Before the media magpies elect Gore, a note of obvious caution: these “rules” are made to be broken and Bush may well rise again. But there’s no question the shape of the race has changed. Coming off a relentlessly positive GOP convention, Bush had hoped to run a high-toned campaign where he got snarky only in reluctant response to desperate attacks from a floundering Gore. Instead, it’s Bush who’s playing catch-up–a contingency he doesn’t seem to have planned for. To win, he’ll have to gut and fillet Gore the way he did John McCain in South Carolina. It won’t be pretty.
Just a day before the ad appeared, Bush said on CNN: “I think you can win a campaign without personally attacking an opponent.” He was either fibbing or changed his mind after coming off the air. Bush’s new approach, as one aide confirmed, is that “every week is integrity week,” which means that from now until November Bush will try to convince voters that Gore is an untrustworthy lout.
The “remote control” ad, produced by GOP consultant Alex Castellanos and now running in 16 states, is a good start. A female narrator, scoffing all the way, watches Gore on TV at the Buddhist Temple and then saying, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” She concludes sarcastically: “Yeah, and I invented the remote control.” Coming soon are spots showing Gore’s Clintonian “no controlling legal authority” dodge and his praise for Clinton as “one of our greatest presidents” on the day he was impeached. The goal is to reshackle Gore to Clinton and establish sleaze-by-association.
Almost unmentioned in all the pre-Labor Day head-slapping is that these ads are all basically illegal. Although paid for with soft money by the Republican Party, not the Bush campaign, the spot was clearly coordinated with the Austin powers. That’s against the law. (The Democrats started flouting that law in 1996, when President Clinton actually approved the scripts on soft-money ads.) At least this year no one in either party is trying to hide the illegal coordination, which I guess is progress of sorts.
Even so, it was comical watching Bush claim last week that the ad was not negative and personal. If suggesting your opponent is a liar and hypocrite isn’t personal, what is? Calling him a lawbreaker? A bootlicker? (That’s the point of the ads to come.) Personally, I like personal criticism. We’ve had it in our politics for more than 200 years. I’d like to see the Democrats attack Bush as a lightweight in hock to polluters who expects the Oval Office as a graduation gift and wouldn’t know enough as president to settle the inevitable differences among his advisers. What I’m sick of is the pretense that politics should be a tea party. The only things that should really be out of bounds are appeals to racial or religious fears and clear factual inaccuracies, like Bush’s claim in another ad that he had a prescription-drug plan when he didn’t.
What’s wrong with Bush’s attack ad is that it may not work. Even the Bush folks admit that, for a politician, Gore is somewhere in the middle range on the integrity meter. He made fund-raising calls from the White House that he shouldn’t have, but he’s hardly a sleaze. (This is a guy who sold all of his stocks when he entered Congress because he thinks it’s an inherent conflict of interest for legislators to vote on bills that affect their portfolios.) Presidential elections are partly management decisions. Bush now has to convince voters that Gore should be fired for an annoying exaggeration of what was in fact his important and farsighted role in funding the Internet while in Congress, and for that dumb picture of him wearing the lei at the temple, which most voters don’t even understand.
Yes, Gore screwed up, just as Vice President George Bush messed up by attending meetings where Reagan aides discussed trading arms for hostages, then claiming he was “out of the loop.” But the consequences of both incidents have been grossly overplayed by the press. The 1988 Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, tried to make the Iran-contra scandal an issue. He failed, just as Bush will probably fail this year to make Gore’s fund-raising a transforming issue. One of the hardest things in politics is making an old scandal stick. Absent fresh revelations, the voters just don’t care enough to let it outweigh other issues. Nor should they. It’s not about them and their everyday concerns.
And even if the arrogant corner-cutting of the Democrats’ 1996 fund-raising blitz is ultimately Gore’s responsibility, that hardly makes him a hypocrite for advocating campaign-finance reform now, as the ad suggests. Bush, who broke all records for vacuuming up special-interest money and whose campaign-finance reform proposal was labeled a hoax by John McCain, is in no position to lecture anyone about fund-raising.
The best thing about the new Bush ad is that it’s funny. Most campaigns are too risk-averse to show wit. If the ad gets any traction at all, it may kick off a whole new competition to be clever, which would be a nice gift to viewers. More likely, it will fail, except with the already convinced. In this season of pious politics, sarcasm is the ultimate Hail Mary pass.
