LBANY, N.Y. - The nearer the election draws, the less clear it seems.
Now, only a week before the balloting, it no longer seems like a battle over who has a more inclusive political style (the July theory). Or over who is better suited to represent the average American (the August theory). Or over who makes the country feel better about his intelligence (the September theory). Or over who makes the country feel more comfortable about his leadership style (the October theory).
But most of all, the 2000 presidential election does not seem like a contest over personality (the overarching theory of the summer and the fall).
Because, to borrow a classic debate line from former senator Lloyd M. Bentsen, we knew Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Reagan and Clinton were presidential candidates with real personality - American originals, giants who, even as they were suffering defeat or enduring scandal, defined the politics of their time, crowded their competitors off the debate stage, filled up all the space on the campaign trail, and did something neither Governor George W. Bush nor Vice President Al Gore can accomplish next week: present a personality and political profile so compelling that they were able to unseat an incumbent president.
Reagan won the presidency because of what came naturally to him - an easygoing style that masked deep beliefs. Clinton won because of his natural ability to reach out and understand Americans' greatest hopes and their deepest worries. They were both remarkably large figures, but the most remarkable thing about them is that the American presidency was occupied by both of them in a two-decade period.
The comparisons between the 2000 presidential contenders and Reagan and Clinton are instructive, not because the comparisons diminish who Bush and Gore are but because they illuminate who Bush and Gore are.
Republicans, galled that the Democrats have controlled the White House for two terms, are taking false comfort in the notion that much of the criticism of George W. in 2000 mirrors the way the political establishment described Reagan in 1980 (as a mere governor, as an innocent in foreign policy, as an intuitive politician with little regard for the details). All those things are true about both Reagan and George W., but they do not make the Texas governor a variation on the Reagan theme. They make him a variation on the George H.W. Bush theme.
At the same time, Democrats desperate to retain power in the White House are taking equally false comfort from the idea that Gore is much like Clinton (underestimated, mired a trifle too deeply in the details of policy, suited by intellect if not by temperament to leadership). All those things are true about both Clinton and Gore, but they do not make the vice president a variation on the Clinton theme. They make him a variation on the Albert Gore Sr. theme.
For all the emphasis today on the new genetics, it is the old genetics that is controlling this presidential campaign.
The two candidates bear not only the likenesses but also the actual names of their fathers. They both have spent their lifetimes trying, alternately, to rebel against and to please their fathers. The great defeats that marked them were not their own. (Each had one, Gore's in a losing presidential bid in 1988, Bush's in a losing congressional bid in 1978.) Instead, the great defeats that marked them were their fathers' - Senator Al Gore Sr.'s defeat to Bill Brock in a bitter Senate race in 1970; President George H.W. Bush's defeat to Bill Clinton in the presidential race in 1992.
And so what are we left with?
Two men whose personalities are vivid, but not as vivid as their predecessors'. Two sets of policy positions that are strongly argued but not as sharply defined as their predecessors'.
But we are also left with more than that. We are left with one presidential candidate who thought that having all the answers would mean getting all the votes. It hasn't. We are left with one presidential candidate who thought that he could glide to the White House the way he glided through almost everything else, including the struggle for his party's presidential nomination. He couldn't.
Adlai Stevenson once said that a presidential campaign was the greatest education any politician could have. In truth, this crazy system of electing a president exposes grown men and women to indignities beyond number. It encourages them to pander. It exhausts them. It trivializes them.
But it also forces them to confront the size of the country, the enormity of the problems, and their own limitations. This campaign has been humbling to a country that considers itself great. But, more important, it has been humbling to its next leader. And for that reason alone, it hasn't been a waste of our time, or of the next president's, whoever he is.
