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 tortilla 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.

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."

IT'S NOT hard to see why the Gore campaign hoped it could find magic by choosing LA. Unlike the First Union Center, the concrete tomb on the outskirts of Philadelphia where the Republicans held their convention two weeks ago, the Staples Center is located in the heart of LA's downtown. The adjective "glittering" is not inappropriate. The best feature is a huge courtyard with palm trees and, this week at least, dancing balloon figures, food stands, and free concerts. And though the Democrats have tried to keep the protesters away, let the record show that one reggae band dedicated its final song to celebrity cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Try doing that at a Republican convention.

Thus far, the convention has focused like a laser beam on the proposition that the presidential contest should be about issues, not personalities. As veteran political journalist Elizabeth Drew noted this week on Voter.com, "The Republicans are running against Clinton's personal approval ratings, which are low, and the Gore campaign is trying to get the contest on the level of the job-approval ratings, which are high." The result has been a relentless - and, to my eye, reasonably effective - assault on the recently concluded Republican convention, with its inclusive rhetoric, troglodytic platform, and willful attempt to gloss over real differences on the issues.

Sure, parts of the Democrats' response have been as boneheadedly dumb as anything the Republicans came up with, especially Monday's Oprah-like panel shows featuring former welfare mothers, beneficiaries of the family-leave law, and victims of gun violence. After one particularly sappy video about an ex-welfare mother named Mary, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu chirped, "Aren't we all so proud of Mary? From Shreveport, Louisiana, she's one of a kind. But she's not alone." I would like to have hurled.

But much of the convention has involved old-fashioned substance - that is, speeches by important, recognizable Democrats, starting with Hillary Clinton's well-written (though robotically delivered) talk, followed by Bill Clinton's masterful performance and, the following evening, rave-ups by the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Senator Ted Kennedy that were right out of the pre-television era. Kennedy's was entertainingly archaic; even his voice sounded thin and tinny, as if it had been pulled off one of those CDs of historic speeches. "Fight for Al Gore because he is fighting for you!" he bellowed, chopping his arms in the air and looking for all the world like his grandfather, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, in one of those daguerreotypes from the early 1900s. He was followed by Bill Bradley, who - contrary to expectations - did not let the air out of the room but actually delivered a passionate performance. And unlike John McCain, who acted like a neutered lap dog when he spoke at the Republican convention, Bradley was not afraid to bring up campaign-finance reform - the issue that Gore, despite his rancid personal history, says he will make his first priority if he's elected.

For my money, though, the most effective speech of Tuesday night was by Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay-rights group. The party had already signaled its commitment to equality for gays and lesbians with Melissa Etheridge's performance the evening before, but Birch filled in the details. And she neatly stuck the stiletto into Dick Cheney, whose daughter's lesbianism wasn't even acknowledged at the Republican convention (privacy, you see, as though it were something to be ashamed of), and who, despite having what is by all accounts a good relationship with his daughter, compiled a shockingly anti-gay voting record when he was a member of Congress. "It is not enough to love your own child," Birch said. "We must love all children and heal the family called America."

Take out the LAPD (please!), and this week has been as good a build-up as Al Gore could have hoped for. He's close in the polls, he's got a respected running mate, and the Clintons, even while indulging their narcissism, nevertheless went out of their way to acknowledge that it's his week.

But the sense of foreboding won't go away because Democrats know that Gore, even when given every advantage, remains a distant, vaguely unlikable figure. His last speech at a national convention - a floridly emotional description of his sister's death from lung cancer - turned out to be an embarrassment when it was revealed that he'd continued to take tobacco-industry money for several years after her death. Gore is supposedly writing this week's speech, the speech of his life, all by himself - news that is not likely to put any of his supporters at ease.

"I think people who are warmly disposed to Bill Clinton are more likely to be Gore supporters than Bush supporters," former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry told me. If McCurry's talking about political activists, that's undoubtedly true. But if he's talking about the vast middle of the electorate - the people who maybe watch the presidential candidates' acceptance speeches and the debates, but otherwise pay little attention - then McCurry may be whistling in the dark.

Thanks to Bill Clinton's triangulations and George W. Bush's squishy rhetoric, the Republican and Democratic Parties appear to many people to be just as much alike as Ralph Nader says they are. Gore now has to make the case, once and for all, that it's not true - that Clinton really did stand for something more than a warm smile and a strategically bitten lower lip. No doubt voters will still find Bush more likable than the slashing, pandering, truth-shaving Gore. But if Gore can convince them that he is the true inheritor of Clinton's legacy, that may be enough come November.

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