The Politics of Bifurcation

...And it suggests why, in one of the campaign's biggest surprises, the only pro-change issue that has gained traction for any candidate is a pure "process" issue widely expected to be marginal: campaign finance reform...

...The positive Republican candidates admired for their prowess in high-dollar fund-raising have repeatedly underperformed once exposed to voters...

...Since early 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, a solid majority of voters have expressed personal disapproval of Clinton, while a solid majority of those same voters have continued to give the president high job approval ratings...

...But when they asked voters to reprise the 1992 election between Clinton and President George Bush, Bush was strongly preferred...

...Also bucking the odds were candidates with well-defined ideological agendas different from Clinton's...

...That should not be too much for voters to ask...

...But a McCain campaign without a reform theme would not have posed a serious challenge to Gov...

...But Bush took a huge lead in polls of rank-and-file voters before he had raised his first dollar or secured more than a handful of endorsements...

...Vice President Al Gore led all comers in presidential polls throughout 1997, but abruptly lost his lead at the beginning of the Lewinsky scandal, and has never regained it...

...But the expected reconvergence of Clinton's ratings hasn't happened—with direct consequences for his designated heir...

...But 1998, of course, was the year of Monica, and marked the beginning of the Clinton bifurcation...

...Asking voters to reassess the 1992 election, it would seem, is the equivalent of asking them whether Clinton should have been elevated to the presidency in the first place...

...To achieve his standing as the Republican front-runner— whether measured by national polls, funds raised, or endorsements—the governor of Texas also had to rewrite a rule or two...

...Meanwhile, that same mounting evidence fed the growing revulsion against Clinton the man, prompting the voters, even as they resisted impeachment, to elevate in the polls a politician to whom they had had little direct exposure, but whose name happened to be George Bush...

...The answer, for a majority, is no...

...economic and social developments associated with Clinton's policies may have discredited these challengers in a way that never happened to the experienced Republicans who invariably dominated the competition in previous presidential cycles...

...To make the most of these chances, Republicans—those running for Congress as well as the national ticket—should unite behind a serious plan to clean up the campaign finance system...

...McCain's determination to clean up politics probably would not have looked credible without his personal story, but it is unlikely that his courage as a prisoner of war, by itself, would have cut any ice with an electorate obsessed with resolving its ambivalence about the Clinton era...

...It is the stubborn persistence of the public's conflicted view of the Clinton presidency that explains why this has been a miserable year for broad ideological agendas, whether of the right or left...

...This description fit Bush, McCain, and Elizabeth Dole (who had a high favorable rating and matched up well against the Democrats in national polls even on the day she withdrew from the race...

...It is said that in the midst of a national desire to "take a shower"—clean up the government—Bush, by means of his awesome fund-raising and countless endorsements, inadvertently made himself the establishment candidate...

...Bush...

...Bush's biggest mistake was probably much more straightforward: He made himself look like an implacable opponent of McCain's central proposal, campaign finance reform...

...The 1988 nominee, George Herbert Walker Bush, had run twice for vice president and once for president...

...Assuming the basic hypothesis is true, where did George W. Bush go wrong...

...This was true of two earlier Texans, John Connally in 1980 and Phil Gramm in 1996...

...At the end of that year, when national pollsters asked voters to revisit the 1996 election between Clinton and Bob Dole, Clinton still won handily...

...This reluctance to abandon Clinton's policies undoubtedly helps explain why impeachment remained unpopular, no matter how much evidence piled up against the president...

...BY JEFFREY BELL The 2000 presidential campaign is surprising analysts by breaking the seemingly ironclad rules of the game, and many of its oddities are traceable to one pervasive fact: The American people hold a bifurcated view of the Clinton presidency...

...Contenders with prior experience as national candidates— especially those who had run in 1996 as (in effect) advocates of Clinton's ouster (Buchanan, Alexander, and Forbes)—failed to achieve the traction such battle-tested candidates had in earlier Republican races...

...Jeffrey Bell was senior consultant to Bauer for President 2000 and is president of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, an economic and financial forecastingfirm...

...Bush has also been excoriated for the opposite: "moving to the right" to scoop up socially conservative voters and win the South Carolina primary...

...After the Senate acquitted Bill Clinton, it was reasonable to expect that the president's job approval and personal approval would reconverge...

...And the 1996 nominee, Bob Dole, had run once for vice president and twice for president...

...It also fit Bradley, until he began outlining his policy differences with Clinton-Gore...

...Again and again, Republican presidential candidates admired for their prowess in high-dollar fund-raising have underperformed once exposed to the voters...

...But each failed to get traction in the polls and in early ballot tests...

...The hypothesis, if true, also sheds light on a number of features of the subsequent 2000 election cycle...

...In contrast, asking voters to reprise the Clinton-Dole election is the equivalent of asking whether the Clinton policies, once launched, should have been abandoned...

...Once Bush lost to McCain in three early primaries, it became tempting to write off his prior status as odds-on favorite as the product of flawed judgment on the part of GOP financial and political elites...

...Not only does the system as it has developed, with its strict limits on personal contributions and increasing dominance by huge blocs of "soft money," patently favor incumbents and entrenched special interests—but it is bound up with what is least appetizing in the Clinton-Gore era...

...Beginning in 1968, every "open" Republican presidential nomination has been won by a previous national candidate...

...Each of these men emerged as the front-runner early in the selection process, suffered a decline in the polls, and recovered to achieve the GOP presidential nomination...

...It is the barrier that shields Al Gore from his Buddhist temple...

...Those elites' judgment may or may not have been flawed...

...It is this earlier, comparatively nonideological, phase that saw Bradley's huge, unexpected rise in polls of Democratic primary voters...

...This anomaly has remained in place through the president's impeachment by the House in December 1998, his acquittal by the Senate in February 1999, and the year of presidential politics since then...

...He went so far as to imply that reform would not be in the interest of the Republican party...

...By contrast, Bush, who had never previously sought national office, took a huge lead among GOP voters during 1998 and has never relinquished it...

...Now for some second-guessing...

...McCain's bravery as a prisoner of war in Hanoi was a big reason for his rise...

...Equally surprising, most of his rise in the national polls came in 1998, when he was seeking reelection as governor and, by his own choice, received virtually no national media coverage...

...How could this natural beneficiary of the voters' dual sympathies—inclining them both to punish Clinton, and to refrain from disrupting his successful policies— find himself in such jeopardy on the eve of the March mega-primaries...

...Perhaps there is something about talking to GOP financial elites that makes it harder to talk to Joe Six-pack...

...Three of these men had strong showings in the presidential primaries of the 1990s, and the fourth, Quayle, had been nominated twice and elected once as vice president...

...In 1980, Ronald Reagan had two previous unsuccessful tries for the nomination behind him...

...The public's bifurcated view of Clinton has made it a tough year for reviving the Reagan coalition, or making much progress toward a post-Cold War redefinition of conservatism, desirable as those aims are...

...All but Forbes were forced out of the race in the wake of the August 1999 Iowa straw poll...

...The stunning rise of John McCain, riding an issue virtually no consultant thought would cut any ice in a Republican primary, has made it easy to forget that the emergence of the other leading Republican candidate, George W. Bush, was once almost equally surprising...

...But it also affected Bill Bradley, whose campaign began to decline as soon as he defined his candidacy in terms of such liberal "big ideas" as universal health care and universal handgun registration...

...The truth is that voters have become profoundly suspicious of political fund-raising...

...This critique has some obvious merit...

...The candidates with national races under their belts were Dan Quayle, Lamar Alexander, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Forbes...

...The 1968 nominee, Richard Nixon, had run twice for vice president and once for president...

...This was true of conservatives like Steve Forbes and the candidate I worked for, Gary Bauer...

...The advantage, instead, has gone to first-time candidates with a good name or an interesting biography who were not seen as militant critics of existing policies...

...It explains the electorate's unusual focus on personal rectitude and character...

...In the 2000 Republican race, all that changed...

...But without the bifurcation, the Republicans would have far less chance than they do of retaking the White House, given the positive economic and social trends over which Bill Clinton and Al Gore preside...

...The only other Republicans who ever did well in national polling were Elizabeth Dole and McCain, marquee names in their own right but, like Bush, new to national candidacy...

...But in retrospect, what sane adviser would have told Bush not to parlay his huge lead in the polls in 1998 into a huge war chest in 1999, or not to try to rally the party's conservative voters, once John McCain's appeal to moderates and independents had become plain...

...In a year when fundamental policy questions are off the table, Republican opposition to fixing the campaign finance system is the central barrier to the party's benefiting from the voters' bifurcated view of Clinton...

...It also seemed likely that his popularity would come to rest at a fairly high level, given the persistence of the encouraging national trends—low unemployment, high stock prices, budget surpluses, and sharply declining rates of welfare dependency and violent crime—that had given Clinton his high job approval in the first place...

...The answer to that question also is no, since a majority of voters associate the president's policies with the favorable economic and social trends...