Sunday, December 17, 2000

By James O'Toole, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The quick nomination victories, a product of a front-loaded primary calendar, set the stage for what, in effect, was the earliest beginning of a general election campaign in modern history.

With the party conventions more than four months away, it was already clear who would be giving the Thursday night acceptance speeches.

	The Coronation / George W. Bush consolidated control of the GOP by the time of the Republican convention in Philadelphia. Not a peep of protest was heard -- at least from inside the hall -- at what turned out to be the most crisply choreographed nomination in history. (VWH Campbell Jr./Post-Gazette)

For most of those four months, the Bush-Gore confrontation was limited to minor rhetorical skirmishes. The battles were down the road.

Bush's sometimes-erratic performance against McCain had brought some sniping and criticism from party insiders, but it did little apparent harm with the public. Through the balance of the spring and summer, Bush enjoyed a consistent lead over Gore in public opinion polls.

The most reliable applause line in Bush's standard stump speech was a tacit slap at Bill Clinton. Bush would, he assured every audience, "restore honor and dignity to the White House."

Bush's rhetoric also demonstrated that he had learned a thing or two from the incumbent president. Clinton had won by moving his party to the center and staking a Democratic claim to issues, such as welfare reform and fiscal responsibility, that had long been associated with Republicans.

From the moment he announced his candidacy, Bush talked about issues that had been seen as Democratic strong suits, notably Social Security and education. The programs he talked about were often modest, but they helped put rhetorical meat on the bones of his compassionate conservatism.

Before the end of March, the Texas governor had proposed a new federal program to promote reading and education, issues he had emphasized during his administration in Austin. He traveled to Battle Creek, Mich., calling for a new program to rehabilitate urban housing.

Gore had forged a reputation as a champion of the environment, which would prove a nettlesome issue for Bush throughout the campaign. Democrats assailed his Texas record on pollution. But in the first week of April, he came to Pennsylvania for an appearance signaling he would not cede even that issue to his rival. Bush appeared with Gov. Tom Ridge in Aliquippa touting a plan to recycle industrial brownfields sites.

During this early phase of the general election, Bush appeared to be in the driver's seat. He led in the polls; his campaign was the one tackling issues. Through the spring, Gore spent more time talking about Bush, attacking his proposals and his record in Texas. This strategy had sunk Bradley, but Bush proved a more elusive target. The vice president's early criticisms made no appreciable dent in Bush's lead.

Convention magic

Through late spring and early summer, the presidential picture was a still life.

It became a motion picture again, and one with an apparently growing audience, as delegates gathered in Philadelphia and Los Angeles to ratify the nominations that the candidates had effectively captured on March 7.

The Republican convention in Philadelphia was a confident display of choreographed diversity. Perhaps the only ethnic group underrepresented on the stage of Philadelphia's First Union Center was white males.

The first evening set the tone for the four days of fund raising, planning and revelry. George W. Bush's GOP was a nurturing Earth mother, in contrast to the hard-edged partisan persona of the party's congressional wing. A party that had called for the abolition of the Department of Education in its last platform featured a parade of teachers as first-night speakers, led by the Texas first lady, Laura Bush.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert appeared by remote video. He was one of the few members of Congress to be featured in prime time that week, and his geographic remove was symbolic of the rhetorical distance Bush sought from Washington partisanship.

	The Kiss / Al Gore greeted wife Tipper onstage at the Democratic convention by practically wrapping his lips around her face. "The Kiss" elicited hoots of "get a room!" And effectively sent two messages: 1) I am not Bill Clinton; I am devoted to my wife. 2) I am not without passion. (Stephen Savoia, Associated Press)

Governors, depicted as bipartisan problem solvers, were the GOP officials most prominent in Philadelphia. Congressional Republicans would not reemerge as a central public presence in the presidential race until the post-election deadlock.

The Philadelphia gathering from July 31-Aug. 3 was interspersed with demonstrations, as was the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that followed from Aug. 11-17.

In one way, the demonstrations were consistent with a campaign that lacked polarizing wedge issues. The protesters were upset about a variety of things -- world trade, corporate greed, threats to the environment -- but overall, they seemed to lack a coherent focus.

Did Bush have 'heft?'

The climax of every convention is the nominee's acceptance speech. Bush's drew special scrutiny because he had a relatively modest resume for a presidential candidate. Questions lingered over whether he had the heft to play the role assigned by the delegates.

Bush's speech passed the plausibility test. He assailed the Clinton administration.

"They have not led; we will," he repeated in a chant picked up by the delegates. He offered an impassioned portrayal of the philosophy he called compassionate conservatism. And he displayed a winning personality. Recalling that the nation's first president, George Washington, had addressed Congress in the same convention city, he drew laughs with the apocryphal historical note that "his friends called him George W."

After the speech, the general public seemed to endorse the enthusiastic reaction of the partisans in the hall. Before the crews had finished cleaning up the confetti from the convention center floor, Bush's poll numbers had shot up still further.

Besides Bush's own performance at the convention, the major event of Bush's summer was his selection of former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to be his running mate. Cheney, a veteran of Bush's father's administration, drew praise as a mature adviser and potential president. But his governing credentials were stronger than his campaigning skills.

The newly minted ticket began its general election campaign with a whistle-stop tour that embarked from Pittsburgh's Station Square.

At each stop along the route through the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, Bush would linger along the rope line, shaking hand after hand until his aides pressed him to get back on board. Cheney was always there waiting for him. Almost as soon as the speeches were over, Cheney strode back to the ornate passenger car as though he were afraid it would leave without him, or that a voter might ask him for a loan.

At one point on the trip, as the Bush train rolled through the sunny Ohio countryside, strategist Karl Rove dispensed quotes to a huddle of traveling reporters.

"Gore is going to get a bounce out of his convention and he's going to consolidate his base," Rove predicted. "By Labor Day, we'll be in single digits or dead even."

Lieberman lightning

Amid the post-convention glow, Rove's words seemed like political spin from a campaign trying not to appear overconfident. But a few weeks later, the assessment proved, if anything, optimistic.

Bush had garnered weeks of headlines from his vice presidential search. Gore's selection process was less protracted, but it yielded a much more surprising and energizing result. Word leaked that Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman was on Gore's short list.

The weekend before Gore chose Lieberman, Ed Rendell, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, forthrightly stated why many thought him a long shot. If Lieberman were Protestant, he would be a slam dunk of a choice, Rendell noted. But the senator was an Orthodox Jew, a member of a religion that had never been represented on a national ticket. Many observers wondered about the reception for a Jewish candidate in a nation with an abundant history of discrimination against Jews.

Gore's risk in flouting the ethnic hurdle was met with almost universal enthusiasm. Lieberman brought another important element to a man trying to walk out of the shadow of Bill Clinton's notoriety. After the tawdry Lewinsky revelations, Lieberman had been the first Democrat on the floor of the Senate to denounce Clinton's actions.

Over a two-week span, that choice, coupled with the most famous kiss since the sailor grabbed the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, drove Gore toward the goal he enunciated in his acceptance speech -- to stand as "my own man."

Polls suggested that Bush had arrived in Philadelphia with the solid backing of his party. The Democratic base was slower to coalesce behind Gore. That reality was reflected in the convention agenda. The

Philadelphia Republicans had spent most of their time reaching beyond their base to the center, where the swing voters resided.

The Los Angles Democrats, however, were treated to repeated calls for loyalty directed at the party's traditional constituencies. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and various Kennedys took turns at the microphone, exhorting the party's faithful to come home.

They did. Among the chief reasons for Gore's eventual victory in the popular vote were the grassroots activism and strong turnouts by organized labor and minority voters.

Clinton's contribution

In state after state, the results were sufficiently close that every constituency was essential, but it was certainly true that Gore could not have won states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan without blacks or without labor. And the stage for the epic Florida drama was set in part by a huge turnout of black voters. Blacks made up an estimated 15 percent of Florida voters on Nov. 7, while they account for only 10 percent of the state's voting age population.

One of the highlights of the Democratic convention was President Clinton's Monday night speech on Aug. 14. On giant television screens, the delegates watched a closed-circuit shot of Clinton striding toward the podium through backstage hallways. It was rock concert stagecraft, and Clinton got a rock star's reception from the Democrats.

That appearance spotlighted the positive side of Clinton's legacy for Gore. The downside re-erupted three days later when, on the eve of Gore's speech, reports surfaced that Kenneth Starr's successor had empaneled a new grand jury to scrutinize "l'affaire Lewinsky."

Gore's convention acceptance speech may have been less stirring than Clinton's, but it achieved two important objectives. It drew voters' focus to him as an individual, as opposed to an extension of the Clinton administration. This was reinforced by the startling, three-second kiss Gore gave his wife, Tipper, as he paused on the way to the podium.

The speech also helped turn the terms of the presidential debate toward areas more favorable to Gore. His address was a litany of policy goals that had little of the lofty oratory of the usual nomination acceptance speech. As though conceding he couldn't compete with Bush on the plane of personality, Gore tried to highlight the nuts and bolts of policy. The speech also showed that Gore's campaign would adopt a populist tone. Rather than concentrating on taking credit for prosperous times, Gore emphasized the grievances of those whose boats hadn't been lifted by the tides of prosperity.

"I will fight for you," Gore promised.

At least in the short term, the tactic yielded dividends. Gore's poll numbers jumped sharply. Within a few days of the convention's close he had -- barely, but for the first time in the general election season -- overtaken Bush.

Third-party players

As the Democrats gathered at their convention in Los Angeles, the Reform Party was self-destructing just a few miles away. After several days of internecine warfare at its convention in Long Beach, the party nominated Republican renegade Pat Buchanan, but it split apart and seemed spent as a political force.

Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, had launched his campaign back in February, but at that point he was dismissed as a quixotic nonfactor in the election. Democratic fears that Nader might threaten Al Gore didn't crystallize until well into the fall.

A cadre of former Nader's Raiders, lawyers who had worked for the consumer activist, crisscrossed the country in the final weeks of the election, warning voters to stay away from their former mentor. Nader scorned their concerns, insisting that Gore and George W. Bush were nearly indistinguishable corporate lackeys.

In the end, the Democrats' fears were justified. If Nader had stayed out of the race, Gore would have easily overcome Bush's tiny margin in Florida and won the White House.

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