What Gore needs isn't stage-managing

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Staff, June 20, 1999

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Privately, Al Gore is live wire.

Second Lady Tipper Gore says so -- and Tipper is an honorable woman. US Representative Martin Meehan says so. And Meehan is a right honorable gentleman.

President Clinton says so and . . . well, anyway.

All the vice president needs to do, or so the conventional wisdom goes, is loosen up. Doff the coat. Take off the tie. Unbutton the collar. Show people the real Al.

But as he formally announces for the office he first sought in 1988, there's a bigger question about Gore: Why the disparity between his regular-guy private self and his cautious, formal, skittish public persona in the first place?

It's a question more pressing after last week's campaign kickoff. Texas Governor George W. Bush swept through New Hampshire Monday in a whirl of grins and mischief, heightening the contrast with poor plodding Gore, who came to Manchester Thursday to make his own candidacy official.

There, Gore led a tightly scripted public forum that campaign consultant Bob Squier said was designed to showcase his skills in a give-and-take situation, but which actually seemed like a seminar on political cures for insomnia. (A sample of the folksy, relaxed Gore: "Now I want to engage in a dialogue with you about some of the issues I have just discussed.")

Even at his best -- and this was it, Squier said -- Gore talks to voters as though he were lecturing a class of second-graders about crosswalk safety.

That's led Gore supporters to hope 2000 will be the year of geek chic. "As far as him being a stiff, I think the country is probably ready for someone who is a little more boring than Clinton was," Meehan say hopefully.

Perhaps. But why does a man drop a dense screen over his true self in public? There are only three likely reasons -- and two bode ill for Gore's presidential candidacy.

First, and most innocuous, is the institutional explanation.

"I think he has been constrained as vice president," said US Senator John Kerry. "That requires a supporting role, and I think he is breaking out of that now." Except that Gore was every bit as wary and constrained before he became VP.

The second is that Gore may not trust his political instincts. And with good reason. Although Gore was hailed as the great Southern hope in 1988, his campaign quickly became a disaster. The candidate couldn't decide where to stand and fight -- and on Super Tuesday Michael Dukakis boxed his ears and battered his premise by beating Gore in both Florida and Texas, before ending the threat by thumping Gore in New York.

As vice president, Gore's gaffes and embarrassments are well-known. There's his appropriation of his sister's death from cancer in the administration's battle against tobacco -- though he himself kept accepting contributions from tobacco interests for six years after her death. And his pettifogging defense of his in-office fund-raising calls on the grounds that no "controlling legal authority" -- vis-a-vis, a judge -- had ruled on exactly how the law applied. And his 1997 toasting of then-Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng, who oversaw the Tiananmen Square massacre.

And, of course, the silly stuff. His quarter-baked claim that he and Tipper were the models for Oliver and Jenny in "Love Story" and his assertion that he invented the Internet speak of poor instincts, an odd self-image, and a clumsy tongue.

But the more troubling explanation is this: The vice president seems afraid or unwilling to engage in a forthright process of political argument. Call it algoraphobia.

One illustration comes in a moment Gore's own supporters still point to as a seminal one for the VP: his 1993 debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement with Texas businessman Ross Perot. NAFTA is a complex issue, with different results for different workers. Better-educated workers have done well, but some unskilled workers have certainly paid a price competing against lower-wage foreign workers.

But rather than debate the real issues, Gore preferred to skewer Perot. First he held up pictures of Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley, the federal lawmakers whose high tariffs help exacerbate the Great Depression, as though the issues were remotely comparable.

Then he attacked the Texas billionaire because Perot's son had business interests shipping goods from Mexico into the United States through a duty-free zone at Forth Worth's Alliance Airport. His charge: Perot opposed NAFTA to preserve a special advantage for his family, all while lecturing Perot that "the politics of negativism and fear only go so far."

Last summer, addressing the NAACP, Gore used the same sort of tactic, saying of affirmative-action opponents: "They use their colorblind the way duck hunters use a duck blind -- they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't notice."

The vice president found a different way to avoid a very real issue when he came to Charlestown High School in mid-May. There, Gore called for "revolutionary change" in public education, but rejected the "risky" notion of school vouchers. Everyone, Gore said, agreed those were a bad idea.

That, as Clinton might say, depends on what you mean by everyone. The teachers unions do. So do liberals and many Democrats. But vouchers are steadily winning converts, not only among Republicans, but also among black voters -- a key Democratic constituency -- whose children are often trapped in underperforming urban schools.

Too often, however, that's been the nature of Gore's argumentation: ad hominem attacks, imputations of ill will to opponents, or sweeping statements that paper over legitimate public policy disagreements.

The flip side of Gore's reluctance to confront controversey frontally has been his penchant for micro-politics.

Gore has been Clinton's partner in two national campaigns. Their 1992 campaign against Republican President George Bush was an intellectually sophisticated effort at public persuasion, with reasonably detailed proposals on everything from welfare to health care to fiscal policy.

But when the duo, bruised by their overreaching on health care, and battered by the Republican congressional victory in 1994, ran for reelection in 1996, they campaigned on issues so small as to be almost beneath the political radar: school uniforms, teen curfews, stepped-up anti-truancy efforts, 911 for non-emergency calls, cellular phones for crime-watch volunteers, and so forth.

As he begins his own quest for the presidency, Gore has two models to choose from. So far, the results aren't encouraging.

Consider some of the issues Gore has highlighted in the last half year: larger print on drug labels, an airline passenger bill of rights, urban sprawl, tax breaks to help firms entice workers to use public transit, telephone traffic reports, annual student-teacher-parent conferences, and grants to promote community inclusion in planning new schools.

In New Hampshire last week, Gore's focus was just as small.

There, he laid out five economic proposals that would guide his administration: continued economic growth (certainly a consummation devoutly to be wished, but can it truly be called a proposal?), tax cuts to promote research and development, investment in information technology, increased free trade, and programs to help workers stay current with technology.

Subsidiary ideas: balance the budget, eliminate waste and bureaucratic excess, defend the Internet from foreign tariffs, and create educational savings accounts.

None of those, of course, would set Gore more than a half-inch apart from a mainstream Republican candidate.

"He's aped the Clinton approach on micro-issues," laments one veteran of several presidential campaigns. "It's the Dick Morris school of small-issue politics -- and it comes at a time when when the public may be ready for a politician who addresses big issues."

Ironically, one big-name national strategist who agrees with that assessment is none other than Morris himself.

Not that Morris is renouncing micro-politics.

But the man who guided Clinton's 1996 reelection strategy doesn't think that approach will necessarily work when a non-incumbent seeks the Oval Office.

"He is trying to run for election using tactics more appropriate for a race for reelection: the announcement of grants, the initiatives from the White House," Morris said. "It is kind of a Rose Garden strategy -- but it is not his Rose Garden."

So what would Morris recommend? "A presidential candidate who is not president needs to leave the White House and campaign with new ideas that are bolder and more far-reaching than those of the current administration," he says.

As Al Gore seeks the presidency in his own right, showing that kind of intellectual courage would say more about his authenticity than a dozen stage-managed attempts at spontaneity.