Al Gore's Game Plan

...Ask Gore's backers whether Texas is an issue, and they'll reply, "Boy, is Texas an issue...

...But today, the election is about Bush's embrace of racially atavistic Bob Jones University, and the misleading ads bankrolled by political crony sam Wyly—who, thanks to Bush, enjoys usufruct of Texas's pension investments...

...Bush's Texas is as exotic and unsettling to most Americans as Dukakis's Massachusetts was in 1988...

...That could undo him in the swing states stretching from Illinois across Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to New Jersey...

...Gore is an overrated debater...

...The Gore campaign is working on the assumption that this election combines elements of both 1988 and 1996...

...Out of these considerations is emerging a clear Gore strategy for making short work of Bush...

...some even think an early barrage can wrap up the race by convention time (a la 1996...

...3. Heighten personal comparisons...

...The present political configuration leaves the Gore camp cocky...

...Bush has yoked himself to the most distrusted group in American politics, the southern Christian right...

...It's 1996 in that Democrats can run on peace and (mind-boggling) prosperity against a party undergoing an identity crisis...

...They are not worried that Bush will try to parry their "Pat Robertson Republican" message with symmetrical attacks on Al Sharpton, assuming, perhaps correctly, that a southern Republican treads on racial turf at his political peril...

...Gore has belittled every Republican tax-cut proposal of the last five years as a "risky tax scheme...

...Aside from that, they're stuck with what they raise until each gets a federal infusion of $67 million after the parties' summer conventions...

...He ran circles around Ross Perot in 1993 and Jack Kemp in 1996, but was bested by Dan Quayle in 1992...

...Gore's advisers see Bush as particularly vulnerable to issue-based attack ads (a la 1988...

...That is the game plan, but at root, Gore's team doesn't think it has to do much...

...Either way, a huge bloc of voters has come unmoored, and must be wooed in new ways...

...now's the best time for Gore to define him for the general electorate...

...The Lewinsky baggage is easily enough shed...

...Gore's people plan to pressure Bush to back a release of oil reserves that would drive down prices and help the country at the expense of Texas...

...The coming weeks could see a crisis in Taiwan, a market crash, a new Clinton money scandal—who knows...

...Until Bush finds a way to respond, he loses...

...Only $6 million remains of Bush's once-Croesian war chest...

...It may be the route to a new marginality (as Eugene McCarthy's and Robert Kennedy's candidacies were for Democrats in 1968...

...The barefoot and brain-damaged kids of the Rio Grande, the encephalitis kids, smog floating over the state . . ." Since education is the only domestic issue Bush feels genuinely comfortable talking about, one can expect the Gore campaign to promise New Jerseyites and Missourians that a vote for Bush will allow their children to be taught creationism like a real Texan, etc...

...If Bush is lucky, this election will resemble not 1988 or 1996, but 1992...

...What makes Texas an even bigger liability than Massachusetts is oil...

...It may harm him even in the southern border states of Missouri and Kentucky...

...Gore is down to $4 million, awaiting $7 million more in matching funds...

...Wyly has also helped drive out of the papers the recent campaign finance conviction of Gore's China-linked fund-raiser Maria Hsia...

...Bush complained that he let himself "get defined" during the primaries...

...There's a glimmer of hope for George W. Bush...

...Nonetheless, his advisers are right to see the gravitas gap between the two candidates as wide enough to make Bush an even harder sell than he already is...

...Gore expects Bush to persist in the almost universal Republican delusion that a bad Democratic campaign-finance-reform plan can be defeated by a non-existent Republican one...

...It's like an advanced Mexico City...

...Exit polls showed that the entire increment in this winter's record Republican primary turnout was due to the McCain candidacy, and 35 percent of "McCainiacs" (41 percent in Virginia) say they plan to vote for Gore in the fall...

...There is a recent presidential race in which the party that held the White House went into a general election campaign with the same hubristic overconfidence Gore now exhibits, the same unwarranted smugness, the same electorate-repelling cockiness—and wound up absolutely stunned when the voters repudiated it on Election Day...

...By sewing up their respective nominations in the first days of March, vice president Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush have booked themselves the longest general election campaign in American history...

...McCain's uprising may promise an eventual new majority (as Reagan's candidacy did in 1976...

...The one blunder of the primary season that truly haunts Gore's advis-ers—his suggestion that top Pentagon officials be vetted for their attitudes towards gays in the military—will hurt him if Bush raises it in ads...

...If Gore responded to a mild criticism by deploring adultery in general and Clinton's in particular, what part of the Clinton years would Bush's team then be able to "wrap around him...

...If Gore can hold on to a third of those McCain voters, this race is already over...

...Nor does it matter that such a moratorium is constitutionally unenforceable...

...Wyly taints him as a southern back-scratching pol of a decidedly Clintonesque variety...

...That's why Gore's campaign will stage events as often as possible to highlight the candidate's similarity to (and Bush's difference from) McCain...

...he clearly doesn't think that rhetoric is failing...

...Not only Texas's culture but also its economic interests are at odds with most other states...

...Gore's offer to debate Bush twice weekly and forgo soft money may be a "stunt," but so were the Lindbergh flight and the moon landing...

...The precipitous drop in crime rates...

...Issues are more propitious for Gore than they're likely to be again...

...Not without reason...

...Here are its elements: 1. Start the general election immediately...

...It's 1988 in that it pits a two-term vice president from a successful administration against a governor who's earned his stripes in a state easily cast as outside the American mainstream...

...Much as Republicans might like it, there will be no breather...

...It would allow him to appear again and again in close proximity to his considerably less verbal rival...

...Bush is being driven hard to the center by a revolt against his own Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...At any rate, Gore has been considerably more circumspect than either Bill Bradley or Hillary Clinton about appearing in public with Sharpton, and went to great pains to keep from being photographed when the two met privately weeks ago...

...Gore spent the first hours after his super Tuesday victories noting that he favored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill (as did Senate Democrats, 45-0), and that Bush opposed it (as did senate Republicans, 7-45...

...party's fealty to special interests monied and moral, and hard to the right by fear of a Pat Buchanan Reform candidacy that could chip away at the pro-life voters who have for decades been the most solid part of the Republican base...

...Even Gore's very worst liabilities, the thinking goes, can be defused if the candidates are kept in close proximity...

...It's eight months until November, and the candidates have already spent most of their money...

...In half the black section of Houston, the streets aren't even paved...

...For Gore, the real payoff of the debates-and-money-bans deal lies elsewhere...

...2. Cast Bush as the anti-McCain...

...Gore realizes this more than Bush does...

...Nor is there much worry that Bush will "wrap Bill Clinton around" Gore...

...Given the clout of liberal trial lawyers, there is little advantage for Democrats in giving up soft money...

...Bob Jones taints Bush as a "Pat Robertson Republican...

...Outside of the South, wherever voters have gotten to know Bush, his majorities have eroded...

...The economic boom that Gore helped preside over and George Bush proposes to tinker with...

...4. Mess with Texas...

...In debates, Gore can swiftly shift the focus to his own military experience and Bush's lack thereof...