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Bush is back in the lead, as he has been for most of the past year. Blame Gore, of course - but blame the media as well.

by Dan Kennedy

Al Gore didn't lose the election during Wednesday night's debate. But his flat, tentative performance, when contrasted with George W. Bush's surprising confidence, restored to the race the basic dynamic that has been in place since the presidential campaign got under way more than a year ago: Bush ahead by a small but significant margin, with Gore having no obvious strategy for making up the difference (see "Grading Gore").

MORE DEBATE COVERAGE

Grading Gore by Robert David Sullivan Stupid Bush by Susan Ryan-Vollmar Foreign policy debacle by Seth Gitell

Seen through this lens, Gore's bounce -- which lasted from his selection of Joe Lieberman as his running mate, on August 7, through the eve of the first debate, on October 3, was an aberration. Picking the cuddly Lieberman as his running mate, sticking his tongue in Tipper's mouth, and hammering away at some populist-sounding themes worked for a while. But at the end of the day, there are simply too many voters who don't like Gore. In fact, it's Bush, with his easy affability and no-worries persona, who reminds voters of the things they like about Bill Clinton, and it's Gore, with his lies and his no-controlling-legal-authority, who conjures up Clinton's dark side (see "Baby Bills," News and Features, August 18).

Much of this is Gore's fault, of course. As just about everyone knows by now, Gore is arrogant, pedantic, and prone to untruths and exaggerations that may be no worse than those of a typical politician (you won't find a bigger whopper than Bush's assertion, in the first debate, that he's being outspent by the Gore campaign), but that are weird and disturbing in their self-aggrandizing specificity -- such as his entirely false claim to have visited a Texas disaster area with the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But the media are complicit in Gore's fade as well. Indeed, media spin has essentially cost Gore the victory he needed in both debates.

In the first, commentators -- spooked by the conflict-averse undecideds who populated the networks' focus groups -- turned an overwhelming Gore victory into something of a draw, claiming that though Gore won on debating points, Bush proved himself to be presidential (apparently by not breaking into a flop sweat when he realized he was in over his head) and, because he sniffed rather than sighed, more "likable" (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, October 6). As the week wore on, what was judged to be a narrow Gore win actually turned into a loss, as the media focused on Gore's lies, his aggressive manner, and even his orange make-up.

In the second debate, Gore was so conscious of not offending his critics in the media that he came off like someone who'd swallowed one too many Valiums just before taking his seat. And the media, having hammered him for his aggression the last time around, this time made fun of him, noting, like a broken record, that he had taken to heart a parody of him on Saturday Night Live in which he was portrayed as an obnoxious bully. Here are just a few takes on Gore's demeanor made by TV and print commentators. Newsweek's Mark Whitaker: "paralyzed." MSNBC's Brian Williams: "at minimum, self-sedated." Newsweek's Howard Fineman: "anesthetized." ABC's David Gergen: "a tabby cat . . . overhandled." CNN's Robert Novak: "Mr. Nicey-Nice." NBC's Tim Russert: "very subdued . . . kind of withdrawn." The Washington Post's Dan Balz: "walking on eggshells." The Weekly Standard's William Kristol: "Samson after the haircut."

The substance of Wednesday's debate offered plenty for Gore and Bush partisans to point to as reasons to support their candidate, but not much for undecided voters, who simply by virtue of being undecided at this late date are, well, let's face it, pretty damn disengaged. Did anyone even notice that Bush charged that the military is overextended, yet couldn't name a single place from which he would withdraw except maybe Haiti? Bush also used a right-wing code phrase -- 'special rights' -- in referring to efforts by gays and lesbians to win equal protection under the law, but he said it so reasonably that only unusually well-informed viewers would have gotten it. He effectively parried Gore's mildly worded attacks on Texas's abysmal environmental record and the state's wretched performance in providing health care to poor children and families by simply saying, well, we're trying to do better, you know?

Slate's Jacob Weisberg - who last week called Bush's disastrous first-debate performance a "Boston Massacre" -- wrote this time that Gore's "enforced self-discipline kept him from clobbering Bush on points the way he did last week . . . Gore was like a pit bull with a muzzle on, prevented from doing that for which he was bred." Thus it was not surprising that the instant polls were all Bush: 46 percent to 30 percent (ABC News); 51 percent to 48 percent (CBS News); and 49 percent to 36 percent (CNN/USA Today/Gallup).

Gore's only chance, it would seem, is to find a way to convince voters that a candidate's record is more important than good intentions. Toward the end of the debate, in discussing Texas's record of providing health care to poor children (49th in the country), Bush, all wounded indignation, replied, "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hard-hearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong." Gore's comeback: "It's not a question about his heart, as far as I know, it's a question about his values and priorities." Promising stuff, if inadequate by itself.

Afterward, The NewsHour's Mark Shields commented on Bush's penchant for taking substantive criticism personally by saying, "I think that can become an annoying characteristic over time." Maybe so. But there's not much time left, especially for Al Gore.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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