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The hope of shredding Gore's credibility may explain Bush's nutty debate debacle. The Bush crew all looked at the tapes of Gore telling Tim Russert and Larry King that he would debate Bush on their shows, and then refusing unless Bush in turn agreed to the traditional Presidential Commission debates. They thought they had the perfect chance to show Gore backing off a big promise and ran an ad implying that Gore was ducking the debates. But however aggrieved the editorial pages, this was not a life-and-death issue for average voters, and if they were paying attention, it was probably to decide that they smelled fear in the Bush camp. Given the Vice President's famous appetite for debates, the attack ad didn't ring true. (The Austin team never tested that spot in a focus group, a fact that some campaign officials now regret.) "I'm not sure why we went there," says an adviser, and by week's end, Bush had backed off, agreeing to negotiate with Gore over the Commission debates. Another aide is blunter about the cost of the detour: "We've been off message and off stride. We've been talking about debates and reporters instead of issues. It's time to smell the coffee here--you may have thought we were perfect, but we're not."
Republicans outside Austin are complaining that Bush is too deep in the weeds of his own operation; a major vendor says Bush okays every piece of direct mail himself. "I thought Al Gore was the one who was writing all the bumper-sticker slogans," said a disgruntled G.O.P. operative, "but it turns out to be W." The narrow funnel to the top slows everything down and suggests the principal has no confidence in his troops--a bad signal to send everyone else.
Bush himself seems conflicted about the heart of his message. "Reasonable change," the phrase chief strategist Karl Rove uses internally to describe what Bush is selling, is not a particularly revolutionary product. It lets you clean house without tearing it down. When Bush was running symbolically against Bill Clinton, the message seemed to work. Bush was a new kind of Republican--which meant he wasn't Newt Gingrich, and he wouldn't shut down the government or open the orphanages. And he exuded a freshness, optimism and tolerance that voters found appealing.
But now that voters are comparing Bush with Gore, the case for reasonable change may be harder to make. Gore has detached himself from Clinton, enlisted a high-collar running mate in Joe Lieberman, brought down his negatives to the point that they are lower than Bush's, 29% vs. 34%, and reached out to swing voters. In fact, Gore has found his own way of making a character appeal. He talks about being "specific" as though it is an act of political heroism: "All this talk that it's a mistake to give out specifics, I think, was premature," Gore says. "This is not about momentum, it's about substance. I think the best substance turns out in the end to be the best politics--that's a view some see as quaint, but I think it's true." Here Gore is executing a version of the Dick Morris game plan, using issues to gild himself and tar his opponent--hence the Democrats' ads attacking Bush's health-care record in Texas for leaving too many poor children without coverage. "Gore's ads make Texas look like it's Belize or Bulgaria or someplace where kids live in huts with no roofs and everything's polluted," said a Bush adviser. "They are really hurting us."