f every important phase of a presidential campaign is defined by a distinct mood, the theme of fall 1999 has been the thirst for authenticity.
The desire for real people rather than realpolitik explains the rapid rise of Bill Bradley and the slower but steady progress of John McCain, just as it helps illuminate the demise of Elizabeth Dole and the woes besetting Vice President Al Gore, as both the Democratic and Republican fields prepare for separate forums this week at Dartmouth College.
Why the emphasis on the real?
Former US Representative Chester Atkins puts it this way: ''In presidential elections and in second marriages, people look for the exact qualities missing in their previous choices.''
Thus we get an energetic Kennedy after a staid Eisenhower, an honest Carter after a scheming Nixon, an optimistic, delegating Reagan after a gloomy, detail-obsessed Carter.
Now, after almost seven years of a president so wily he's willing to parse the meaning of ''is,'' the public understandably wants someone who is (in the traditional sense of the word) what he seems.
Authenticity is a tricky thing, of course. Give voice to your Fruit of the Loom fantasies and, as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has learned, candor can do as much damage to a reputation as a flying body slam off the top turnbuckle.
Still, true political authenticity - defined as the quality of being reasonably forthright and candid, as refusing to pander or patronize or evade, as showing some independence of mind and issue - is proving to be a defining test.
''People are longing for a politician who is less political, who is comfortable with himself, who is straight-talking,'' says John Sasso, a veteran of three Democratic presidential campaigns. ''Authenticity and trust may be the wave in 2000 the way Jimmy Carter's `I will never lie to you' was in 1976 or John Kennedy's ` let's get the country moving again' was in 1960.''
Pollster Peter Hart, who has done a number of focus groups gauging voter feeling, says it's the sentiment that has buoyed both Bradley and McCain.
''People have seen a lot of the political types and a lot of the media-produced and consultant-produced candidates,'' says Hart. ''They look at Bill Bradley and John McCain and the word that we hear coming to us is `authentic.' They may not be perfect people, but what you see is what you get.''
For McCain, a Republican US senator from Arizona, that quality is seen in a willingness to brave the slings and arrows of his own party to battle to ban the soft money that he believes, and says, corrupts the process.
That's why Guy Molinari, the Staten Island borough president and a former New York congressman, decided last week to break with George W. Bush and support McCain instead.
''I watched him debating his own Republican colleagues in sometimes acrimonious debate,'' said Molinari. ''He has the strength and courage to do that, so I started to search my soul and my conscience.''
For Bradley, a former Democratic US senator from New Jersey, it's been a quiet determination to speak his mind in his own way on his own timetable, taking thoughtful stands on big issues like gun control, universal health care, and child poverty.
One fact grounding both men in the public mind is that they first came to public attention outside of politics, says Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh. McCain's 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam speaks to a courage and mental toughness seemingly unmatched in the field, while Bradley's determined, dignified college and professional basketball career shows him a high-minded competitor resolved to do things his own way, Marsh suggests.
''Because people know their personal histories and who they are as people, it makes them much more willing to believe the promises they make as they run for president,'' says Marsh.
Now consider the perils of the inauthentic.
Last week's victim was Dole, whose quest started with high hopes, but was soon hampered by the ultra-cautious nature of a candidate so programmed she seemed robotic, so averse to spontaneity that even a seeming casual decision to leave the podium and mingle with the crowd was planned - and announced - in advance.
Dole's loss is McCain's gain. In the last few months, McCain has made steady progress toward establishing himself as the only real alternative to Bush. Her departure should formally crystallize the sense of a narrowed choice, for McCain and Bush are the only two plausible GOP candidates.
That paring, in turn, should worry George W.; though he is charismatic and affable, he's also a candidate built by the consultancy, and as someone learning the issues as he goes, Bush can't hope to compete with McCain's candid style.
Meanwhile, the Texas governor's decision to skip Thursday's GOP forum at Dartmouth will only underscore the difference between the two men.
Which is one reason Warren Rudman, admittedly a McCain partisan, thinks his candidate looks increasingly good in New Hampshire, where, according to the latest polls, he now trails Bush by only 16 points.
''John's candor can get him in a little trouble sometimes, but overall I think it's what people are looking for,'' said Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican who was McCain's colleague in the Senate. ''The results of the last eight years have been so much controversy, so much partisanship, so much backbiting, so many purely political statements as opposed to dealing factually with the issues that my sense is that people really want someone who talks right to them.''
Rudman, of course, is focused on the GOP race, but his sense of the public is one that Gore should take notice of.
Instead, Gore's reaction thus far to Bradley's surge suggests that he misinterprets the public sentiment as mostly public weariness with Clinton. During a recent visit to the Globe, Gore revealed that mindset, saying, ''I'm counting on Clinton-fatigue fatigue.''
While Gore is undoubtedly suffering from association, his problem goes beyond a surfeit with all things Clinton.
Take, for example, the latest University of Massachusetts survey, conducted Sept. 29-Oct. 5, which showed Bradley now narrowly leading Gore in Massachusetts. The single biggest personal difference between the two in voters' minds? A sense that Bradley is a genuine person. Asked who ''talks and acts like an upfront person,'' 22.7 percent chose Gore, 42.6 percent Bradley.
In search of a better connection, Gore, the former Tennessee senator and son of a Tennessee senator, has moved his headquarters from Washington to Nashville, altered his wardrobe, and even declared that henceforth he will override his innate inclination to pause and consider before he speaks.
In other words, he has come up with a plan to be authentic. That's not only risible, but risky, should voters spot the man behind the curtain. ''Gore has a credibility problem that could become critical if his shape-shifting becomes obvious,'' notes political analyst Lou DiNatale.
It's a risk aggravated by a growing disparity between the new, candid candidate Gore claims to be and the way he continues to campaign. In the three weeks since leaving the dreaded Beltway, Gore has courted - and won - the AFL-CIO's endorsement, while trying to lock up Democratic Party superdelegates, the party's consummate insiders.
''Gore has moved to Nashville, but he sends a different message: I am an insider,'' said Dick Morris, the political consultant who helped plot Clinton's 1996 campaign. ''His reliance on the AFL-CIO endorsement and on the superdelegate strategy vitiates the move to Nashville and only adds to his woes.''
If Gore's psychic address is still Washington, so, too, do the barbs he has directed Bradley's way have a distinct inside-the- Beltway feel.
Thus far, the gravamen of his critique runs this way: Bradley should be suspect with real Democrats because he voted for the Reagan budget cuts; supported the Contras; has voted for vouchers for children trapped in perennially underperforming public schools; and bowed out of partisan combat by deciding not to seek reelection in 1996, after which he mulled running for president as an independent.
Those are weak arguments for half a host of reasons. For starters, that tack, like Gore's promise to the AFL-CIO to veto ''any anti-union bill,'' position him, a man once in the vanguard of the moderate ''New Democrat'' movement, squarely as the defender of old-line Democratic dogma.
And as Sasso notes, ''Gore may be reinforcing exactly what a lot of Democrats like about Bradley: that he is not adhering to a certain orthodoxy and that he is his own person.''
But most tellingly, with the exception of his charge that Bradley's plan to expand health care is prohibitively expensive, Gore's critique of his rival speaks not to principled policy differences, but rather of tactical sniping, in some cases on matters more than a decade old.
It is, in other words, nothing more than politics as usual. And there's nothing at all authentic about that.
