DAVID NYHAN

Gore May Have Some Tiptoeing To Do En Route . . .

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, February 28, 1999

Day in, day out, the soundest political decisions are the ones made in the cold, hard light of logic, probability, and human-nature-being-what-it-is.

Which is why there won't be another President JFK presiding over the next inaugural 23 months from now. John Forbes Kerry will hold onto his day job in the US Senate, thank you, and forego the trial-by-media-terrorism that is the presidential gantlet at century's end.

He watched and waited, dreamed and schemed, waiting for the political weather to clear, for that gap in the clouds that has emboldened navigators for eons. But it never came. Impeachment came and went, the various probes into front-runner Al Gore's past (office phone calls for money, Buddhist nuns, standing too close to Clinton when the impeachment avalanche hit) came up short of mortal sins, and the timetable proved insuperable.

The Scylla and Charybdis of the modern presidential candidacy are raising the vast sums required ($20 million is the consensus minimum for just 1999, never mind 2000) and the front-loading of primary dates, the rush-to-the-front-of-the-queue by states fed up with holding meaningless primary elections.

Having to navigate between the rock and the whirlpool was too much for Navy veteran Kerry, so out he goes, leaving no one but the diffident Bill Bradley to challenge Vice President Gore for the Democratic nomination. It was about time for another presidential candidacy from Ye Olde Bay State, to tell you the truth. We had JFK in '60, Ted K. in '80, Mike Dukakis in '88, and Paul Tsongas in '92.

So to the great disappointment of the infotainment biz, which loves a street brawl, Gore has only the gentlemanly Bradley with whom to contend, assuming Jesse Jackson arrives at the same conclusion Kerry reached. Right now it looks like Gore has a very good chance to be the next president, the Democrats have a great shot at recapturing the House, and an outside shot of taking back the Senate to make it the 2000 Trifecta.

So, Kerry might have reasoned, as Jackson may yet, "Do I really want to blow my chance to be close to the next president on a very expensive, nasty, and potentially-fatal primary challenge, when so many other good things could happen?" Hmm? Neither Kerry nor Jackson got where they are by being timid, hang-back, forelock-tugging wimps. Neither man suffers from ego depletion.

Bradley's seems to be more of a Hey-what-the-hell-I-got-nothing-to-lose effort, a roll of the dice that will cost him nothing but time, of which he has plenty. Big Bill has no job other than being an ex-senator with a good reputation, of which category there are a dozen or more ex-senators of excellent reputation whom I could name.

Bradley may push Gore in debate, provide the media with a convenient antihero, and make things mildly interesting along the way. But no one of gravity in the GOP broadcasts the notion that Bradley has anything but an outside-outside-outside chance to deprive the sitting VP of the nomination.

It is feared by some Democrats, and devoutly wished by many Republicans, that the public will at some point rise up in righteous anger to cleanse the system of the immorality brought to light by the Clinton-Lewinsky business. The cable television industry, abetted by morality-mongers in the rest of the, ahem, news game, will simply not let go of Clinton's libido, despite his wish to turn the topic to legacy.

On TV, as on talk radio, libido trumps legacy any day. So Gore will have to tiptoe through the media minefields of questions about Clinton's character. Bradley is not your basic slash-and-burn campaigner. His idea of a good read is a thick volume of Alan Greenspan's Top 50 verbatim transcripts of appearances before congressional committees.

But there is undeniably sloshing around out there a reservoir of ill will toward Clinton. Whether it appears during the Democratic primary elections is problematic. It is much more likely the anti-Clinton sentiment will well up in the final election campaign that really cranks up in summer 2000. The tip of that anti-Clinton iceberg may have poked its snoot above the surface in a Pew Research Center survey. While 54 percent would like to see the next president offer programs and policies similar to Clinton's, 4 out of 5 of voters want a president with different personal qualities than Clinton.

This is the soft underbelly of the Gore candidacy, and no senior Democrat doubts the GOP's willingness to mount yet another savage assault on Clinton's character. They couldn't lick him in two national elections and an impeachment drive, but these Republicans are nothing if not single-minded.

Gore will have to figure out how to inherit the mantle of Clintonism without Clinton's character, like Marley's Ghost, ruining Gore's Second Act. My hunch? Clinton, the best politician practicing at present, will know when he has to distance himself from Gore, and he'll figure out how to do it.

And then? Just when the GOP puts all its chips on the argument that Clinton is a rat, with Clinton's character the subject of every GOP attack ad, there comes riding to the rescue a short, blond woman named Hillary.

It is not hard to envision a summer-and-fall-of-2000 scenario in which William Jefferson Clinton holes up at Camp David, watching Vernon Jordan drive the golf cart, acting presidential during the week and playing 36 every Saturday and Sunday, while Hillary Rodham Clinton rides around the country on Air Force Two, vouching for Al Gore as Boy Scout of the Year at every tarmac in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the race will be decided.