How W. Can Win
By staying on message. By putting all that nasty Bob Jones business behind him. By patterning his campaign after 1994, not 1998. By trusting in the math of the electoral map. And by not being cocky (okay, maybe just a little).
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What Bush’s strategists are looking for are signs that the voters are receptive to change. (Some support for change is inevitable at the tail end of an eight-year presidency; call it the channel-surfing effect.) A standard question in political polls is, Do you think that the country is generally on the right track or the wrong track? For most of Clinton’s presidency, a majority has answered the right track. Recently, however, the right-track responses have dipped below 50 percent—a good omen for Bush.
Another way to look at the political climate is through a longer lens, placing the 2000 election in the context of history. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, believes that the major political parties have arrived at a rough equilibrium, having exhausted their twentieth-century agendas. Republicans have cut taxes, defeated communism, stopped the growth of big government, and returned power to the states. Democrats have won acceptance of the economic safety net, secured rights for women and minorities, enshrined ethnic and cultural diversity as important national values, and maintained a government that is still big, if not quite as big as it once was. Now we are at the beginning of a new century, a time when the country anticipates change but has no clear idea of what it will bring. In such a climate, Rove believes, the voters will be drawn to a leader who is optimistic and open to change, but within a reassuring conservative framework.
THE NUMBERS
The darkest moment for Bush occurred just after McCain whipped him in New Hampshire, when he arrived in South Carolina to find that he trailed his unexpectedly fearsome rival in that pivotal state by five points. While meeting voters, he was greeted by a man who said, “I want to shake the hand of the next vice president.” So lackluster was Bush’s performance during the period leading up to the primaries that his support versus Gore’s had been eroding for half a year. The Bush campaign tracks the average of 35 major national polls each month; last September, he led Gore by an average of sixteen points (53 to 37). The average margin fell a point a month until it reached twelve in January and then went into free fall during the primary season: five points in February, less than two in March. During those two months, Gore topped Bush in 6 polls—the only times he has finished on top in 186 surveys covering the period from January 1999 to mid-May of this year. In April Bush widened the gap again to five points, and it remained there in May. This is a shaky lead, one that is within the margin of error for most polls, but it represents a turnaround of a disastrous trend. (There is also the issue of a ceiling on Gore’s support, which Bush strategists would have you believe is even more telling. Their spin is that the vice president has exceeded 46 percent only 6 times in the 186 polls and has never reached 50 percent, while Bush has hit or exceeded the 50 percent mark 115 times. This sounds impressive until you realize that only 2 of the polls in which Bush hit 50 percent were taken after February of this year. The rest are ancient history.)
Does any of this make any difference with two conventions, three debates, and more than four months to go? Not surprisingly, the Bush camp says it does. They point to a Gallup poll conducted between May 18 and May 21. Bush led, 45 to 38, but the poll found that only 41 percent of those surveyed had made up their mind about who they are going to vote for. More than half of the Bush supporters (56 percent) said that they were committed to voting for him in November. Only a little over a third of the Gore voters (37 percent) had made up their mind. Referring to the solidifying of Bush’s support, his media strategist, Mark McKinnon, says, “It’s all getting baked into the cake.”Think of the two campaigns Bush has waged in Texas. In his 1994 race against incumbent governor Ann Richards, he ran on his message. He overcame suspicions that he was a lightweight who was running on his name and family connections—sound familiar?—with a serious reform agenda that tackled big issues: education, welfare, juvenile crime, tort law. In his 1998 reelection bid against Garry Mauro, he ran on his image. His main proposals, ending the social promotion of failing students and cutting property taxes, were not high on anybody’s agenda except his own, and they were secondary to his popularity.
Bush’s GOP primary campaign was closer to the Mauro model than the Richards model—and that was the problem. The carefully orchestrated visits to Austin by out-of-state politicians, the dodging of the national media, the substitution of slogans (“compassionate conservative”) for message, the fundraising totals shooting upward like a hit CD on the charts: Bush was running as a star who had only to show up and bask in public adulation. He was content to run this way. Never having faced a primary challenge in his gubernatorial races, he wasn’t comfortable with being the prime target of both the media and all of his rivals, and he didn’t know whether or how to fight back. And he was frustrated by the rhythm of the primary campaign. “As a politician, you’re conditioned for winning or losing,” he told me. “The primaries are like a perpetual runoff. You win the Iowa caucuses, you’re flush with victory, and then you fly to New Hampshire and start all over again.”
When McCain emerged as a major challenger, Bush was in serious trouble. He didn’t like the process, and in New Hampshire, it was obvious. Had McCain stayed with his themes of making politics more honest and paying down the national debt instead of griping about negative campaigning, he would have had a great chance to win South Carolina and march toward the nomination.
In defeat, McCain did Bush an enormous favor. He exposed the weakness of the celebrity candidacy—it is political suicide for the son of a former president, who has to prove himself worthy, to run on image instead of message—in time for it to be corrected. And Bush got the opportunity to show how he would react to a crisis, something that both the voters and the media were waiting to see. (“It was a backbone check,” Bush acknowledges. “Did I have personally what it took to get up and fight?”) And, because McCain made an open appeal to Democrats and independents, he was the catalyst that cemented the party faithful to Bush. The GOP is more united than it has been since 1984.
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