(4 of 5)
Bush will try to get some traction by talking more about reform and stop trying to match Gore promise for promise, on prescription drugs and military pay and education spending. But with his enormous tax cut at the center of his budget, he doesn't have as much room to counterpunch. Reforming anything as vast as Social Security or Medicare or the Pentagon takes money too, as Americans learned from welfare reform. Gore puts $775 billion into Medicare, Bush $198 billion. Gore allots $115 billion for education, Bush $48 billion. For the environment, Gore offers up $120 billion, Bush just $5 billion. Even in defense spending, Gore's budget is $100 billion, while Bush's is $45 billion. Bush is right to say that by passing a huge tax cut, he lets people decide for themselves whether to give it to the poor or stay home more with the kids or save for a rainy day. But "an individual can't fix schools, they can't clean up the environment, and people know that," counters a Gore senior adviser. "The people I talk to pay 50% in taxes, but they are more worried about the schools and environment than they are about taxes."
Finally, even as Gore unveils a new ad about his fight for a patient's bill of rights, the Republicans will ramp up, not abandon, their attacks on his character. In addition to the sarcastic ad about Gore's Buddhist temple fund raiser, they plan to roll out the "no controlling legal authority" press conference and Gore's defense of Clinton as "one of our greatest Presidents" on the day of his impeachment. The ads will then pivot to something Gore is promising now, so that the message will be, If you couldn't trust Gore to tell the truth then, why should you trust him on his policy proposals? Ads comparing Gore's record and rhetoric on education have been filmed; in one, a high school graduate is shown staring at his diploma. The boy reportedly will say to the camera: "I would enjoy it a lot more if I could read it."
There is even talk of reviving the controversial spot Bush himself killed three weeks ago. This is the ad made by RNC image guru Alex Castellanos, which was actually shipped out to 350 TV stations before Bush finally yanked it. One argument was that it was just too nasty; the other was that it was unfair, since it featured a clip of Gore defending Clinton's truthfulness as if it referred to the Lewinsky scandal. The problem was that the interview was from 1994, not 1998, long before anyone had ever heard of the White House intern. But the ad tested so well with focus groups that, according to two officials, the campaign is thinking of just putting some dates on the screen so that no one can accuse the G.O.P. of misleading voters, and running it in battleground states anyway. But a top aide to Bush insisted to TIME that the rumors of its resurrection are "not true."