Change, Credibility Underlie Campaign

George W. Bush gives one stern lecture when it comes to personal change and its place on the campaign trail. It has none. Al Gore “changes his tune” all the time. And that, says the Republican nominee for president, is the problem with his Democratic rival.

“I haven’t changed my message since I got started in this campaign,” Bush told a crowd here last week. Earlier, in Marion, Ill., the Texas governor proclaimed with pride that “I didn’t try to reinvent my candidacy in the middle of a campaign.”

In hotly contested Michigan late Friday, Bush declared that his “position has been consistent. I haven’t fine-tuned. I haven’t altered. I haven’t changed.”

Bush believes that being elected on an unchanging message would give him a mandate to sway Congress. He believes that America does not trust his opponent. He believes unwavering means credible.

The interplay of change and credibility is the undercurrent of the 2000 campaign, a red flag in the polls for the vice president, a regular theme for Bush as election day nears and one reason the race remains breathtakingly tight.

While the century changes and the world shifts, candidates don’t have the same luxury. Flip-flopping is a common political attack, one that does not allow for personal growth, evolving conditions or shifting public attitudes. It is a charge that is increasingly easy to make and difficult to escape.

At fault are “gotcha politics,” an increasingly skeptical electorate and technology that captures and replays a politician’s every word--usually at a bad time, often in attack ads, invariably in ways that are difficult to counter. “Our standards about consistency have increased, partly for technological reasons,” says political scientist Bruce Cain. “It’s a mixed blessing.”

While so-called opposition research, employed by campaigns to sniff out weakness and deception in rivals, sometimes points out real inconsistency, “it also introduces a rigidity that may not be good for governance,” Cain says. “You cannot foresee all the uncertainty in life.”

Various kinds of personal transformation crop up in political life--change in style, change in message, pandering for political gain, true evolution. How you feel about them often depends on where you stand in relation to the switch.

“It’s growth when it’s your candidate; it’s flip-flopping when it’s the other guy,” says Dan Schnur, former communications director for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who battled Bush in the primary.

Democratic strategist Bill Carrick points to Robert F. Kennedy as “a quintessential example of someone who started in one place and moved to a different one.” Kennedy, for example, shifted from “a defender of our Vietnam policy to a passionate opponent” and evolved in his embrace of the civil rights movement. “None of that happened without criticism,” Carrick said, “but in our current politics, none of that would be possible to do.”

Bush More Passionate on Education Reform

Truth be told, Bush himself has changed. The longer he has served in public office, many analysts say, the more passionate he’s become about education reform, elevating it from one of several issues he focused on when running for governor in 1994 to a centerpiece of his Texas tenure and his campaign for the White House. His message has changed too, evolving outward from his first days as a self-proclaimed “compassionate conservative,” through a spell as a “reformer with results,” a period as a broker of “prosperity with a purpose,” a stint as purveyor of “real plans for real people” and later as a salesman of “tools for parents.” In this last week on the campaign trail, the slogan is “bringing America together.”

And he has been varyingly Republican throughout his run for the White House. Bush began as a moderate, lost the New Hampshire primary, then took a hard right turn, heralded by a fiery defense of conservative values at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. The school prohibited interracial dating. One school leader considered Catholicism a cult.

While Bush spent the summer reaching back to moderate voters, in recent weeks he became increasingly Republican again. On a campaign swing earlier this month in Iowa, Illinois and Florida, he stressed core conservative values.

On Friday morning in Kalamazoo, Mich., Bush made a rare foray to a Christian high school, where he lauded “pregnancy crisis centers,” which offer an alternative to abortion. Later in the day at an Indiana rally, he was introduced by the Republican candidate for governor, who said that the Texan would take America back along “the path of moral values, the path of families.”

Cain, director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies, argues that Bush has undergone “three or four major transformations along the way” to the White House, with the Bob Jones shift being the most disingenuous.

But Larry Gerston, a professor of political science at San Jose State University, argues that much of what Bush has done during 19 months of campaigning for president is simply pick and choose which positions to emphasize at different times in the race. All politicians tailor their messages to adjust for circumstances, he argues; that’s the job of politics.

“At different points in the campaign, different things will work,” Gerston says. “It’s very difficult for these guys to go through this year and a half process, find a message that resonates, without some positions changing along the way. They’re a moving target.”

No target moves more than a politician who has been in public office for a quarter of a century or more. Bush has only a six-year public record. Gore, who was first elected in 1976, has served through great shifts in American public opinion. Think smoking. Think nutrition. Think guns.

The Democrat has come under fire throughout the entire 2000 campaign for being a political chameleon. In the short term, he moved his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville.

He dumped his dark suits for earth tones--a sartorial switch that Bush poked fun at on Oct. 19 at the Al Smith dinner in New York City. He decided America should tap its petroleum reserves to ease the energy crunch--a change in position from a year ago for which Bush frequently derides him.

In the longer term, he has become more anti-gun and more of an abortion rights advocate, shifts for which he recently took fire from comedian Jay Leno and Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker.

Early in his congressional career, the National Rifle Assn. gave Gore a high rating. As vice president, he cast the tie-breaking vote on a Senate measure that would have forced dealers at gun shows to perform background checks on buyers. The measure died in the House. Today, the NRA is campaigning vigorously against him. When Gore represented Tennessee in Congress, he voted against using federal funds to pay for abortions. Today, he supports the use of such money.

“The best thing [Bush] has done is state his position clearly,” Tucker said of the Republican’s unwavering anti-abortion views, “not change his position like Vice President Gore has. People on both sides of the issue appreciate his forthrightness.”

Leno on Gore: “He was once pro-life, now he’s pro-choice. He was once against gun control, now he’s for it. . . . Hey, Gore just needs to debate himself!”

Mark D. Fabiani, Gore’s deputy campaign manager, defends what he described as his boss’ ability to adapt to a changing world, a trait that he says is critical in an effective leader. He also lambasted Bush for targeting changes in Gore at the same time Bush has morphed himself. Noting Bush’s penchant for shifting campaign slogans, Fabiani said Bush has been “unable to settle on one theme for any period of time.”

“Bush criticized Gore for arguing that the petroleum reserve should be tapped,” Fabiani said. “They said last February we were against it. Well, last February, there wasn’t a shortage of home heating oil. What kind of president would you be if circumstances changed and you refused to readjust your view to the new circumstances?”

With Web, It’s Easy to Disseminate Records

The Internet has made disseminating information about Gore’s and other candidates’ records swift and easy--a point that the Republicans found out when Bush announced Dick Cheney as his running mate. The day after Cheney’s selection was officially announced in July, the Democratic Party had unearthed his congressional voting record and e-mailed it to reporters. The former Wyoming congressman was peppered with questions about votes against abortion rights, increased funding for Head Start and a resolution urging the release of Nelson Mandela from a South African prison in the 1980s.

Cheney at the time said that he might vote “a bit differently” today. But he also defended those votes, saying they were cast in “the 1980s, a time when we had huge budget deficits, no money, and when we really had to be concerned about controlling federal spending.”

Some political analysts argue that an electorate averse to discussion of issues and obsessed with political personality is one reason change is considered these days to be a fundamental political evil. And they say that some change is necessary.

Who is ultimately short-changed by politics’ push for lifelong consistency in candidates? Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, argues that voters lose when growth isn’t possible because of today’s “sound-bite, attack-mode” politics.

The presidency, he warns, is all about flexibility, compromise, the ability to change and push others to change as well.

“For Bush to accomplish what he says he wants to do--create a new sense of bipartisanship--it is going to require adjustment on his part,” Panetta says. “The same for Gore. Presidents have to be flexible.”

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Times staff writer Michael Finnegan contributed to this story.