Bush Shifts Emphasis in Race to Size, Scope of Government

A ghost that Democrats thought they had exorcised has returned to haunt Al Gore in the final weeks of his whisper-close struggle with George W. Bush.

In a presidential campaign in which both candidates now are seeking to minimize their differences about issues as diverse as gun control and the crises in the Middle East, Bush is drawing one of the sharpest lines by aggressively framing the race as a referendum about the size and scope of the federal government.

“I’m running against a man who wants to empower the federal government,” Bush declared at a rally here late last week. “And this is a campaign that wants to empower the American people.”

With this stark rhetorical contrast, Bush has found a single theme to unify his disparate proposals to cut taxes, reform Social Security and Medicare, and provide private school vouchers to low-income parents whose children attend poorly performing public schools.

Even more significantly, Bush is calling the bluff on a political wager at the core of the “new Democratic” strategy that Vice President Gore and President Clinton have pursued.

Like Clinton, Gore has bet that the public will support new federal spending--even substantial new spending--if it is bounded by promises of fiscal responsibility; in effect, Gore is assuming that his promises to keep the federal budget in balance and pay off the publicly held national debt by 2012 will shield him from Republican charges of profligate spending. But Bush is calculating that voters will recoil from the sheer amount of spending in the Gore plan--even if it keeps the federal budget in the black.

By framing the choice this way, Bush is seeking to shift the debate to more favorable terrain. Instead of arguing the merits of each of Gore’s individual spending proposals--many of which are popular in the polls--Bush is bundling them together and denouncing the resulting package as a return to big government, a notion that has far less public support.

“Gore is betting that it is the individual parts that matter,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says. “Bush is betting that the whole is greater and more important than the sum of the parts.”

Many Democrats, including some in Gore’s campaign, worry that Bush’s argument is gaining traction. In an ABC/Washington Post survey last week, three-fifths of Americans polled said they preferred a smaller government with fewer services over a larger government with more services. But nearly 70% thought Gore wanted a bigger government; 60% thought Bush wanted a smaller government. Likewise, a Time/CNN poll released Saturday found that 54% of likely voters felt Bush shared their views concerning the proper size and role for the federal government, while only 45% felt that way about Gore.

Surplus Puts New Spin on Things

Findings such as those have some centrist Democrats fearful that Gore has placed so much emphasis on his new spending programs--particularly his plan to provide prescription drug benefits to senior citizens--that he’s failed to project any commitment to streamlining government, a theme central to Clinton’s message. While Gore has defended Clinton’s signature government reforms--particularly his commitment to welfare reform and the balanced budget--the vice president hasn’t advanced a reform goal of his own that is nearly as memorable.

“The politics of the surplus has changed things,” worries Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “What’s happened now is you can’t just say ‘I’m for fiscal discipline, I’m going to pay down the debt,’ and have people assume you’re for smaller government, because with the surpluses being as large as they are, you can have hundreds of billions of dollars of new programs, no fiscal discipline, and still pay down debt. You have to be for reform as well as fiscal discipline. You have to do things in a new way.”

The sharpest irony in this new assault is that Republicans are using Clinton as a foil to belittle Gore. In a striking speech recently, Bush favorably cited Clinton’s 1996 declaration that “the era of big government is over” and suggested that Gore had strayed from Clinton’s path. For Gore, Bush insisted, “big government has never really been dead; it has simply been biding its time, waiting for its next chance.” In new television advertisements, the Republican National Committee echoes that theme, accusing Gore of proposing three times as much new spending this year as Clinton did in 1992.

“This is an important transformation in the race,” said one senior Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified. “By saying that Gore is for government and that he [Bush] is for empowering people, Bush in a way has really laid claim to Clinton’s formulation. In effect, he’s depicting Gore as a pre-Clinton Democrat. It strikes me Gore doesn’t even realize it’s happening to him . . . but I think it’s working.”

Building on Clinton’s Spending Plans

Gore’s camp vigorously disputes the Republican estimates of how much his program will cost. But there’s no question Gore’s plan contains far more new spending than the agenda Clinton ran on four years ago. Constrained by his 1995 pledge to balance the budget and by much smaller surplus estimates than exist today, Clinton in 1996 offered only relatively minimalist new ventures, such as volunteer reading tutors. That gave Republican nominee Bob Dole little to shoot at when making an argument similar to the one Bush is using now.

But since 1996, Clinton’s proposals for new spending have grown step by step with the surplus projections. Faced with former Sen. Bill Bradley’s challenge from the left in the Democratic primaries, Gore this year took that base and raised it. Among other things, Gore has offered sweeping proposals to provide universal access to preschool, health care for uninsured working adults, incentives for the use of clean energy sources, and billions of dollars to help cities recruit, hire and pay teachers. In all, Gore puts the total cost of his proposed spending at about $800 billion over the next 10 years.

“This really is a very substantial change not just in what the federal government spends but what the federal government does,” says Carol Cox Wait, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington-based deficit watchdog group.

Wait’s group maintains that Gore’s agenda could cost twice as much as he estimates; Republican staffers on the Senate Budget Committee say the real cost could be triple Gore’s calculations. The principal difference in the estimates comes over the tax credits Gore would provide to help lower- and middle-income families save for retirement. Gore’s camp counts that proposal as a tax cut and projects its 10-year cost at $200 billion; Republicans count it as spending and say the real bill could be as much as $750 billion.

These calculations are the foundation of the critical comparisons Bush and the RNC are drawing. In alleging that Gore’s spending would triple that proposed by Clinton in 1992, the Bush campaign took Clinton’s own campaign estimate of how much his agenda would cost and then adjusted for inflation through 2010. That produced a 10-year estimate of $800 billion; then the campaign used the Senate Budget Committee staffers’ $2.6-trillion estimate of Gore’s spending to produce its assertion that Gore’s plan would triple Clinton’s.

But critics say that Bush is comparing apples and oranges. His campaign uses Clinton’s own estimate of his 1992 agenda’s cost, which produces a relatively smaller number, but the critics’ estimate of Gore’s cost, which yields a larger number, for comparison. If the campaign used Gore’s own cost estimate, as it uses Clinton’s, the price tag would be identical. The difference would likely also be much smaller if Bush compared partisan estimates of Clinton’s cost with the partisan estimates of Gore’s.

Yet there’s no question that Gore would spend more than Bush, whose campaign places the 10-year cost of his proposals at about $510 billion. Gore does not shy away from that comparison: At every opportunity, he insists the country would be better off using the budget surplus for investments in programs such as education and health care than the $1.3-trillion tax cut Bush has proposed. (Gore would cut taxes by about $480 billion.) At the same time, Gore portrays himself as the true fiscal conservative because his plan would allocate about twice as much as Bush’s over the next decade toward reducing the national debt.

All year, polls have found that most Americans would prefer to allocate the surplus toward stabilizing Social Security and Medicare and paying down the debt--all priorities Gore emphasizes--rather than the tax cut Bush is offering. But the country has always been more closely divided as to whether it would prefer tax cuts to significant spending on new federal programs, and Bush, by hammering at the long list of initiatives also central to Gore’s agenda, may now be slowly redefining the choice in that way.

“The Democrats could actually have a strong case to say, ‘We were the ones who were fiscally responsible,’ ” says Steven Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political group. “But Gore overstepped. There are a lot of big targets in his budget.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where the Ad Buys Are

As the race for the White House enters its last three weeks, strategists in both major campaigns are now focusing their advertising dollars on the competitive states where they believe they can win. To track the ad spending by the candidates and their parties, The Times contracted with the Campaign Media Analysis Group. The map featured here examines shifts in spending in certain key states.

Republicans, who ceded the airwaves to the Democrats for about two weeks in mid-summer, now have opened up a huge spending advantage over the Democrats. For the 10 days ending Oct. 11, the Republicans spent in excess of $9 million, more than double the Democrats’ $4.3 million. But the Democrats late last week started pouring money into Florida, a must-win state for George W. Bush, who is running even with Al Gore.

The chart combines spending by the Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee on the one hand, and the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee on the other. The chart compares the daily average spending for each side Oct. 2-8 against the daily average spending for each side Oct. 9-11.