it.

I’m back to a rout: Gore by five to 10 points easy. *