How Gore's Campaign Went Off the Rails

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What they need now is a seawall, one that would prevent Bradley's support from washing beyond where it is strongest at the moment: a hard core of affluent liberal men from the Northeast, according to the TIME/CNN poll. The poll shows that Bradley is weakest among Democrats with a high school degree or less (26% to Gore's 58%), who make less than $35,000 annually (26% to 51%), are union members (27% to 63%) and who live in the South and West. "It's very elite," says a Gore adviser of Bradley's core group. "In the South, Midwest and everywhere else but California, that's not who the Democratic primary voter is."

Maybe not, but last week several Gore officials were worried enough to talk privately of perhaps losing New Hampshire--a stunning concession at this stage--and maybe even New York. All of which leaves them counting on the back pages of the primary-season calendar. That is a far different scenario than the quick blowout they expected earlier this year when they decided not to take on Bradley at all because several key players, including Gore, thought he might drop out.

That was not the only miscalculation by a candidate who cites chaos theory as a favorite scientific principle. Gore spent the first six months of 1999 surrounded by a virtual asteroid belt of orbiting pollsters, message advisers, family retainers, backseat drivers and policy hangers-on. All wanted a say in campaign strategy, but few were committed enough to give up their day jobs--many of which involved deep, complicated ties to other politicians and corporate interests. Amid all this advice, the one tip Gore might have done well to take came early on from Bill Clinton, who told others that Gore should have moved his campaign operation back to Tennessee. Instead, Gore set up shop blocks from the White House on K Street--a concrete-and-glass canyon that is to lobbyists what Wall Street is to stock traders.

While a bloated, imperial operation could hardly be expected to pick up on warning signs, Gore insiders particularly fault Mark Penn, the lead among Gore's half a dozen pollsters. Penn shares his energies with the President, Hillary Clinton and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Over and over, Penn told the Vice President that Bradley posed little or no threat, that Bush was not as far ahead as public polls suggested and that most voters were confusing the Texas Governor with his father. At one point, when Penn was insisting that Gore was no farther than 10 points behind Bush, a campaign official quietly asked another pollster to check Penn's work. The number came back: Gore down by 18. Penn declined to be interviewed but let it be known through an intermediary that his position is secure.

The job of mopping up the mess that Gore made of his own campaign fell to Coelho, a party operative recruited in May. He has seized control of Gore's schedule and made sure that no one but he and message guru Carter Eskew have day-to-day access to the candidate. So determined is Gore to divorce himself from the details that when his wife Tipper recently raised a question about the campaign, Gore answered, only partly joking, "Have you talked to Tony?"