Resurfacing Gore Has Chance to Reenter Tax Debate

Timing, like most subtle political skills, has never been Al Gore’s strength. But whether by luck or design, Gore now may be approaching a harmonious convergence of moment and messenger. How he handles that opportunity could reveal much about the way Gore will position himself against President Bush in the coming months--and even in a potential 2004 rematch.

For the last nine months, Gore has been doing his best Calvin Coolidge imitation; he’s been “Silent Al,” whittling away, keeping his thoughts to himself. When Gore resurfaced recently with a beard, it seemed to confirm the suspicion that he had been marooned on a desert island all these months.

But Gore recently agreed to deliver the keynote speech late next month at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner of the Iowa Democratic Party. With an enormous press corps expected to gather in Des Moines, the evening will provide the former vice president with his first chance to talk to the nation since he conceded the presidential election last December.

And, now, the Bush administration may have given him something to talk about.

During last year’s campaign, Gore routinely changed his consultants, his look and even his persona; he was a blue-suited New Democrat one day and an earth-toned populist the next. But one thing was utterly constant: From the moment Bush first announced his tax cut proposal in December 1999, Gore insisted that the plan would wipe out the massive surpluses projected for the coming decade and plunge the federal budget back into deficit.

Even as Bush was initially releasing the proposal, Gore described it as a “reckless tax scheme that would immediately put our country back into deficit.” Nearly a year later, in his first debate with Bush, Gore again charged that the tax cut was “the surest way to put our budget into deficit.”

Anyone who watched the debates--or, for that matter, “Saturday Night Live”--remembers Gore’s alternative: He would cut taxes less, spend more on education and health care, pay down the national debt faster and place all money raised by the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes in a “lockbox.” Gore talked about a lockbox so often that many listeners probably wanted to stuff him into one by the time the debates were done. But Gore was so annoying about placing Social Security off-limits that people might remember it more than almost anything else he said last year.

“People laugh about the lockbox; it has kind of the ‘Saturday Night’ quality to it,” says one high-ranking Democratic strategist. “But people remember that’s what Gore said. As you move forward, people are going to remember that there was a choice about the surplus.”

Fast forward to last week. In its midyear update, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget disclosed that the budget surplus was melting so fast (a victim mostly of the tax cut and the slowing economy) that the report’s title could have been lifted from Hollywood: “Gone With the Wind” or “Honey, I Shrunk the Surplus.”

Leaving aside the surplus in Social Security--which both parties have pledged not to use to pay for other programs--OMB said the rest of the government’s accounts this year would produce a surplus of only $1 billion. Earlier, OMB had estimated that the non-Social Security surplus, also known as the operating budget surplus, would reach $128 billion this year.

In last week’s report, OMB said the operating budget surplus would remain at $1 billion in 2002 and rise to just $2 billion in 2003 and $6 billion in the election year of 2004. (Last April, OMB projected a combined surplus for those three years of $427 billion.) That means if economic growth is even slightly below the optimistic 3.2% the administration projects, or if spending is only a bit higher, in any of the next four years the federal government could again be forced to tap Social Security to pay for other programs--the now commonly accepted definition, in both parties, of a budget deficit. Indeed, many analysts expect that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, due out Tuesday, will show the government dipping into Social Security again.

Which is, without much equivocation, exactly what Gore had predicted would happen.

Now, the question is whether Gore uses his Iowa stage to say, in so many words, “I told you so.” For both Gore and his party, the choice isn’t simple. Democrats are aggressively criticizing Bush over the shrinking surplus numbers, and some feel Gore could enormously amplify that message with the megaphone he’ll have in Iowa. Others worry that inserting Gore into the mix personalizes the argument in a way that obscures the larger point.

Gore faces contradictory pressures himself. Any successful Gore campaign in 2004 would have to convince Americans that they took a wrong turn by accepting Bush’s agenda over his own in 2000; a tough indictment of Bush’s budget record in Iowa would begin the long process of selling such an argument.

But some intimates worry that Gore would personally alienate voters again if he seemed to be insisting that he had been right all along. “People would tune it off because it sounds arrogant,” said one close advisor. (A better early strategy, this advisor advises, is for Gore to limit his jabs at Bush and swaddle them in jokes.) If Gore joins the argument over the squeezed surplus, he’ll also face the same challenge that’s so far stumped congressional Democrats: whether to call for rolling back or delaying the tax cut to keep the budget safely in the black.

Bush is defending the shrinking surplus as a way to keep money away from Washington big-spenders; he’s already portraying his Democratic critics as closet tax-hikers more intent on enlarging government than reducing the national debt--an argument that hurt Gore in 2000. Before Gore throws a punch, he’ll have to be prepared to take one.

Friends say Gore is only just beginning to work through what he’ll say in Iowa. “He has probably as much, if not more, credibility than anybody in the party on the deficit issue,” says one confidant. “It’s just a question of timing. And that’s what he is going to struggle with in the next couple of weeks.”

The question is also one of tone: Can Gore renew his old arguments with Bush without sounding self-righteous? Early as it is, the Iowa dinner will test whether Gore can find a way to say “I told you so” without sounding like someone saying “I told you so.”

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.