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Al Gore's campaign stagnates
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April 25, 2000 | Let's rewind for a moment. Coming out of the primaries, Gore had burnished his public image for toughness and resourcefulness by bouncing back from an initial slow start to handily dispatch his sole primary opponent, Bradley, while maintaining overwhelming unity within his party. George W. Bush, meanwhile, came out of the primaries tangled up in a skein of unhelpful associations with the most extreme elements of Republican Party, and seemed eager to assure himself more self-inflicted wounds with the insolent and ungenerous attitude he took toward his defeated opponent John McCain. With national head-to-head polls showing him finally drawing even with Bush, Gore seized the moment of his Super Tuesday victory speech to reach out to McCain supporters, telling him that their fight was his fight. In the following days he took the audacious, and perhaps ingenious, step of roundly embracing the one topic pundits expected him to avoid, campaign-finance reform, and making it a centerpiece of his campaign.
And then? And then -- well, nothing. Nothing at all. Aside from an embarrassing jaunt into the Elián González mess, Gore has more or less left the field to Bush. And Bush has set about the task of "reintroducing himself" to the American people, meeting with a group of (albeit hand-picked) gay Republicans and rolling out a series of policy initiatives on education, health care, low-income housing and savings for low-income families. The Bush people know they won't be able to match Gore on issues like health care and low-income housing, but that's not really the point. The Bush campaign is trying to get back on the message it was pushing before things got ugly with McCain -- showing voters he's not another one of those scary Republicans in the Gingrich mold, but a new kind of Republican who is really most concerned about bread-and-butter issues like health care. Tacking to the center makes perfect sense for Bush. But why has Gore given him a free pass to do so with little or no criticism? Why has the Gore campaign been stuck in neutral ever since the vice president wrapped up the nomination? "I can't really describe the sense of stagnation," a Gore staffer recently told me, "but it's just a feeling we all have ... It's sort of this like eerie feeling ... knowing that this stuff is happening, but not being able to latch on to it." Over the past week a dozen newspaper articles have commented on Gore's stagnant operation and Bush's renewed pitch at defining "compassionate conservatism" as something more than an empty phrase. What's unfortunate for the Gore campaign, however, is that this isn't the first time this has happened. And it may not be the last. It took the whiff of death from the onrushing Bradley campaign to shock Gore into action last fall, finally transforming the vice president's wobbly and bloated campaign into the streamlined operation that trounced Bradley in the winter. Something similar, but less noticed, actually happened at the tail end of the campaign in New Hampshire.
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