August 9, 2000

The real interest of a Veep nominee is the political strategy of the choice, and what it says about about the prez nominee who picks him.  In picking Dick Cheney, GW Bush showed that his "different kind of Republican" is really the same old Republican, but with a smile.  Cheney embodies Gingrich policies without Newt's personal obnoxiousness factor.  The other thing Bush did, of course, was fall back on Poppy's board of directors.  As political strategy, Cheney is a flatliner.

In contrast, by picking Joe Lieberman, Gore has in one stroke thrown both the Republicans and the Beltway media totally off their game plan.  The GOP convention made it painfully clear that the Bush campaign has one and only one message:  No oral sex in the Oval Office.   (A little blow, maybe, but no jobs.)  This, as it happens, has also been practically the only message of the Beltway pundits.  Both have spent the last two years -- ever since Lieberman chewed out Bill Clinton from the Senate floor -- making him the poster boy of probity.  Now that he's on the ticket with Gore, this puts GOPers and pundits in an awkward spot. 

Let's take the pundits first, to get 'em out of the way.   They've been saying for months that Gore has to "distance" himself from Bill Clinton, and praising Joe Lieberman to the skies for even longer.  None of them evidently thought that Gore would have the nerve to actually pick Lieberman -- and now that he has, what can they do but give him rave reviews for doing it?  Which is exactly what they've been doing.  No other choice, this side of Colin Powell, could have bought Gore the positive spin and saturation air time he's gotten. 

Now to the Republicans.  They too have spent months praising Lieberman, so they can hardly trash him now.  Wisely (for the moment) they haven't tried.  They've settled for finding an handful of issues on which Lieberman has at times strayed from the Democratic reservation, and pumped those up into a claim that he's "closer" to Bush than to Gore on issues.  California and Siberia are also pretty close, as viewed from Alpha Centauri.  Minimum wage?  Environmental issues?  On these issues and almost all others, you'd have to travel through hyperspace to get from Lieberman's positions to Bush's.  (And, note to the Bushters: straying off a party reservation is a plus with independents.)

For all their brave talk, the Bush team is obviously discombobulated by the Lieberman pick.  How can they run against Bill Clinton, as they obviously intended to do, when Clinton isn't on the ballot and Joe Lieberman is?  A couple of GOP consultant types were on CNN today, claiming that, oh yes, they could still run against Clinton -- running ads with his chew-out speech side by side with Gore's "one of the greatest presidents" speech on Impeachment Day.

Please, Republicans, throw Al 'n' Joe in dat dere briar patch!

Think back to the Republican convention, if you can bear to.  The subtext was all Monica all the time -- but the operative word is "sub."  Dick Cheney got thunderous applause for even the vaguest of anti-Clinton allusions. The I-word was never once heard, and the House Managers were locked up in a broom closet for the duration.   For all this there is a reason. 

The year that stretched from Monica's public debut to the impeachment trial was not fun or uplifting for the American public.  Their understandable annoyance now falls most heavily on Bill Clinton, for the simple reason that he is the sole survivor.  Newt is long gone.  Poor Bob Livingston was gone before he ever arrived.  The House Managers have been kept in that broom closet not just for the Republican Convention, but for the last year and a half.  They are let out on furlough only to visit the right-wing rubber chicken circuit -- safely below the media radar.  And when it comes to the American public, not noted for its long attention span, out of sight really is out of mind.

But what happens when the Republicans, no longer able to Clinton-bash in the weasel-worded way they did at the convention, have to fall back on doing it openly?   It will be like giving an alcoholic a bottle of gin.  One sip and they'll chug that sucker down -- they just can't help themselves.  If we've learned anything from the last eight years, it is that right-wingers lose all self control when it comes to Bill Clinton.  Oh, yes; we've learned one other thing: when they do, the public doesn't like it.

Soooo ... what can we expect for the remainder of the campaign season?

On past performance, Bush plays best when the intensity is low -- whereas Gore only plays well when the intensity is high (and is absolutely terrible when the intensity is low).  All of last year, when the intensity was the temperature of Pluto in winter, Bush cruised about 15 percentage points ahead of Gore in the polls. Once the primaries got into gear, Bush started to slip and Gore started to come up; the lines were just crossing in early March. Then -- pfft -- the intensity went right out of the campaign. Thanks to our bizarre campaign calendar, with that enormous hiatus between the primaries and the general election, Bush was able to go back into genial backslapper mode, while Gore fell back into his awful off-season mode.

What's interesting, though, is that Bush never regained his 1999 lead, or anything near it. All in all his summer lead averaged about 5 points. Coming off the GOP convention, it spiked up to about 14-17 points -- not so much because of the convention itself as because by definition Bush owned the airwaves for a couple of weeks.  As soon as Gore captured the media attention, which he did with Lieberman, the Bush bounce instantly evaporated.  The two latest polls have the race down to 2-3 points, and that's before the Democratic convention.

And after that, the intensity will pick up steadily. Gore can be expected to improve under intensity, as he has in the past.  Bush? We'll see how he stands up under intensity, and whether he does better at it than he did in the primaries.

I see one of two basic scenarios: New Hampshire or South Carolina. If the campaign goes the New Hampshire route, with Bush staying genial and vague, he could be in for the same rude shock he got last February. And if it goes the South Carolina route? Well, that worked for Bush ... in South Carolina. But in the national level, with the focus on those industrial swing states?  If the campaign gets down 'n' dirty (brace yourselves: it probably will), Bush is in trouble -- he will simply remind swing voters of everything that annoyed them about the GOP during the Year of Monica.

Oh, yes, a little side note:

You may have noticed (or, more precisely, not noticed) something that was as invisible at the GOP convention as the House Managers -- namely, any hint of who will make up Bush's domestic policy team, especially his economic team.   Bush trots his foreign policy team every chance he gets, even to naming one as his running mate.  Unsurprisingly so, because it's essentially his father's foreign policy team and, scored his father's one Big Success.  But don't hold your breath waiting for GW to bring out the likes of Dick Darman.  The less said about Bush the Elder's economic policy the better.

-- Rick Robinson

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Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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