But not this time. When Weld held his Little Rock press conference, trying, he said, “to peel away a few leaves from the artichoke,” Clinton staffers were in the room, distributing a “fact sheet” about Weld’s recent troubles back home that peeled some skin off the visitor. Other Clinton staffers were poised to refute any charges Weld made, and Clinton himself weighed in with a stinging attack: " Bill Weld used to spend all his time … telling me what a good governor I was. But now he’s pandering to the right wing of the Republican Party so he can run for president in 1996." Indeed, the Clinton staff seemed anxious to show their counterpunching ability. “I can’t wait until [Bush] goes negative on us,” said a member of Clinton’s new advertising team. “Just watch what happens.”
Which raises an interesting question: is it possible that the same old gutter-ball tactics won’t work this time? With Clinton enjoying perhaps his best week of the campaign, the Bush and Perot forces were scurrying for new answers and strategies last week–especially Bush, whose only solace was that most of the G-7 buddies with whom he was commiserating in Munich were faring as poorly in the polls as he. " I think the Weld trip probably sent a message to a lot of Republican governors," said a Bush campaign aide. “They may think twice about going on the attack now, but the instinct here will be to keep the pressure on.
The old instincts seemed particularly lame last week. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater dubbed the Clinton-Gore ticket “The Pepsi Boys, [but] we have the real thing.” Bush strategist Charlie Black tried to paint Gore a liberal and added, “He might help Clinton carry Arkansas.” These reactions were thrown into stark relief by Ross Perot, who confounded politics-as-usual, and made the Bush surrogates seem mean and tiny, by calling Gore “an excellent choice.”
The Perot camp seems more becalmed than desperate, still working on the next stage of the campaign. Plans for some sort of big-bang announcement to limit Clinton’s favorable publicity immediately after the Democratic convention apparently have been shelved. " There will be an Act II,” says campaign chairman Tom Luce. " But next week looks like a quiet, internal week … I don’t anticipate any bombshells." Nor does Luce see any immediate change in Perot’s tendency to ignore Clinton at Bush’s expense. “What you’re going to see is Ross talking about core issues, talking about where he stands rather than about his opponents.”
Actually, Bush plans to be doing some of the same over the next month, spending three to five days on the high road each week, visiting two states a day, attempting to sell the notion that he actually has a domestic policy in “substantive” stops at schools and factories, as well as “Ask George Bush” town meetings. It will be a tough sell, especially in the absence of any bold new policy initiatives.
The real problem is the lack of an agenda, or even a rationale, for a second term. The assumption, up until a week ago, was that a rebounding economy would relieve the president of the need to trot out anything resembling a serious “vision thing.” But the awful June unemployment figures squelched that and it is now, once again, Tension City in Bushland. Even some of Bush’s top aides admit he has not clearly articulated to them why he wants to continue as president. “The cold war is over. The next four years can’t be devoted to foreign policy,” says a senior campaign adviser. “What we need from the president is a clear view of what he hopes to accomplish. Once we have that, we can sell it.”
And if they don’t get it, they can always go back to slash and burn. Or can they? The president was forced to move aggressively last week to disassociate himself from Floyd Brown, the independent operator who put on the Willie Horton television ads in 1988 and has now come up with a Gennifer Flowers hot line. With surrogates like William Weld bombing out and staff pit bulls like Fitzwater and Black coming up lame, Bush may ultimately find that he’ll have to do most of the heavy lifting himself. He did it gleefully in 1988, lacerating the hapless Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” but this is a different election, a more concerned electorate-and this time he has two opponents who’ll fight back.
