LEVELAND - Vice President Al Gore's campaign has known for some time that it would have to come up with something pretty good to dampen the bounce Texas Governor George W. Bush hopes to get from his GOP convention next week.
But the Democrats might not have counted on the phenomenon confronting them right now: a jolt of preconvention bounce for Bush, fueled by the wild speculation and eager anticipation about Bush's running mate, which he is expected to announce today.
All weekend long, the pundits and the public have been all over the Republican guessing game: Friday's front-runner fever for Senator John McCain gave way to Saturday's for former Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, followed by another wave, for former Senator John Danforth, who by yesterday was succeeded yet again as front-runner by Cheney.
The Gore campaign has gotten so little attention, it might as well be Republican convention week.
So, to compete for air time on issues, like the Sierra Club's endorsement of Gore yesterday, Gore and his aides seem to have simply seized on the Republican vice presidential brouhaha to help make their case against Bush, working it in at every opportunity.
''A word about running mates,'' Gore began as he stood by the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Mich., accepting the Sierra Club's endorsement yesterday morning. But he wasn't going to give anything away. ''Right now,'' he said wryly, ''I just want to say how proud I am to be running with the Sierra Club.''
In Cleveland later in the day, Gore used the same technique, except this time his `running mates' were union workers.
''There's a lot of talk these days about running mates,'' he told a group of construction workers at the site of the New Federal Courthouse in Cleveland, his shirtsleeves rolled up. ''I'm proud to be running with the construction trades and working men and women.''
All day long, Gore and his aides seized on what they characterized as the governor's relatively informal approach to the selection process to make the point that the Texas governor is less responsible and dignified than he.
But by day's end, Gore had injected himself into the vice presidential speculation far more forcefully, disclosing details he had kept to himself about his own selection process.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force Two after campaigning in Michigan and Ohio, Gore said that he has met with some possible vice presidential candidates, that he will be meeting with more, and that he will probably announce his decision on a running mate a few days before the Democratic convention.
He would not say whom he had met with, and he would not say how many, but he did say that the list was short and that it included women as well as men.
The day began smoothly with the Sierra Club endorsement.Club president Robert Cox said Gore, if elected president, would be ''the most pro-environment president in our history.''
Gore spoke of his longtime commitment to the environment, which began when he was a child on his family's farm in Carthage, Tenn., and his mother gave him a copy of Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring,'' which warned of the dangers of pesticides. He pledged to fight global warming and pollution as president, and to create jobs while doing so.
Gore wove the topic on most people's minds throughout his speech, sometimes more gracefully than at others:
''And I'm told in these days leading up to the Republican convention, copies of `Earth in the Balance' are selling quite well in Philadelphia,'' Gore said, referring to the book on the environment he wrote in 1991. ''And I know that the polluters and the special interests are coming after me, and I wear their attacks as a badge of honor.''
The Gore campaign has also taken shots at Bush for failing to conduct his running-mate search with dignity. The frenzy over Bush's selection of a running mate, Gore spokesman Chris Lehane said, demonstrated both that Bush was having trouble finding a suitable partner and that he lacked sufficient discretion.
''We haven't turned the process into a sound bite, a photo-op, and a parade,'' Lehane said yesterday. ''Bush's [search] is like a frat party rush. There are different names every day.''
That point was made less directly by Gore in an interview with a Grand Rapids television station yesterday: ''I have tried to handle the process in a different way,'' he said. ''And keep it private.''
Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett dismissed the criticisms as ''more silly attacks from a campaign that can't stop attacking.''
During the Republican convention, Gore will disappear from view. On Thursday, he heads for the seaside near Wilmington, N.C., for a weeklong vacation with his family. The vice president's campaign workers will make themselves scarce, too; each campaign usually allows the other to have its moment in the sun with little distraction.
After yesterday's fund-raiser, Gore met with members of steelworkers' unions from swing states across the Midwest and vowed to protect their rights to organize and strike. His support among unions is not unanimous: the United Auto Workers, for one, has withheld its outright support, flirting instead with Green Party nominee Ralph Nader.
Gore said yesterday, as he has been saying for over a week, that he understands voters' disillusionment with government and that he thinks he can remedy it. He asked the union members to ''take a chance'' on him.
''I want to ask you to allow yourself to believe, without reservation, that we can do the right thing in this country and be the better for it, and not stay back, not stay at arm's length,'' Gore said. ''Don't be afraid and disappointed about being let down - I will not let you down.''
