n the second Monday in August, Bill Clinton set the standard Al Gore must meet by the first Tuesday in November.
No, not the quotient of charisma or the measure of magnetism. If the presidential race is decided on personality or charm, it's curtains for Al2D2.
One can see that in this campaign's persistent default drift back toward Bush; each time the contest isn't joined, the Texas governor bobs back up to a lead of eight to 10 points.
And yet that doesn't mean Gore can't win. Plugging his plodding political protege on Monday, Clinton showed the way.
''More than anybody else in American life, Al Gore understands the future,'' Clinton claimed. ''We need somebody in the White House at the dawn of the 21st century who really understands the future.''
Proving the first premise of Clinton's proposition could be the route to victory for Gore. The bad news for Democrats is that so far Gore hasn't even demonstrated that he understands the lessons of the political past.
To win, Gore must persuade the nation that he's the best choice to sustain, safeguard, and spread the current prosperity.
As government-reinvention guru David Osborne puts it, he needs to talk about ''expanding the winner's circle: what we need to do to bring more Americans into the new economy.''
Combined, that's a message with across-the-board appeal.
But for months now, Gore has been offering a dated class politics, claiming to be ''on the side of working families'' against the wealthy or playing the populist by railing against pharmaceutical firms, oil companies, and other ''powerful interests.''
With the eyes of the nation upon him Thursday, Gore chose the same course, repeatedly declaring himself on the side of ''working families'' in their battle against the ''powerful forces and powerful interests'' he sees arrayed against them.
''That's the difference in this election,'' Gore declared. ''They're for the powerful and we're for the people.''
That simplistic approach holds several very real perils.
First, it opens a yawning chasm of implausibility between Gore's pedigreed persona and his politics.
''It doesn't seem likely that someone who is the son of a senator who has been VP for eight years in a pro-business administration would suddenly turn into an 1890s style populist,'' notes Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies.
Second, as intoxicating as that old-time ideological elixir is to the party faithful, it is ultimately a campaign cul-de-sac, a path, perhaps, to the mid-40s, but not to a winning mark.
With Gore trailing Bush by 19 points among the crucial independent bloc in a Gallup Poll last week, the vice president needs a pitch with broader appeal.
''The populist message hasn't worked since Harry Truman,'' says Osborne, a former Gore adviser whose latest book is ''The Reinventor's Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government.'' ''As much as I wish it would work, it isn't a majority message.'' Just ask Dick Gephardt or Jesse Jackson or Tom Harkin, each of whom tried and failed that way in the past.
Gore's populism might rally the base and bring him somewhere near the 46 percent Michael Dukakis won against Vice President Bush in 1988. But it's unlikely to carry him over the top because, in a nation where as many as three-fourths of the people consider themselves middle class, it defines America in a way most Americans decline to define themselves.
Former US Senator Paul Tsongas warned his party about that tack back in 1992, and he was right.
Although a retro message of populism and class interests may work in a lower-turnout congressional campaign, Americans want a president who appreciates the importance of a strong economy and the crucial job-creating role of business, not an old-style class warrior. Two elections later, in the best of times, it's not clear Gore grasps the point.
Further, in a time when technology has put a premium on flexibility and individual choice, Gore too often seems stuck in a government-monopoly mode when it comes to government services.
Examples abound, but two suffice to make the point.
Although the popularity of Bush's Social Security plan forced Gore to come up with his own retirement-saving plan, he still remains opposed to letting individuals invest any of their Social Security payroll tax payment in the market.
Schools offer a second example. There, Gore has sided with the teachers unions in an absolute rejection of vouchers in any circumstance, even in those troubling situations where the public schools are not just mediocre, but are repeatedly and demonstrably failing.
That stance has won him the support of the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, but has put him on the opposite side of an issue increasingly popular with minority voters, a core Democratic Party constituency, whose children are too often stuck in under-performing urban schools.
Odder still, Gore seems to realize the disconnect.
''If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner-city school that was failing ... I might be for vouchers, too,'' Gore said on Aug. 9. And yet it's an idea that Gore habitually denounces as a risky scheme. That's been his response for so long, and so many issues, that it has become caricature.
Which underscores another problem Gore must overcome: His rhetorical rifle is a rusty political blunderbuss.
In an era when more than half of American families own stock or mutual funds, when more and more Americans are economically literate, and when government commands a comparatively smaller and weaker hold on the American imagination, it's simply not enough to denounce an opponent's each and every idea as a reckless or risky or irresponsible plan. Or to argue, as he did Thursday, that ''our whole future is at stake'' in November.
Granted, that sort of rhetorical overkill helped Gore torpedo Democratic rival Bill Bradley in New Hampshire last fall. But looking back at the critique Gore made of Bradley, what's most notable is not how effective his campaign was, but how fast and loose Gore played with the truth in his broadside attacks on Bradley's proposal for near-universal health care, which Gore portrayed as an unaffordable boondoggle that would hurt minorities and send the economy into a tailspin.
If ever anyone had a doubt, a detailed study of Gore's debate history by James Fallows in the July Atlantic Monthly makes it crystal clear how little reverence the vice president holds for the truth when he's in campaign mode. Gore, says Fallows, ''is manifestly willing to lie for political convenience.''
But both the press and the public are catching up with Gore's bombast and broadsides. And in one of the best passages in his own acceptance speech in Philadelphia, Bush started to inoculate himself against those accusations.
''If my opponent had been there at the moon launch, it would have been a `risky rocket scheme,''' said Bush. ''If he'd been there when Edison was testing the light bulb, it would have been a `risky anti-candle scheme.' If he'd been there when the Internet was invented, well ....''
It was a moment both funny and memorable, one that will make it harder for Gore to portray his rival's plans as precursors to economic or social disaster.
Good economic times may also demand another approach.
''After years of prosperity, average Americans are not really interested in heavy-duty negativity,'' says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. ''If you are going to go after your opponent this year, you are better off doing it with an epee rather than a broadsword.''
Certainly Gore's current approach doesn't faze the GOP.
''`Risky' and `extreme'' just hasn't worked,'' says Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. ''I think it falls on deaf ears. People realize that if Bush is a governor and his state is doing all right, he is not going to do something that is outrageous or extreme.''
But Bush's best defense is Gore's own number two, Joseph Lieberman, who has voiced support for both vouchers and market investment of some of Social Security - as well as a number of other nostrums Bush supports.
Lieberman, once an iconoclastic thinker, has had to undergo the sort of brain transplant that is a vice presidential nominee's sad lot in life. Still, there's no better defense against a Gore accusation of recklessness than the simple reminder that Gore's own running mate - back when he was of independent mind and judgment - supported ideas like those Bush has proposed.
Or, as Hess puts it: ''It is going to be harder to make some of the arguments about risky business when Lieberman was with the riskers.''
Which means Gore needs to adopt a mode of argumentation that relies on something smarter and more intellectually engaging than apocalyptic predictions.
That's where he needs to take his cue from Clinton - but not the self-congratulatory president of Monday, defending his record and gilding the lily of his legacy. Rather, the earnest, determined Clinton of the 1992 campaign.
That year, Clinton, a little-known governor, burst to the front of the Democratic field with an attractive package of proposals that analyzed America's problems and offered some appealing ideas about how to jump-start the economy, help small business, improve education, better train the work force, reduce the deficit, help the working poor, and ease the strain on American families.
Clinton's intention, which he stated again and again, was to move beyond the weary, polarized politics of left and right to offer realistic solutions.
However much Clinton may have parsed his language and offered dissembling denials about his personal life, when it came to public ideas he treated the American people as intelligent, thoughtful voters who could make smart choices.
Compare that with Gore's approach. He too knows policy, but his remedial-school style of slow-cadenced admonitions, his dire warnings of disaster, and his simplistic sloganeering all bespeak a certain mistrust of the very electorate Gore hopes to enlist.
To put it in the practiced parlance of ritual convention rhetoric, Al Gore can do better, Al Gore must do better - and Al Gore will have to do better if he's to be elected president of these United States.
