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HenchPAC NewsWASHINGTON — To fully appreciate the erosion of Al Gore's fortunes during his season of discontent, consider the case of Brian Lunde.
One might assume that Lunde — a former executive director of the Democratic National committee, a strategist who helped Bill Clinton during his gubernatorial career in Arkansas, a man who remains loyal to a number of Democratic congressional candidates — would be supporting the next presidential nominee of his party.
But that assumption would be wrong. Lunde has decided to dump Gore and embrace George W. Bush, and he's already busy trying to convert other Democrats.
This is not great news for Gore. Nor is it helpful that former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich is teeing off on him, or that he has failed to nail down his Democratic base, or that he's striking out with the constituencies that made Bill Clinton a winner.
Whatever happened to the vaunted Gore juggernaut, anyway?
Lunde explained his move the other day: I'm going for my heart over my history. I think Bush really means it when he says he wants to stop the usual political games that get played in Washington. And Gore's whole style, the way he keeps attacking, suggests that if he wins, nothing is going to change. Voters sense that, and that's not what they want."
Then there is Reich, a prominent liberal spokesman. He just published a magazine article deriding Gore as a "desperate" candidate, someone who represents little more than the status quo."
Bleak surveys - Wayward Democrats are symptomatic of a broader predicament for the vice president. Gore trails Bush in five new national surveys, and it's the fine print that truly stings. For several months, he has been steadily losing ground with the pivotal groups that twice paved the way for Clinton's victories: women, Catholics, independents and Northeasterners. His Democratic base is far less secure than Bush's Republican base. And he is chasing Bush in key states that twice voted for Clinton: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and Louisiana.
It gets worse. Gore is even running second in some of the states that voted for Michael Dukakis in the losing Democratic campaign of 1988 — namely, Oregon, Washington state and West Virginia. When a Democratic presidential candidate is gasping for air in West Virginia, something is seriously amiss. That state has voted Republican only twice in the last 10 elections.
"If we're ahead in West Virginia, it means we're strong in a lot of places," said John Morgan, the Republican Party's resident expert on voting demographics. "This election is ours to lose, even if we do have to go through the valley of death in September and October."
Gore emerged from the primaries at the top of his game. He pulverized Bradley from sea to sea. He freed himself from the Washington Beltway and traded his power suits for earth-tone slacks. He blunted the gibes about his wooden deportment by bonding with voters at countless town halls. In March, the conventional wisdom decreed that he would eat George W. Bush for breakfast. Yet the "likely voters" are telling pollsters a different story.
Time to rebound - Gore press secretary Chris Lehane insisted that nothing is wrong; in fact, he said his boss is "well positioned for the fall campaign. . . . It's very early in the process. We have two candidates who are famous, but I don't think that people know that much about either of them. Elections are about educating people on the differences."
He pointed out that candidates who trail in the spring often win in the fall — Ronald Regain in 1980, the elder George Bush in 1988, Clinton in 1992 — and that most voters trust the Democrats on health care, Social Security and education.
But political observers argue that Gore's tepid numbers — and his failure to halt Bush's steady march to the political center — might be traceable to Gore's personal flaws. They warn that if Gore is not perceived as a likable or trustworthy messenger, his message won't matter.
John Zogby, an independent pollster based in New York, said: "Gore has more stature than Bush, he is a lot more experienced than Bush, and he's got peace and prosperity on his side, so why isn't he 10 points up on Bush? In part, it's because of who he is. He's like the kid in school we all remember, the one who had all the answers and was always running for class president.
"Lately, I've hearing his defenders say, ‘Wait until the [autumn] debates.' But if I were them, I'd be worried about that. Bush can go in with such low expectations, like Ronald Reagen did in 1980. If Gore tries to prove how smart he is, and beats up on the guy, that could backfire. Clinton has a knack for showing his smarts, but he soft-pedals it somehow. Gore doesn't have that quality."
The Democratic National Committee is weighing the idea of running TV ads that would include biographical material about Gore, but the decision hasn't been made. It's clear that the party feels a need to upgrade his image; at the moment, as non-partisan Washington analyst Charles Cook noted, "Gore is perceived as transparently opportunistic, as someone who will say anything to get elected."
The Bush campaign is certainly nurturing this impression, but many Democrats believe it. They privately fault him for numerous rhetorical excesses and factual misstatements. Earlier this month, for instance, he said that Bush, as governor of Texas, "has never put together a budget." It turns out that Bush submitted a 1997 budget proposal that ran 154 pages, and a 1997 document that ran 183 pages.
Robert Borosage, a liberal activist and former Jesse Jackson aide, said many nominal Democratic voters, notably white working people and union members, were increasingly disenchanted with Gore's "drive-by pandering" — particularly his decision in April to loudly endorse permanent residency status for Elian Gonzalez.
"That goes to his biggest problem," Borosage said, "which is that he has a reputation for not believing in much of anything, that he looks like an inside-the-Beltway pol who will abandon principle. And this could hurt him with working people in the key industrialized states in the Midwest."
HENCH adds: I hear the low rumbling off in the distance of an impending LANDSLIDE!
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