Sunday, December 17, 2000

By James O'Toole, Post-Gazette Politics Editor

The first post-convention days brought a sea change in the conventional election wisdom. George W. Bush had left Philadelphia with a 25-point advantage. A week after the Democrats scattered from Los Angeles, Al Gore had moved ahead, and the vice president seemed finally to have reaped the incumbent's expected advantage from peace and prosperity.

	Taking Up Residence / Once the polls narrowed after the conventions, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought for every patch of ground in the big tossup states. By election day, they had visited Pennsylvania so often, they could have picked up their mail here. In this picture, Bush gestures during a rally at Pittsburgh International Airport. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

The wheel would turn again and more than once, but for the moment, Gore was riding high.

The Bush campaign, which had seemed more adept at controlling the issue and media agenda through the spring and summer, suddenly seemed to be flailing.

A cosmetic change mirrored Bush's response to the McCain threat in February. In the face of rising Gore numbers, the Bush campaign coined a new slogan and hoisted a new banner at its rallies.

Bush had moved decisively in South Carolina to co-opt McCain's calls for reform with the newly minted slogan "A Reformer With Results." Now, the Republican countered Gore's claim to be a politician offering policy specifics, not vague promises, with "Real Plans for Real People."

In a reversal of roles, Bush seemed to be reacting to Gore.

The Democrat called for a prescription drug benefit tied to Medicare. Bush said he, too, would come up with a prescription drug plan.

Gore threw a pass at the Steelers' South Side training facility, and the picture spread through the media. A short time later, Bush threw a pass with the Packers in Green Bay, Wis.

Bush finally unveiled his prescription plan in Allentown, Pa. The site was no surprise. The candidates were regular commuters to Pennsylvania, criss-crossing the state almost weekly.

As the fall campaign began, Gore's lead in New York seemed unassailable. Bush, for obvious reasons, could count on Texas. Gore's campaign assumed Democrats would win California, an assertion the Bush forces dismissed until the end.

Gore insisted Florida would be in play. The Bush side at first figured the Democrats were deluding themselves since Gov. Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother, presided over the state. They belatedly recognized the threat was real.

That left Pennsylvania as the largest state deemed up for grabs by both campaigns throughout the fall.

Those perceptions were reflected in how the campaigns spent their money.

Pennsylvania was the target of more television ads than any other state. According to one analysis, the Gore team spent $15.4 million in Pennsylvania and Bush and his allies, $12.8 million. Florida stations got the second most money: $14.5 million for Bush and $10.1 million for Gore.

	No Picnic in the Park / Al Gore greets supporters on labor day at point state park. Looking relaxed, he was working the crowd -- hard. Over his head, political ads were flying along the airwaves; he and Bush spent more on TV ads in Pennsylvania than in any other state. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

Bush placed a big bet on California -- a total of $10.8 million, the third largest ad commitment for the Republican. Gore, however, remained confident of prevailing there and spent only $127,000. He won it 54 percent to 42 percent.

Professor Kenneth Goldstein, of the University of Wisconsin, identified Bush's fruitless California effort as one of the big "what-ifs" in the election.

"Bush's massive spending in California ... erased his advertising advantage over Gore in other important states," Goldstein said. "As a result, the vice president was able to outspend Gov. Bush in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington and in New Mexico -- all states that Bush lost by tiny margins."

Turning the second-guessing toward the Democrats, Goldstein points out that Gore allowed himself to be outspent in his home state of Tennessee even though late polls showed him trailing there. If he had held the state he had represented in the Senate, Gore would have managed an Electoral College majority without Florida.

But as the decisions that produced those spending totals evolved, those calculations were still over the horizon.

The debates

One thing that contributed to Bush's early September malaise was the debate on debates, a staple of presidential campaigns.

Hoping to steal a march on the tactical issue, the Bush campaign released a challenge on the last day of the Democratic convention calling for five debates in a variety of formats. The subtext was that Bush wanted at least some of the debates to take place outside of the traditional venues supervised by the bipartisan debate commission. Bush proposed settings like the Sunday talk shows.

Gore had said he would debate Bush, "any time, anywhere," so the Bush forces calculated that if he did not accept their proposal, the vice president would be seen as going back on his word. But Gore said he'd be happy to debate Bush in just about any setting -- but only in addition to, not instead of, the three commission debates. Gore suggested Bush was trying to engineer less visible debates, implying that his rival was afraid of appearing with him.

	Who's Chicken? / Green Party candidate Ralph Nader flaunts rubber poultry to suggest that George W. Bush and Al Gore were afraid to debate him. Nader's candidacy ended up costing Gore the election. (Chris Kleponis, Associated Press)

Gore got the best of the argument. The public perception was that Bush was ducking, and the Republican camp was forced to blink. The three debates were on.

The debate debate was a clear setback for Bush. But it may have paid serendipitous dividends down the road. The episode reinforced the notion that Gore was supposed to be a far better debater, lowering expectations for Bush's performance.

Cynics might suggest this was the GOP plan, but that is unlikely. It would have taken politicians with the nerves of a jewel thief to play out such a ploy while watching their poll numbers erode by the day.

The Bush campaign seemed to find its stride again as September neared its close. The governor got good reviews marketing his personality on the TV interview and talk shows. On "Regis," he flattered his host by aping Philbin's trademark tone-on-tone shirt and tie ensemble.

Then came the debates. They were expected to be Gore's not-so-secret weapon. But they received record low ratings and didn't, according to the polls, change many minds.

Rather than allowing Gore to surge, the first debate produced a major stumbling block. In one of several such asides, Gore noted that he had viewed wild fires in Texas with James Lee Witt, head of the federal emergency agency. Gore was mistaken. He had been briefed on the Texas fires, but not by Witt. He had visited a similar disaster scene with Witt, but not in Texas.

This was hardly the stuff of Watergate, but it lent critical mass to the sniping at Gore's veracity that had been a constant of the Bush campaign. Gore's accounts of fund raising in the 1996 campaign had been a nagging source of questions. Going back to the time he served in Congress, Gore had occasionally been accused of the kind of stump speech hyperbole not uncommon among politicians. The Witt anecdote allowed the Bush team to bring those threads together.

It was not a fatal blow, but for a while Gore had to fend off Bush claims that he was "a serial exaggerator," rather than projecting his own message.

Many viewers also seemed to be put off by Gore's aggressive approach to the first debate -- a performance that was fodder for the first of a series of devastating parodies on "Saturday Night Live."

Bush's performance through the three encounters could not be described as dazzling. His standard stump speech contained a passage bemoaning "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in the nation's schools. In the debates, low expectations were positively liberating for Bush. He got through them unscathed, and given the political handicapping, that was enough to beat the point spread.

But it wasn't enough to win the game. Bush edged ahead in most post-debate polls, but in this general election campaign, neither candidate could hold a lead for long.

Down to the wire

In the final days, Bush's poll numbers held modestly ahead of Gore's, but many key states were too close to call. And Bush's late momentum was blunted by two out-of-the-blue developments.

In the last week of the campaign came the gaffe that the Gore campaign had anticipated. At a rally, Bush said dismissively that Democrats acted "as though Social Security was a federal program."

Of course, it is. And the Gore campaign wasted no time reminding voters in quickly produced TV ads aired in battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Then, five days before the election, came news that Bush, more than two decades earlier, had been convicted of drunken driving. One mystery of the campaign is why the Bush forces didn't release that information months earlier, defusing its potential as an October surprise. While the revelation dominated news coverage of Bush for two crucial days, polls showed it did relatively little to hurt Bush with the public. Still, in an election this close, any damage could be crucial.

Gore, casting around for some key to the voters' allegiance, spent the last 10 days bounding from issue to issue, giving speeches on the new economy, targeted tax cuts, health care, Social Security and the environment.

The Bush campaign also scattered its message. By this point, his Austin braintrust had worked its way through at least five campaign slogans: "Compassionate Conservative," "A Reformer With Results," "Leave No Child Behind," "Prosperity With a Purpose," and "Real Plans for Real People."

Bush didn't let the DUI and Social Security stumbles deter him from projecting an air of confidence in the final days of the campaign -- or what everyone assumed would be the final days. He alternately attacked Gore and the Clinton administration and promised to bring a new era of leadership and civility to Washington.

"In three days, help is on the way," he told a screaming crowd at Pittsburgh International Airport on the Saturday before Election Day.

"It's going down to the wire," Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum predicted as he left the event, heading to Bush's leased 757.

The same day, during his last appearance in Pittsburgh, Gore focused on two core elements of the traditional Democratic coalition. He appeared first at a black church in the Hill District, seeking the big African-American turnout that would end up breaking 9-to-1 in his favor, helping him carry several important states. Then he headed across the Monongahela to a union rally, where he denounced Bush as a lackey of special interests.

Mocking his rival, Gore recounted, "He said, 'What do they think Social Security is, some kind of federal program?'

"Yea -- and it's a damn good one," Gore thundered to the delight of the crowd that stretched toward the river bank.

Bush left Pittsburgh for some last hours of barnstorming through Florida and other states.

Gore headed for the Sunshine State, too, holding a final rally in Tampa at 4 a.m. on Election Day. He predicted, as he had for some time, that the contest was so close that the winner might not be known until the next morning.

Meanwhile, the Voter News Service was making final preparations to conduct the exit polls on which the networks would base their Election Night projections. As the balloting loomed, VNS mailed out token gifts to its subscribers with a note: "HERE'S TO A STRESS-FREE ELECTION NIGHT."

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