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Staking claim as successor no easy task
Dud.
The first confrontation between Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley was a calm, courtly affair, with most of the sound and fury suppressed by the makeup of the candidates and forum. And if this muted struggle, staged in a college theater amid the brilliant foliage of October, also wound up seeming to signify nothing -- or not enough -- it was because the major player in the Democratic field wasn't there.
He was in Washington.
The sponsors called it a ''town meeting,'' the candidates called it a ''debate,'' but what unfolded at Dartmouth College last evening was something else entirely. It was a reminder that the two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are competing not so much for policy advantages but for something far more subtle: the chance to be the Next Thing.
The Next Thing, that is, after Bill Clinton.
As the hour-long session staged here underlined, that's a very difficult proposition to define -- and to sell.
Especially in a debate setting where the premium often is on pugilism, not subtlety.
The Democrats at century's end are struggling with a challenge no party has faced in modern history. When Vice President George Bush sought the GOP nomination in 1988, for example, he implicitly ran as a candidate offering a continuation of the Ronald Reagan years. Indeed, right after the election, a top Bush adviser and future White House chief of staff, Governor John H. Sununu of New Hampshire, declared that the presidential transition was not a ''hostile takeover.''
Last night Gore's predicament was clear; he wanted to be the logical next Democratic step after Clinton, and yet he could not afford to suggest that he might want to extend the Clinton years, which brought with them scandal and impeachment. He told one questioner he understood the ''disappointment and anger you felt toward President Clinton and I felt it myself,'' adding, tellingly: ''I also feel the American people want to move on and turn the page and focus on the future and not the past.''
That comment, coming in the first quarter of the session, underlined the challenge facing the vice president: how to persuade the country to move on and turn the page, but to keep one of the principal characters of the Clinton drama -- and one of the president's chief defenders during the Monica Lewinsky episode -- on the stage.
Bradley's difficulty was on full display as well. He couldn't afford to suggest that he differed with the economic policies that have brought surging prosperity to New Hampshire (which was in economic despair at the beginning of the decade) and the rest of the country, and yet he could not appear merely to sound a ''me, too'' tone.
The Next Thing is a hard thing to define, and right now the Democratic race is a laboratory for concocting it.
Repeatedly the two candidates urged the audience, as Bradley put it in response to an education question, ''to look to the future.''
That is because the past, even in a time of prosperity, is a painful place for Democrats - far more painful than the past seemed when, at a time of more economic strain, a gaggle of Republicans struggled to win the nomination to succeed Reagan.
Clinton's election seven years ago ended a generation-long Democratic drought; with the exception of the post-Watergate administration of Jimmy Carter, the Republicans controlled the executive branch between 1969 and 1993. But the administration repeatedly stumbled, its relations with Congress were contentious even when the Democrats controlled both chambers, and the party relinquished its four-decade hold on power in the House.
Democrats are ready to move on, but even as the party is preparing to choose a successor to Clinton, the shadow of the president was all but visible on the Dartmouth stage.
But it wasn't only the shadow of Bill Clinton that hung over the proceedings. The shadow of Governor George W. Bush was there, too - though his name never passed the candidates' lips.
The two areas where the two candidates sparred most spiritedly were areas that Democrats plan to emphasize in the fall campaign, which they now calculate will be against the Texas governor.
The Democrats' emphasis on health-care insurance was in part a response to Bush, who has not yet made a comprehensive health-care proposal.
The other major subject of domestic-policy friction between the two candidates was school vouchers.
At the conclusion of the hour, the two men spoke of the essence of leadership. By speaking of the need for ''clear goals'' and ''values'' (as Gore did) and by speaking of the need for ''absolute integrity'' (as Bradley did), the two candidates showed they are seeking to define a post-Clinton politics. But the poll results, which show a virtual dead heat, indicate that the party hasn't yet settled on what it believes is The Next Thing.
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ANOVER, N.H. - Bang! Pow! Wham! Thud! Slam!