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By the time Clinton arrived in Chicago for his party's convention in August, nothing that hinted at liberalism was left hanging on him. When the President, who had begun his term advocating the rights of gays in the military, came around to supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition for gay and lesbian unions, Dole was wide-eyed. "Is there anything we're for that he won't jump on?" Dole asked. The answer, essentially, was nothing, as Clinton proved with his support for welfare reform, the single action most responsible for anchoring him in the political center. The President had vetoed two earlier welfare bills but agreed to the third on July 31. Although flawed in Clinton's view, the bill ended welfare as a federal entitlement, thus allowing the President to redeem a key 1992 campaign pledge: his promise to "end welfare as we know it."
Clinton agonized over that third bill, but his eventual assent was made palatable because Republicans had softened their harshest demands. And that happened because Clinton's moves to the middle had retarded Dole's progress, thus causing G.O.P. members of Congress to think first about their own careers, which meant standing for re-election with a law that reformed (or at least changed) welfare, the one program among thousands that had come to symbolize everything wrong with paternalistic Big Government.
Saying Clinton stole the G.O.P.'s positions misses the point. He stole their issues and refinished them with his own less severe, and therefore more acceptable, gloss. Even welfare reform was made easier to swallow for the Democrats' more liberal adherents when the President swore he would "fix" the bill's toughest commands in a second term.
Thus the landscape was set for the fall classic. Clinton's coherence forced Dole to flail. He had adopted much of Steve Forbes' supply-side agenda, but his proposal to slash taxes 15% bumped against his long insistence on cutting the deficit first. Dole seemed more wishy-washy than the President, who was becoming a model of constancy. In fact, voters deadened to sweet-sounding quick fixes became less enamored of Dole's tax-cutting scheme the more he publicized it.
With his "economic package" actually losing him support, Dole swung at Clinton for a rise in drug use among youngsters and pushed a school-choice plan that would permit parents to send their children to private and parochial institutions. Whether those notions could have moved the dial will never be known, for as quickly as he raised them, Dole dropped them. He said Clinton had no core, and when that didn't work, he labeled him an old-fashioned liberal, and that didn't work either. Scandal was left, so Dole tried that, eventually lighting on foreign contributions as the most recent example of Clinton's lack of a moral compass. But most voters, the polls found, had long since concluded that while inherently "untrustworthy," the President was nevertheless trustworthy enough for the White House, and in fact cared more about their own problems than did Dole--which mattered more to them than anything nefarious that the President or his wife or their minions might have done.