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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Out of the McCain race, then, came the Bush strategy for the period between the primaries and the convention: Define yourself as the agent of change. Take the initiative. Set the agenda. Boldly go where no Republican has gone before. Confront the smarts issue with a blizzard of policy addresses. (Among the Bush campaign handouts in mid-May was a sheet headed “32 Policy Messages Since March 13.” Another carries the line “27 Gore Attacks in 35 days.” The spin is that Bush is positive, Gore is negative; Bush is change, Gore is status quo; Bush is a new kind of Republican, Gore is an old kind of Democrat.) If the catchphrase of the 1992 Clinton campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid,” then the catchphrase of the reborn Bush campaign of 2000 is “It’s the Ann Richards race, stupid.” Why didn’t the Bush team come up with this formula during the primaries, when the campaign was in such trouble? Because it wouldn’t have worked. If Bush had unveiled his new-kind-of-Republican policies during the primary, they would not have helped him against McCain. His proposal for unilateral nuclear arms reductions may make perfect sense in the post-cold war age, but the large number of retired veterans in South Carolina probably wouldn’t have bought it. Nor would Bush’s emphasis on reading programs for urban schools have excited a party anchored in suburbia—and whose right wing is suspicious of any federal role in education.
In a primary race the range of issues tends to be limited to traditional party concerns, about which members of the same party seldom have major disagreements. Consequently the media focus is on process issues: Gore reinventing himself, Bradley’s weak response, Bush and McCain accusing each other of negative campaigning. Policy becomes important if, like Bush early in the debates, you don’t seem to know it.
But in a general-election campaign, the range of issues includes everything. Policy positions are a way of appealing to voters interested in a particular issue and also a way of sending a symbolic message to all voters. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue that shapes up as the biggest battleground for Bush and Gore: Social Security. It’s known as the third rail of American politics: Touch it and you die. Yet Bush has touched it—make that, grabbed it—by proposing that young workers be allowed to put a portion of their Social Security taxes in individual investment accounts. The downside is that the elderly and near elderly will rise against anyone who tampers with Social Security; the upside was stated by Bush himself in an interview with the Associated Press: “I’m driving the campaign on issues, on announcements, on vision. The accumulated effect, I hope is, ‘Here is a guy who knows how to lead.’” The early returns are favorable. A poll in Florida, the state with the largest retirement community, taken just before and just after Bush came out with his Social Security plan, showed his lead over Gore growing from 2 percent to 11 percent.
To be sure, these are only first impressions. Millions of dollars and countless soundbites will be applied to this issue before Election Day. But the presidential race isn’t a sprint where everybody starts out even; it’s more like an America’s Cup yacht race, where one side can get an edge before the starting line. Bush sailed across the line first. The conventional wisdom remains that the Democrats are better situated to take advantage of the issues that are uppermost in the public’s mind. Gore laid them out in a recent letter to contributors: The top three were Social Security, education, and health care. (Another, gun control, helps Gore in some states and hurts him in others.) For years Democrats have outmaneuvered Republicans on these issues, painting the GOP as caring more about money than people and gaining a significant edge among women voters in the process. Bush knows that he has to narrow the gender gap. “If we act like Social Security reform isn’t a Republican issue,” Bush told me, “what are we supposed to talk about when everybody else is talking about Social Security?”
Bush hates to be on the defensive, but he will find it unavoidable when Gore or his surrogates attack his record as governor of Texas. Democratic researchers have amassed pages of statistics about the state’s shortcomings: “Texas Ranked Next to Last in Women Without Health Insurance,” “Texas Led the Nation in Pollution since 1995,” “Report Showed Texas Ranked 2nd Worst in Hunger,” and much more. The question is whether Gore can persuasively argue that these failings can be attributed to Bush. Some Gore strategists believe that the criticism of Bush’s governorship should focus on things he actually was responsible for (vetoes of a patients’ rights bill and a bill making state government more responsive to the problem of hunger; and his preference for reducing pollution through voluntary actions by industry). Others want to make him out to be the worst chief executive since Nero. The national conventions are the first time in the election cycle that Americans start paying serious attention. This phase of the race is more important for Gore than for Bush: It represents the vice president’s best, and possibly last, opportunity to separate himself from Bill Clinton on the character issue (but not on the economy), establish an identity for himself, and frame the issues for the voters.
For Bush, the most important task is the selection of a running mate. This is crucial because it could be an obstacle to party unity. The problem for Bush is that a pro-choice pick would infuriate the hard-core pro-lifers. At best, they would attack him on national TV; at worst, they would stay home on Election Day or cast a protest vote for, say, likely Reform party nominee Pat Buchanan. Is Bush ready to take that risk? Loyalty matters more to him than ideology; he would prefer someone he has been comfortable with for a long time, and the name everyone comes back to is Tom Ridge, the governor of the swing state of Pennsylvania. But Ridge is pro-choice. Unless Bush can do some preliminary fence-mending with the pro-lifers, Ridge violates the number one rule of choosing a potential vice president: First, do no harm. Americans pick their president in a most peculiar way, not in one election but in 51 separate elections, one in each state and in the District of Columbia. National polls measure the popular vote, but they don’t measure the electoral vote, in which each state gets one vote for every member of Congress: Texas, for example, has 2 senators and 30 representatives, or 32 electoral votes. California has 54. Washington, D.C., has 3. The total number of electoral votes is 538; the magic number needed to win is 270.
The result in many states is already a foregone conclusion. Bush will carry Texas along with all of the plains and mountain states of the West, except for New Mexico, which is a toss-up, and possibly Colorado. The South is almost as Republican as the West; Gore can’t count on a single state, although he will probably end up taking his home state of Tennessee; he has chances in Arkansas and Louisiana and is a long shot in Florida, if the elderly turn against Bush. Gore should win California and New York, the two states with the most votes (87 between them) and most if not all of New England.
Rove’s U.S. map shows states in which Bush is leading, according to public polls, colored in two shades of blue (light for a lead of five to nine points, dark for ten points or greater), states in which Gore is leading in two shades of red (ditto), and states that are too close to call in yellow. Foremost among the yellows are Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey, in the industrial North. The blue states alone, he tells me, add up to 277 electoral votes. This means, he says, that to win, Gore is going to have to hold on to all of his states, capture all of the swing states, and take a state or two away from Bush. It is not hard to find prospects for Gore among the light-colored blue states: West Virginia and Wisconsin, for starters. Still, Rove has a point. Gore has no margin for error.
He’s not the only one who thinks so. Based on available public polling data, hotlinescoops.com, a neutral political Web site, has Bush ahead in states with a total of 282 electoral votes. But a number of states have no reports, including Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, Kansas, and Mississippi. Bush is a heavy favorite to carry every one of these states, which collectively are worth 24 electoral votes, putting him at 306, well over the number he needs.
Of course, the maps don’t mean that Bush has the election wrapped up any more than the professors’ models mean that Gore has the edge. When he was on top a year ago, with a much bigger lead than he has now, Bush was vague about what he believed. Today he has offered more details, which gives Gore something tangible to attack. Being specific has its risks. When I asked Bush about this, particularly his gamble on Social Security, he said, “What people want is someone willing to lead.” Then he shrugged. “Why run if you’re not going to take on the big issues?”
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