Baby Bills, continued

by Dan Kennedy

The theme of a Tuesday-afternoon forum was ostensibly women's issues. But it might as well have been "Damn It, Al Gore Really Is Different from George W. Bush." Moderated by Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland, the event featured speaker after speaker who took the podium to denounce Bush and his saturnine running mate, Dick Cheney.

There was Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York, whose husband was killed and son badly injured in Colin Ferguson's infamous rampage aboard a Long Island commuter train. Proclaimed McCarthy: "Governor Bush might as well have chosen Charlton Heston as his running mate." There was Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who reminded the crowd that Democrats Franklin Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were responsible for Social Security and Medicare, as though tales of class warfare from two and three generations ago would somehow turn the tide this fall. There was Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner, who blamed Bush for Texas's worsening air pollution and said of the GOP ticket, "These are not friends of clean air and water."

The Democrats are obviously worried by Gore's inability to convince voters that the Clinton-Gore years were just that -- the Clinton-Gore years. Browner's comments, in particular, suggest that at least some Democrats believe Gore's not going to be able to claim that legacy unless the campaign goes negative -- a risky step, given the voters' alleged aversion to even the mildest nastiness this year. (Then again, "alleged" may be the right word, given that Gore blew away Bill Bradley and Bush crushed John McCain with witheringly negative campaigns.)

I asked Browner about that as she emerged from the auditorium. "What I was doing was talking about facts -- where the two men stand on important issues," she said in response to my suggestion that she seemed prepared to go negative. Of the Bush-Cheney ticket, she added, "Great, go to Philadelphia, give a speech, and use the environmental word. It doesn't work that way." Trouble is, maybe it does. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson told the crowd he's particularly worried about the Democrats' inability to excite their base of liberals and minorities. Later, when I asked him why that was happening, his answer neatly encapsulated the Democrats' dilemma: "The Republicans were successful in moderating their image and blurring the issues."

A Zogby poll released on Monday shows just how successful the Republicans have been. On the surface, the results contained good news for Gore. In one week, he had gone from 17 points behind to just three. And by a margin of 62 percent to 29 percent, respondents said the country is moving in the right direction, which presumably should bode well for the Democrats. Yet that's not how it's working out. Zogby reported that Gore is winning just 54 percent of those who believe the country is moving in the right direction, with Bush getting a startlingly high 30 percent. In contrast, Bush leads by an overwhelming 68 percent to 12 percent among those who think the country is on the wrong track. Bush has apparently been able to add a substantial minority of Clinton supporters to his rock-solid base of Clinton-haters. That's not going to be an easy combination for Gore to overcome.

It would be unfair to blame the overpowering specter of Bill Clinton for all of Gore's woes. In an odd sense, despite being able to claim at least some credit for these fat and happy times, Gore himself may be less suited to preside over prosperity than Bush. Bush is a comfortable presence; Gore is work. In Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's quirky biography of the governor, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House), Bush comes off as an easygoing, likable mediocrity who has spent a lifetime trading on his family name, and who ended up in politics almost by accident. By contrast, Bill Turque, in Inventing Al Gore (Houghton Mifflin), portrays the vice-president as a driven workaholic haunted by the memory of an overdemanding father, and as someone who abuses his staff and is entirely too impressed with his own intellectual prowess.

Maybe Gore's image suffers more than it should because of his stiff public persona, but the camera doesn't lie all the time. John Seigenthaler, Gore's editor at the Nashville Tennessean back in the early 1970s, acknowledged as much when I ran into him at a Freedom Forum event earlier this week. "I don't see what you people in the media see," Seigenthaler told me in defense of his protégé. But, he admitted, he finds it strange that a man whom he watched run ferociously effective campaigns for the House and the Senate can't seem to connect with the public on a national level. "There are some people who are easier in the skin on television," he said, "and some people who are not."

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