Think of all they would have to talk about, if Al Gore and George W. Bush could go out for a burger to savor their victories this week and resist the temptation to rip each other's throat out. Who would have thought last summer that Bush would have the near death experience, or that Gore, in the course of flattening Bill Bradley, would manage to climb to a dead heat with Bush after lagging 17 points behind in January--and have even more money left over? After their long distraction, the two presumptive nominees finally get to concentrate on one another, and they are losing no time trying to define each other. But in the course of doing so, they will be defining themselves as well.
Bush, says an aide, thinks Gore is "a phony and a cutthroat" and cannot wait to take him on. While he doesn't quite know what to make of the Vice President, people close to him say, he has a gut dislike for him. Already you can hear it when he talks about Gore's "slash-and-burn politics": "Mr. Gore, I'm not going to let you get away with it," he said last week. "We're not going to be fooled by somebody who says one thing and absolutely does something else." It is as though Gore has become a stalking-horse for all those elitist liberals, the pantywaists and special pleaders who whine about rights and fairness from the comfort of their ivory towers and whom Bush has reviled since his days at Yale. And Bush has no time for liberal guilt, doesn't believe he should feel guilty at all for the advantages life has bestowed on him; when he says he inherited "half my father's friends and all his enemies," he signals that he views his extraordinary privilege as more burden than benefit.
You would think that within Camp Gore there would be an equally fired-up cohort appalled that the Vice President, so experienced and knowledgeable on the most arcane policy scraps, should be challenged by some pampered lightweight who thinks five years as Governor of a state with weak executive power qualifies him to be President. But you would be wrong. This is not the way Gore thinks, which tells you as much about how he approaches problems as Bush's visceral antipathy for Gore does about him.
Gore views Bush, like Bill Bradley before him, as simply another "obstacle to be overcome," as an adviser put it, on Gore's way to his appointment with destiny. This view is shared by the people around him, who are generally hard-edged campaign professionals. It is not an epic ideological battle; even the true lefties talk about Bush's "extremism" not as a threat to the social fabric but as a liability they intend to exploit. They probe him clinically, looking for weaknesses, soft spots. This isn't personal; it's just the way politics works.