Gore, Curiously, Fails to Take Credit for Policy Achievements

If Al Gore can’t overcome George W. Bush’s mid-October surge, the vice president’s campaign aides already have a ready explanation for his defeat. It’s two words: Bill Clinton. Through millions of dollars in polling, Gore’s camp has concluded that many voters have a deep, impenetrable, almost irrational hatred of the president.

Duh.

But the same polls that show most voters disliking Clinton personally also show that a solid majority of Americans like his policies. Clinton’s job approval rating remains higher than Ronald Reagan’s late in his presidency. In Los Angeles Times surveys all year, only a small minority of voters have expressed a desire for major changes from Clinton’s policy direction. Even Bush lately has conspicuously praised Clinton on both foreign policy (in last week’s debate, he embraced five separate Clinton international initiatives) and for his 1996 declaration that the era of big government is over.

So here’s a provocative thought: If Gore loses it may not be because he resembles Clinton too much, but too little.

In one sense, Gore’s team has a legitimate beef. The serial Clinton scandals, and the president’s minutely parsed words in response to them, have undoubtedly made voters much more sensitive to Gore’s own misstatements. Gore aides persuasively argue that even relatively minor slips--like those the vice president made in the first debate--cut so deeply because voters are horrified at the thought of spending another four years with a president who argues about what the definition of “is” is.

But if Clinton is the gasoline in the room, Gore is the match. The share of voters who consider Clinton a moral blight doesn’t change much from month to month; what changes is the percentage of voters who think they can trust Gore. As many voters dislike Clinton now as they did last month when Gore consistently led Bush in the race. The difference is that Gore, in the first debate, exhumed the doubts about his trustworthiness that his campaign thought it had buried at the Democratic convention.

Gore is bound to suffer from the negatives associated with the Clinton administration no matter what he does. The real issue is that Gore has proven strangely incapable of benefiting from the positives of both Clinton’s achievements and political strategy. In his near-obsessive desire to prove himself “my own man,” as he put it during his acceptance speech, Gore has blithely discarded some of the most valuable political assets Clinton bequeathed him.

The most obvious of these is the record of the past eight years. Gore’s campaign has convinced itself that voters do not want to be reminded how much better off they are on most measures than eight years ago. From that conviction, Gore has twisted himself into the bizarre position of rarely mentioning the positive trends evident in everything from the economy, to crime, to teen pregnancy and welfare dependency.

Two cases in point. Late last month, the Census Bureau released its annual figures measuring family income and the poverty rate. The results were spectacular: 1999 produced arguably the single largest gains for American families since the go-go years of the late 1960s. The child poverty rate, for instance, dropped 2 full percentage points, the largest one-year decline since 1966. Yet Gore said nothing about the report that day, and his campaign spokesman blew it off with a dismissive comment that the election is really about the future.

Even more odd has been the campaign’s reaction to Bush’s assertion that Clinton and Gore failed to deliver on their promise to cut middle-class taxes. In fact, Clinton, with Gore’s support, in 1997 signed a balanced-budget deal that included a children’s tax credit generous enough that all but the most affluent families now pay a smaller share of their income in federal income taxes than when the administration took office, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But, according to aides, Gore consciously chose not to refute Bush’s charge in the debate because he’s been convinced voters recoil when he tries to tell them that their taxes have been reduced.

With this fanatical reluctance to discuss the administration record, Gore strips himself of what even conservatives recognize as his strongest argument: Why risk a new direction when things are going so well? “To me, it is not that hard to run this Gore campaign: You say I’m going to continue these policies that are working,” says Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political group. “Instead he’s felt compelled to say I’m different from this guy [Clinton], I have a whole new agenda. And that’s what is frightening people: They don’t want a whole new agenda.”

Which brings us to the second Clinton asset Gore is squandering. One of Clinton’s signal achievements in 1996 was to make the Democratic Party attractive again to people gaining ground economically. According to exit polls, Clinton in 1996 carried voters in every income class up to $75,000 a year, and lost those earning more than that by only 10 percentage points.

But with his relentless hammering at “the wealthy” and his insistence that “working families” are his priority, the newly populist Gore almost seems to be telling the upwardly mobile families enriched in the Clinton years that he doesn’t want their votes. And guess what: He’s not getting them. A Time/CNN poll released Saturday (which gave the Republican a 5-point lead overall) showed Bush leading Gore among voters earning $75,000 a year or more by 24 percentage points--more than twice the advantage Dole had over Clinton. Given Bush’s relatively moderate persona, it’s unlikely Gore can beat the Texan among middle-income voters enough to overcome a blowout that large at the top.

Gore is surrendering ground Clinton captured on a third front. By emphasizing his proposed new spending far more than his commitment to fiscal discipline--and by failing to consistently articulate a case for reform in programs from education to Social Security--Gore has made it easier for Bush to hobble him with the big government collar that Clinton thought he had allowed his party to escape.

Differences in political strategy can only explain so much of these odd strategic choices by Gore. At some level, the explanation must be psychological: The vice president doesn’t want to win on Clinton’s accomplishments. Even if it means losing.

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