Prescription for a Comeback
BARNES, FRED
Prescription for a Comeback Can Bush use political jujitsu on Gore's favorite issue? BY FRED BARNES Austin HERE ARE TWO obvious issues that have worked famously in past Republican campaigns: gays...
...If you destroy his strong point, then you undermine the rationale of his candidacy...
...What persuaded them was the reaction of focus groups to a Bush ad that contrasts—favorably, of course—his position with Gore's on Medicare drug plans, taxes, and education...
...When we looked at it closely, we said, 'This thing stinks,'" Canfield says...
...GOP senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania produced a chart that showed ClintonCare as a Rube Goldberg scheme, vast and unworkable...
...He says the issue, if handled deftly by the Bush campaign, could be devastating for Gore...
...These issues have one thing in common: George W. Bush does not intend to use either one to undermine Al Gore and go on offense...
...Gore believes this is his most popular proposal, and polls back him up...
...If all had gone well and Bush had found himself leading Gore on Labor Day, he surely would have stuck with the five positive issues he's been touting all year...
...But Bush "just won't do it," says an aide...
...This August, the Bush campaign's policy staffers began developing a plan to modernize Medicare, including the addition of a prescription drug benefit...
...Many of these had been brought to the campaign's attention by a young Bush policy staffer named Sally Can-field...
...The fresh part of the speech was his attack on the Gore drug benefit...
...For weeks, Gore had been taunting Bush to produce the specifics of his drug benefit...
...This defies both conventional political wisdom and the thinking of congressional Republicans...
...Believing this, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been terrified by the prescription drug issue for several years...
...The test now is whether Bush will bet the ranch on this issue, as Republicans did in 1994 in defeating Clin-tonCare...
...BY FRED BARNES Austin HERE ARE TWO obvious issues that have worked famously in past Republican campaigns: gays in the military and "big spending liberal...
...When people hear the details of the plan, they start to leave [Gore] very quickly...
...To the surprise of Bush advisers, the focus groupies (mostly soft Gore supporters) thought it was a positive ad, not an attack ad...
...This simple calculation says: If it's on the table, GOP candidates lose...
...While formulating his own, less sweeping prescription drug plan in August, he found one...
...The separate RNC ad is devoted solely to the drug benefit...
...And more broadly, Gore is not offering catastrophic health care insurance, covering all medical expenses in excess of $6,000, as Bush is...
...They'd only have one chance to join up at 64 and one-half years old...
...If they can undermine Bush on the Texas record," says a Bush strategist, "they can undermine [our entire campaign...
...It turned out the devil really was in the details...
...Gore's late summer surge made that strategy untenable...
...So Bush is taking a counterintuitive approach...
...Only then might millions of swing voters react as they did against Clinton...
...They've tried to steer clear of it, even as Democrats and President Clinton pound them on the issue...
...An unanticipated but clever departure in the Bush campaign, that's what...
...They regard it as the converse of the issue Gore has targeted as most important, Bush's record as Texas governor...
...I thought the federal HMO thing would sell like hotcakes," one adviser says, and it did...
...It wasn't until after Bush's speech, outlining his own prescription drug benefit, that his campaign decided to step up the attacks on Gore's version...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Now, two TV ads aired in 17 key states, one from the Bush campaign, one from the Republican National Committee, zing Gore's proposal and extol Bush's...
...Mark McKinnon, who produces Bush's TV ads, worried that Bush would be attacking a Democratic "hill" in vain...
...So, Bush needed a hot issue...
...And if we can undermine Gore on the prescription drug benefit—since he supposedly owns the issue—then he's got a problem, a real problem...
...His main target now is Gore's prescription drug plan for Medicare patients...
...The historical precedent for all this is the Clinton health care plan that collapsed in 1994 without a vote in the House or Senate...
...Which meant Bush had to fight back...
...The more he heard about the Gore plan, Rove says, "the more it had the odor of HillaryCare, a sweet smell at the beginning but it very quickly turns bad...
...Bush's political advisers weren't instantly persuaded the drug benefit could be used against Gore...
...Much of what he said wasn't new...
...Canfield also came up with a flow chart like Specter's that shows the crazy complexity of government controls in the Clinton-Gore plan...
...In the past few weeks, Bush strategists have gradually, and with some trepidation, come to see the issue far differently...
...Canfield and the campaign policy chief, Josh Bolten, had numerous talks with Karl Rove, the chief Bush strategist, and others...
...He noted seven specific "practical problems...
...In effect, the Gore plan would put seniors in a government-run HMO...
...The Bush team watched a television ad by Republican senator Spence Abraham of Michigan, lambasting the $600 fee—an ad that has catapulted Abraham to a 12-point lead in his reelection bid...
...ClintonCare, the product of a task force headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, was extraordinarily popular at first, and Republicans feared the public would demand some version of it...
...As she worked on the ingredients for Bush's plan, she examined Gore's scheme, which is the same as Clinton's...
...A humongous problem, actually...
...It's risky, but sometimes history really does repeat itself...
...Its popularity has spooked them, its ability to cause Republican defections has weakened them...
...But he came around...
...The Supreme Court ruling on the Boy Scouts makes the gay issue exploitable again...
...The day after Labor Day, Bush announced his program in a speech in Allentown, Penn...
...They hoped, at best, to neutralize the health issue...
...He has long favored allowing Medicare recipients to get out of the government-run program and receive their benefits through private insurance firms...
...They'd have to pay $600 annually for the plan in 2008...
...The Bush camp believes Gore can't win if the Medicare issue is turned against him, and they might be right...
...So what's Bush up to...
...One of their current fears is Clinton will demand they enact a Medicare drug benefit as the price of averting a budget impasse and government shutdown...
...Then, over the winter of 1993-94, the measure was scrutinized by health care specialists and political experts...
...It cites the HMO argument...
...You know: education, Social Security, defense, taxes, and the next step in welfare reform...
...Stuart Stevens, also a Bush media consultant, concluded that Bush couldn't defeat Gore if an issue as big as health care was stacked 80-20 against him...
...The Clinton presidency fell apart and Republicans won a massive victory in the off-year elections...
...And emphasizing the word "liberal," another Bush adviser explains, spotlights "an ideological fissure that the American public isn't interested in...
...The normal view is that health care in any form is a Democratic issue that Republicans should stay away from...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 2
