Battle Cry for an Uneasy Alliance

In a time of peace and prosperity, Al Gore is betting that Americans want to go to war.

In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Gore extended his effort to fuse Bill Clinton’s centrist policy agenda with a class-conscious populist language that seeks to mobilize working families against “powerful forces and powerful interests.”

This uneasy alliance between old and new Democratic approaches amounts to what Gore himself might call “a risky political scheme.”

It will undoubtedly help Gore sharpen his distinctions with Republican George W. Bush, who has struck many centrist notes in his own campaign. But, at a time when a largely contented electorate has been recoiling from political conflict, Gore risks seeming to be unaccountably angry, or even anachronistic, in combining the moderate Democratic policies of the 1990s with the immoderate Democratic language of the 1930s.

Gore arrived on the stage facing a series of complex, even contradictory, political challenges. He is trailing among independent voters and suffering more defections than Bush among members of his own party--meaning he had to offer both the partisan messages that unify his base and the centrist messages that appeal to independents. In personal terms, polls show that most voters consider Bush more likable and a stronger leader, leaving Gore the daunting task of appearing both warmer and tougher.

Polls in the next few days will measure how successfully Gore met both of those challenges--though initial reactions from an MSNBC focus group and respondents to an online poll at the political Web site Speakout.Com were strongly positive. The program may have been most successful in offering voters a broader picture of Gore’s personal life--and perhaps changing personal impressions about him.

The convention devoted an extraordinarily long stretch of time to a video narrated by Gore’s wife, Tipper, that focused almost entirely on their personal lives--from their first date, to his decision to enlist in Vietnam, to the birth of their children. In his own speech, a conversational and relaxed Gore portrayed himself as a man of faith and family who understood that “the real values in life aren’t material but spiritual.”

If those notes seemed transparently designed to separate Gore from Clinton’s personal misbehavior, the policy agenda that the nominee summarized last night closely followed Clinton’s lead. Gore offered the blend of fiscal discipline (he pledged to balance the budget every year and pay off the national debt by 2012) and government activism (he stressed new programs to guarantee health care for all children, provide prescription drugs for seniors, provide universal access to preschool and build new classrooms) that Clinton pioneered.

Taut Rhetorical Tone May Not Match Times

Yet the tone of Gore’s speech--following his pattern over the last several months--drew more on conventional Democratic traditions. Over and again, Gore presented himself as a fighter who has “taken on the powerful forces” and will stand “for working families” against “the wealthy and the powerful.”

In almost conspiratorial tones, Gore invited voters to see their problems as the product of shadowy forces maneuvering against average Americans. “So often powerful forces and powerful interests stand in your way, and the odds seemed stacked against you--even as you do what’s right for you and your family,” he declared at one point. And again, later, for emphasis, he insisted that the election was about “whether forces standing in your way will keep you from having a better life.”

One large political question is whether these sharp-edged arguments--which might just as easily have been delivered by William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s or Huey Long in the 1930s--will resonate in a nation where unemployment is at a decades-long low, homeownership is at an all-time high and almost half of households now own stock.

“Any kind of approach that depends on voters being unhappy or resentful is not well-timed because there’s a high level of contentment,” said Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at UC San Diego.

This approach presents two other obvious risks to Gore. One is that his thrusts against the “wealthy and the powerful” will seem outdated--or even threatening--to new economy voters who now feel themselves advancing in the economy. The second is that it will alienate voters weary of partisan fighting in the capital; indeed, Bush aides immediately denounced the speech as “divisive” and “class warfare.”

Bush Aide Quickly Damns Divisiveness

“You can’t bring people together if you run a campaign that drives people apart,” said Ari Fleischer, Bush’s deputy communications director.

But Jacobson said Gore may have no choice but to move down this road because Bush is occupying so much ground--on issues like education--usually claimed by Democrats. “Gore needs to do some product differentiation, and this rhetoric helps. And he needs to establish himself as someone who is not Bill Clinton, and it helps there as well,” Jacobson said. And, indeed, Gore’s criticism of managed care drew positive responses in both the MSNBC focus group and SpeakOut.com’s online poll.

Gore’s speech offered an upbeat end to a convention that over its first three nights generated emphatically mixed, and even muddied, messages that failed to produce any gain for Gore in the polls. In fact, almost unimaginably, the bipartisan Voter.com/Battleground 2000 poll saw Gore losing ground slightly during the convention’s first three nights, with Bush’s lead widening from 9 to 11 percentage points. While Gore gained strength with independents, his support among conservative Democrats dropped by 12 points over the convention’s first nights, the poll found.

Other findings in that survey suggested that the convention’s opening sessions had failed to help Gore. Despite three nights of testimonials, the percentage of voters who expressed a favorable opinion of Gore failed to increase. And Gore could manage no better than an even split when voters were asked if what they had heard about him recently made them more or less likely to vote for him.

These results were little surprise to those Democrats, especially from the party’s centrist wing, quietly grumbling about the convention’s direction as they milled on the floor or mingled at after-hours parties. During the first three nights, the message from the podium lurched from left to right in a way that seemed to embody Gore’s own inability to chart a consistent direction for his campaign. “Frankly we haven’t been able to figure out what they are doing,” said a senior aide to a moderate Democratic Southern senator.

On Monday, Clinton gave a strong defense of his centrist direction; on Tuesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bill Bradley delivered textbook liberal speeches that at times seemed as much an indictment as a defense of the Clinton-Gore record; and on Wednesday, vice presidential nominee Joseph I. Lieberman delivered a personally emotional but ideologically muted speech that downplayed his deviation from liberal orthodoxy on such issues as education, affirmative action and violence in the media.

The Lieberman speech seemed to crystallize the uncertainty inside the Gore camp. One principal reason Gore aides cited for the selection of Lieberman--the chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council--was his potential appeal to conservative Democrats and independents.

But Lieberman spent much of the week at meetings trying to convince the party’s most liberal elements that they could trust him; and in his speech Wednesday night, he emphasized traditional Democratic priorities (such as affirmative action) while completely avoiding several issues (such as welfare reform, free trade and education block grants) on which his views challenge the party base.

That ensured Lieberman an enthusiastic reception from party activists in the hall. But it apparently carried a price. At a focus group conducted by MSNBC, swing voters--two-thirds of whom voted for Clinton in 1996--gave Lieberman’s address a sharp thumbs down.

“I thought he could cause Republicans and independents to give Gore a second look, but based on the speech, he isn’t doing it,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who conducted the focus group for MSNBC. “Lieberman dumped everything he used to talk about that used to score so well with these voters. And he’s come down to being a traditional politician. There was a sense of disappointment and a sense that he had sold out to Al Gore.”

In his acceptance speech, Gore actually hit several of those notes harder than Lieberman. Unlike his No. 2, Gore explicitly endorsed welfare reform and free trade and swiped at Hollywood for “entertainment that . . . glorifies violence and indecency.”

But Gore also highlighted a long list of liberal priorities--pledging to defend affirmative action and legal abortion, and underscoring his opposition to the private school vouchers supported by both Bush and Gore’s own running mate.

Clinton’s Juggling Act a Hard One to Follow

This intimate jostling of liberal and centrist themes offered a reminder that the Clintonite agenda that Gore is largely following has always demanded a juggler’s skill. But Gore is putting one more plate into the air by adding to the mix of liberal and conservative themes an old-fashioned populism. “That’s the difference in this election,” he insisted at one point. “They’re for the powerful and we’re for the people.”

The conflicting messages from this week’s Democratic convention made one thing obvious above all: Gore is not nearly as deft as Clinton at managing his party’s contradictions. But in his speech, Gore offered his vision of a new synthesis: a populist centrism that owes as much to Harry S. Truman in style as it does to Clinton in substance.

It is a vision uniquely Gore’s--the culmination of his yearlong struggle to escape Clinton’s shadow and be “my own man,” as he put it Thursday night. The question is whether Gore can hold together Clinton’s coalition while moving so far from its maker.