Baby Bills

Gore wants to be seen as the rightful inheritor of Clinton's legacy. But it's Bush who reminds voters of Clinton's easygoing affability -- and Gore who conjures up the dark side.

by Dan Kennedy

LOS ANGELES -- Never mind that Bill Clinton is still very much with us, and delivered a characteristically bravura valedictory speech on Monday night. It's not the flesh-and-blood Clinton that Al Gore has to worry about. Rather, it is the legacy of Clinton -- a legacy that has brought Gore to the brink of the presidency, yet that in the end may prove an insurmountable obstacle.

There is a sense of foreboding in this stretched-out megalopolis of swaying palm trees and sculpted bodies, of monumental traffic jams and endless freeways. The Democratic National Convention is being held here for the first time since 1960, when the party nominated John F. Kennedy. But any hope that the JFK connection would be a good-luck charm evaporated the first evening of the convention. That's when the goon squad known as the Los Angeles Police Department fired rubber bullets after the crowd got rowdy at a Rage Against the Machine concert, held in the protest zone outside the Staples Center. The sickening televised images of a mounted cop leaning over with his nightstick to beat a woman who'd been stripped down to her bra looked a lot more like Chicago '68 than LA '60.

For the delegates and party officials who are here in the hopes of backing a winner, though, the protesters are only a passing concern. Much more troubling is the fact that Gore -- who, by all reason, should be seen as the inheritor of eight years of Clinton-era peace and prosperity -- can't seem to ignite his campaign against Republican George W. Bush.

Much of the blame has focused on Clinton and his overweening refusal to walk away from the spotlight. To borrow an old line, Clinton has a compulsive need to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. And there's no question that Clinton's presence has made it damn hard for Gore to emerge from his partner's shadow. During Clinton's speech, the president did everything but get down on his knees and beg people to vote for the Gore-Joe Lieberman ticket. Yet afterward, at a late-night party of media types hosted by Mickey (KausFiles.com) Kaus near the Santa Monica oceanfront, over beer and tamale pie, the talk was of how Clinton hadn't done enough -- hadn't been specific, hadn't pointed to a single instance when he had been wrong and Gore had ridden in to save the day.

A fair observation? Perhaps. What's missing, though, is an analysis of exactly how Clinton has changed the American political landscape, and what that means to Gore.

Observers readily acknowledge that Clinton remade the Democratic Party -- that he curbed its liberal excesses, made peace with Wall Street, and turned it once again into a force that could win the White House. But Clinton didn't just transform his own party; he forced deep changes in the Republican Party as well. In fact, despite -- and, to a large extent, because of -- his many and well-documented flaws, Clinton leaves office as a towering figure whose legacy will overshadow not just this presidential election, but possibly several more to come.

Simply put, by moving the Democratic Party to the center, Clinton restored the Democrats' electoral prospects, but he also gave the Republicans an enormous opportunity -- an opportunity that Bush, clever lad that he is, readily exploited. For if Clinton's Democratic Party has evolved into a more socially tolerant version of the GOP, Bush's Republican Party -- at least in the vision he put forth at the party's convention in Philadelphia two weeks ago -- has emerged from the shadows of right-wing kookdom to be seen as a more personally responsible version of the Democratic Party.

Thus two inheritors of the Clinton legacy are running for president this year. By fuzzing up the issues, Bush has managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible trick of turning himself into the "good Clinton" even while shaking his head, oh so sorrowfully, at Clinton's moral and ethical shortcomings. Indeed, Bush has the qualities that people still like about Clinton: his breezy affability, his inclusive rhetoric, his sunny disposition.

Gore, on the other hand, has had thrust upon him the mantle of Clinton's dark side -- not the sex scandals, of course, but the questions of financial impropriety, the shading of the truth, and the no-holds-barred attacks on opponents.

Boiling the race down to a matter of personalities, the good Clinton versus the bad Clinton, requires ignoring the vital differences that separate the Democrats from the Republicans -- including reproductive choice, gay and lesbian rights, the environment, gun control, health care, and tax cuts. So it's not surprising that Democrats are desperately trying to refocus the race on issues where they are in the mainstream and the Republicans are not.

"There's just no question in my mind that once people start paying attention, the American people will start seeing the differences so clearly," Jean Nelson, a top aide to Tipper Gore, told me this week. "I think you're going to see a big turnaround."

Maybe. But if the vast majority of Americans who pay only passing attention to politics continue to see this as a race between two moderates with largely similar views, there's no question who's going to win. And it's not going to be the guy who's stood loyally by the president's side for the past eight years.

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.