Campaign 2000: The Lover vs. The Fighter

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Gore's campaign believes amping up the feisty message is the perfect way to close the deal with swing voters. It has polled Gore's "fight for you" phrasing against Bush's "uniter, not divider" theme and claims that people are savvy enough to know that Love and Happiness will never be a legislative anthem. "People see Washington as a place of powerful interests, where they need a President who takes their side and stands up and fights for them," says Tad Devine, a chief Gore strategist. He points as evidence to a St. Louis, Mo., debate-watching focus group of 50 people, assembled by the Gore camp. They arrived with the lion's share of them, 41%, undecided. They left with 53% of the room for the Vice President. The Gore staff felt so good about its candidate's performance in the debate that it wants to pour precious advertising dollars into rebroadcasting it on cable channels in battleground states.

Austin aides have their focus groups too, and they claim the Vice President's aggressiveness only rankles, reminding voters of the ugly noises of the past four or five years in Washington, the showdowns and shutdowns. The less partisan voters, says the campaign, like Bush's happy soundings of cooperation. "Among swing voters, they don't care about the party labels," says Bush's polling analyst Matthew Dowd. "They want things solved."

Strangely, Gore has not been able to parry the charge that Washington during the Clinton-Gore years has become a do-nothing bickerfest. In large part this is because he refuses to highlight the Administration's litany of achievements. Democrats, both inside and outside campaign circles, say they are perplexed by his decision not to make a move that should be as natural as King Arthur's taking Excalibur from the stone. "I mean, can we let it soak in that we've had the best economy in the history of the world for two minutes before having to say we're not satisfied?" says one Democratic strategist, sighing. By late last week it was an exasperated Clinton, not Gore, who finally touted the past eight years. "One thing I admire about our Republican friends is that the evidence has no impact on them," he gibed. "The country is so much better off [with] our economic policy, our education policy, our environmental policy, our health-care policy, our welfare policy, our crime policy."

Even when pressed last Friday morning on the Today show about why he wasn't talking about his Executive record, Gore didn't take the gimme moment in front of 6 million viewers to brag about welfare reform, a balanced budget, free-trade agreements, low crime rates and newly protected wilderness areas. "This race is about the future," he stammered instead. "President Clinton is my friend... But I'm not satisfied. I'm running on who I am and on my own." Gore denies friction with his White House partner, and aides insist they're not worried about being tied to the Clinton scandals, but the Vice President's chilly feelings for Clinton are palpable. The man who negotiated for weekly lunches with the President when he was being invited on the ticket now makes an effort to insist the two aren't conferring.