et me be blunt, Senator. Your heart problem has been killing your campaign. No, no, not the atrial fibrillation. Specialists say that ailment shouldn't prevent you from being president. What I'm talking about here is political heart: your willingness to let yourself be beaten by Al Gore.
Your more aggressive performance in Wednesday's debate and your tougher talk in the last few days have helped some. That new feistiness seems to have halted your slide in New Hampshire. Still, if you're to survive there Tuesday and soldier on to the all-important March 7 primaries, you've got to do better yet. That requires more than just an eleventh-hour assault on Gore's honesty. It means addressing the doubts your rival has raised about your proposals - and reminding voters of his troubling electoral liabilities.
You're supposed to be a tough, smart competitor, the Rhodes scholar who made it in the National Basketball Association, but so far you've comported yourself with a priggish political naivete - which is why your chances are slipping like a bald tire on black ice.
Iowa has started Gore on the path to the nomination, and if he beats you again this week, you're in deep kimchi, as John McCain likes to say.
Here's your problem, Bill. As a former basketball player, you're waiting for the referee to foul Gore out. Forget it. It's not going to happen. The reason is simple: The health care issue that Gore has used to eviscerate you is so complicated most reporters don't understand it, so they can't blow the whistle.
That means you're on your own. And, frankly, unsavory as it is, maybe that's the way it should be. Presidential politics is a Darwinian struggle, a test of toughness.
One top-level Democratic strategist believes you have ''lost sight of the difference between vigorously defending ideas and negative campaigning.'' You may have thought you were being high-minded by ignoring Gore's attacks, but in politics you don't win points by playing Gandhi. Instead, you raise doubts.
As Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh puts it, if you ''won't fight back against Al Gore, how can people trust [you] to fight for them in the White House?''
She's right, too, Senator. Even your own team has been wondering about that for much of this campaign.
''Secretly, what he really wants is for people to recognize he's the best qualified and appoint him president,'' one despairing adviser said of you last week.
When you came to the Globe late last year, you were asked if you had ''a Dukakis problem,'' that is, an unwillingness to defend yourself aggressively and effectively against an opponent's attack.
At the time, you brushed the question off, insisting you knew how to throw elbows. But others have wondered as well. One well-placed source reports that when Dukakis was asked recently why he wasn't supporting you, he replied: ''I can't. He's too much like me.''
Actually, as far as counterpunching goes, you've made Dukakis look like Evander Holyfield. For the most part, what response you've offered has been listless, understated, and undisciplined. As for enlisting Niki Tsongas and Bob Kerrey to make your case, that won't do. Mrs. Tsongas is a smart, savvy woman, but few remember, or care about, the way Bill Clinton diced up her late husband in 1992.
Nor can Kerrey do the job for you. You've got to fight your own battles, Senator. Fortunately for you - and for Democratic voters who have come to expect a spririted primary - there's a way.
Expert testimony
First, face some basic facts: oleaginous as Gore may sometimes seem, to date he's been a clearer, sharper, tougher, more focused debater and campaigner. That's why he's been able to turn your own health insurance plan against you.
So how do you refute Gore's claims that your signature proposal would force us back into deficits, drive the economy into recession, undermine Medicare, and hurt those who now depend on Medicaid? By pointing to authoritative outside experts. There you missed a big opportunity Wednesday night, for on that very morning, the Congressional Budget Office offered you a tailor-made answer, but you failed to take advantage of it.
The CBO said the non-Social Security surplus could balloon to $1.9 trillion over the next decade. To realize that full amount, Congress would have to adhere to strict spending discipline, to be sure. But even assuming much more liberal spending, CBO estimates a minimum cushion of $840 billion, and more than double that if Congress adopts a middle ground on spending.
Your health care program, independent specialists say, should cost about $85 billion a year, or $850 billion over 10 years. That means the cash is there to pay for it, which should obliterate one of Gore's central points of attack.
It's a point you need to drive home again and again if you want to keep your campaign alive.
Another problem, Senator, is that when it comes to explaining your plans, you're talking over the heads of most voters. This is a rough-and-tumble political campaign, not a graduate seminar in public policy. Which means you should stop with the policy wonkery and start talking symbols.
Your proposal has already won the policy equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, analyzed both your plan and Gore's and judged yours superior on almost all counts. Further, the group scolded Gore for irresponsibly raising fears that your proposal would leave Medicaid patients ''out in the cold.''
That happened several months ago, Senator - and yet, for reasons even some of your own advisers cannot fathom, you have not mentioned it in either your TV ads or your debates with Gore.
You should. And to nick a line from pulp novelist Jacqueline Susann, Senator, once is not enough. You've got to repeat the message again and again.
Tell voters why it matters
In campaign strategy sessions with aides, one way you reject caution's centrist counsel and justify your bolder stands on guns and race and health insurance is by saying, '' If it doesn't make a difference, why not Gore?''
That's exactly right. And yet you have let Gore so blur the differences that most voters - and, yes, most reporters - believe there is no real difference between you on the issues.
Lou DiNatale, director of the University of Massachusetts poll, has it right. He says that by trying to not ''go negative,'' you have failed to make your own case.
If you are smart, you will outline the true differences with Gore in a way that cuts through his strategic attempt to muddy the matter and make you both seem the same.
That's why you have to explain why your health insurance plan would cover 23 million more of those currently uninsured than would Gore's more incremental approach. On Friday, you finally pointed out that your call for registration of all handguns does much more than Gore's plan to register new gun buyers. But let the numbers make your point: The difference is that you include the 70 million handguns already out there, while he ignores them.
As for attacking Gore, though the newly kindled fire in your belly is laudable, hitting him on the general issue of trust isn't likely to work. Expedient Gore may be, but Nixon he's not.
The better issue is electability, given the tarnish of the Clinton-Gore scandals. From his Buddhist Temple fund-raising to his infamous ''no controlling legal authority'' press conference to the special-interest dollars swirling into his campaign coffers and the insider world of lobbyists he inhabits, it's a real weakness of the vice president.
But only if you exploit it. So far, you've let him off easy. You may not want to bring it up, but the Republicans surely will in the fall. Everyone knows that. Which is why, says one presidential campaign veteran, you should start telling voters what Daniel Patrick Moynihan did when he endorsed you: The problem with Gore is that ''he can't be elected president.''
In other words, start running some offense, and put him on the defensive for a change.
Lose the 'tude
But to do any of this, you've got to change your mindset, Senator. To be frank, your philosopher's act has gotten a bit too precious for many voters. Your storied ''sense of self,'' your insistence that you are a different kind of politician, running a different kind of campaign, has mutated into what comes across as sanctimonious self-indulgence.
If you'd rather be an unsullied martyr than a sinning winner, apply for sainthood. God knows, that's a whole different kind of election. But if you're unwilling to dirty your hands, get out of this race, because presidential politics isn't your vocation.
Need a role model? Look at McCain. He, too, is trying to run a positive campaign, but when George W. Bush recycled his father's tinny trick from 1988 by claiming McCain would raise taxes, McCain slammed him back so hard, so fast, and so effectively that Bush was left looking silly. And no one thinks the worse of McCain for doing so.
Like it or not, those are the values this particular game rewards. You may not want people calling you just another politician, Senator, but keep campaigning the way you have been, and one thing is certain: Whatever else they end up calling you, it won't be Mr. President.
