Sunday, December 17, 2000

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

On paper, they didn't seem so different.

George Bush and Al Gore are both baby boomers who came of age in the Vietnam era, both Ivy Leaguers, both sons of famous fathers. As politicians, both men seemed instinctively more comfortable with the centrists than with the ideological purists within their respective parties.

	Hold Your Fire / Once paired off in the general election, George W. Bush and Al Gore headed straight for the middle of the political spectrum in the hunt for independent and crossover voters. They skirted red-meat issues like abortion (Bush anti-; Gore pro-) and gun control (also Bush anti-; Gore pro-). (David J. Phillip, Associated Press)

But the similarities ended there. During the campaign, Bush and Gore offered very different visions of how they would govern, although it was not always easy to discern those distinctions in the mountains of detailed policy proposals they offered.

No one could complain, though, that this wasn't a campaign about issues, even if this election year's crop -- prescription drugs, managed care, education, Social Security and Medicare reform -- weren't particularly galvanizing.

With crime down, the economy humming and the Cold War over, the nation was faced with a more pleasant challenge than it had been as recently as 1992: how to preserve prosperity and spend a surplus estimated at $2.2 trillion.

Bush wanted to use more than half of that windfall, about $1.4 trillion, for a sweeping tax cut. While acknowledging it would favor the wealthiest 1 percent, his campaign noted this group pays most of the taxes. His tax cut would also stimulate investment and savings and would lift many working-class Americans into the middle class, he contended.

Citing some estimates that the Social Security fund would be exhausted in 2037, Bush also suggested letting people divert 15 percent of their payroll taxes into Individual Retirement Accounts, for investing in stocks, bonds or other securities.

Gore scoffed at those proposals. With the economy booming, a tax cut wasn't needed; instead, the vice president wanted to use most of the surplus to pay off the national debt by 2012 and spend the rest on education, health care and matching money for retirement savings accounts.

Bush would have to cut future Social Security benefits to make his numbers work, Gore argued. His own plan wouldn't touch Social Security, and he would push for a more limited form of tax relief -- about $480 billion targeted at middle- and lower-income families.

Most voters shrugged.

There would be no riots in the streets over any of these issues.

But that was largely due to the candidates' desires not to draw too sharp a distinction between themselves.

Winning over the swing votes

After the conventions, it appeared that Bush and Gore had secured the base supporters of their own parties.

Their next task was to woo married suburbanites and older voters -- two groups that could go either way. The Republicans sensed an opening with senior citizens disgusted by President Clinton's philandering and his lying about it later; the Democrats noted that suburban voters, many of them political independents, agreed with Gore on issues like day care, gun control, family medical leave and school class size.

Bush tried hard to position himself in the mainstream, highlighting his record on education in Texas, but Gore would spend almost as much time in classrooms as the governor did. Gore's $170 billion plan, not surprisingly, called for a larger federal role than Bush's: universal preschool for 4-year-olds, hiring more teachers (and testing them) and renovating aging facilities. Bush's $45 billion plan would emphasize local control of spending, vouchers and college aid for poor rather than middle-income students.

On health care, both candidates agreed on a need for a prescription drug plan; Gore's would cost $338 billion, Bush's $158 billion. Both had proposals for addressing the estimated 43 million Americans without health insurance, although experts felt than no more than 25 percent of those people would benefit under either man's program.

Lightning-rod issues like abortion and gun control were downplayed; pro-choice Gore needed to keep socially conservative Democrats, many of them from union households, in his corner; anti-abortion Bush needed to keep affluent moderate suburban Republicans from defecting.

Issues involving national security, military spending and foreign policy barely registered with voters, in part because there wasn't a fundamental difference between the candidates.

In some cases, it boiled down to semantics: While both supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization, Bush called China a "strategic competitor," while Gore called it a "strategic partner."

Neither candidate's proposed military budget made the Joint Chiefs of Staff happy; while Gore said he would spend $100 billion compared with Bush's $45 billion to maintain military readiness, the chiefs complained that both proposals fell short.

Bush criticized Clinton's "nation building" policies and deployment of U.S. soldiers in places not vital to American strategic interests, saying he wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti and would end American involvement in U.N. peacekeeping in the Balkans. Gore stressed "humanitarian intervention" and said a pullout in the Balkans would strain relations with key European allies, who have posted thousands of troops there.

Fine-tuning in the homestretch

Bush went through a tough couple of weeks in September, during which he approved two nasty attack ads, was overheard using a vulgarity to describe a reporter and briefly tried to avoid debating the vice president.

But after the first formal debate, Bush regained momentum. The odds were against him; Gore was known to be a scathingly effective debater. But while the vice president might have won the arguments, his forceful style grated on many people, and Bush was able to survive. Bush's campaign skillfully focused on some of Gore's exaggerations to raise questions about his character.

Gore, for his part, toned down his populist rhetoric, appealing to "middle-class" rather than "working" families and presenting himself as a wise steward of the economy.

But he hammered away at Bush's record in Texas, saying the state consistently ranked at the top in pollution and did a bad job providing health care for poor children. As governor, Bush had fought an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program, and when he lost that battle in the Legislature, he allowed it to become law without his signature.

No particular issue came to dominate Election 2000 the way the economy did back in 1992. And neither candidate gained an overwhelming edge because of any particular proposal.

Bush did somewhat better than Gore on character issues, according to the polls, but by the end of the campaign their personal positive and negative numbers were not far apart.

Perhaps it was a victory for Bush that he was seen as being capable of handling the economy even though his opponent's administration was associated with unprecedented prosperity. Similarly, he held his own against a slightly more favorable public view of Gore's positions on traditionally Democratic issues, such as health care and education.

To that extent, the "compassionate conservative" label he attached to himself clearly helped Bush stay competitive in an election conducted around issues normally most friendly to the other side. It helped cement him in the political center and land him, eventually, in the White House.

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