Monday, Jun. 26, 2000

Restarting All Over

By ERIC POOLEY AND KAREN TUMULTY

It was past midnight last Wednesday when the phone started ringing inside Bill Daley's Washington home. Roused from his sleep, the Commerce Secretary groped for the receiver and heard Al Gore on the line. Soon Gore was asking Daley to leave Bill Clinton's Cabinet and take over as chairman of Gore's campaign. After a deep breath, Daley said he'd like to discuss the matter over a cup of coffee.

"O.K., I'll hold the phone," the Vice President replied. "Go make some coffee."

Daley laughed. "You mean you want to talk now?"

"Yeah, I'll hold. Make some coffee."

Gore couldn't afford to wait. He was midway through the week that was supposed to start turning his campaign around--a week featuring a new "prosperity-and-progress" message, a new New Gore (this one less of an attack dog than the old New Gore) and a new goody bag of policies designed to seize the upper hand from George W. Bush. It had been an encouraging week so far--the press coverage respectable, the stump speech more effective and the rally at the airport near Scranton, Pa., so big and noisy it reminded Gore of the glory days of the 1992 campaign. But now his shiny new message was about to be knocked off the front page by a familiar sort of mess. Tony Coelho, Gore's embattled campaign chairman, had just told the Vice President he was resigning. It was exactly the kind of news Gore didn't need stepping all over his big week.

After 45 minutes on the phone, Daley agreed to take the job, and Gore's week started looking up again. In fact, once the smoke clears, replacing Coelho with Daley may end up being the reason this really was the week Gore turned his campaign around. Daley, a sharp political operator who is the brother of Chicago's mayor and son of the city's legendary boss Richard Daley, helped win the election for Clinton in 1992 with his handling of Illinois and the Middle West. And he has the standing to take Gore's economic message to the Sunday talk shows, where the controversial Coelho hasn't been seen.

Officially, Coelho resigned for health reasons, and his maladies are real. He suffers from epileptic seizures, and checked into a Virginia hospital last week because of diverticulitis, an inflamed colon. Also, Coelho told a friend that an MRI had revealed a cyst on his brain, which may be the reason he has been suffering more frequent seizures. Tipper Gore and campaign manager Donna Brazille visited him last Tuesday; the next day, when Brazille called, Coelho told her, "It's not good."

But as everyone in the Gore camp knew, even if Coelho had been healthy, he would have had to quit sooner or later. Gore's aides would have preferred him to pick a quieter moment (the Fourth of July would have been nice), but most didn't try to hide their jubilation when he left. Coelho had been a divisive figure inside Goreland, not so much because he fired top aides and cut off longtime advisers before the primaries (that was necessary) but because he was routinely imperious and ham-fisted in his dealings with staff. And he was a growing liability. A former U.S. Representative from California who resigned from Congress during a junk-bond scandal in 1989, Coelho is under investigation for alleged corruption as head of the American mission at the 1998 World Exposition in Portugal. (That made him refuse to go on TV to spin for Gore, something a good campaign boss must do.) Coelho also dispensed some lousy tactical advice, encouraging Gore to insert himself into the Elian Gonzalez imbroglio, a move widely ridiculed as the worst sort of pandering.

While Gore was flailing, Bush began trotting out a series of proposals--involving missile defense, arms reduction, allowing people to invest part of their Social Security money in the stock market--that were debatable as policy but made Bush seem more serious and moderate than he had before. Instead of offering his own vision of the future, Gore spent April and May attacking Bush's plans, even canceling a week's vacation so he could rebut Bush's Social Security idea. That strategy worked well against Bill Bradley in the primaries, but six months before the general election--when Gore should have been telling people what he stood for--it made him look mean, negative and short of ideas. His campaign seemed wholly reactive, skirmishing and assailing while ceding Bush the terms of the debate. "Campaigns have their ebb and flow, and we were definitely ebbing," a Gore aide admits.

Gore's new message is basic stuff, but it may prove to be effective. It aims to win him credit for the economic expansion and provide an antidote to the leadership gap in the polls. To make his case, Gore takes a page from Ronald Reagan, asking voters whether they're better off now than they were eight years ago--a neat way of associating George W. with his father's recession. "It's time to say to those who want to go back to the old ways, 'We're not gonna do it,'" Gore thundered at the rally outside Scranton--a crisp, energetic performance that may have been his best since the primaries. "There is a big difference between what is going on today and what was going on eight years ago, when the crowd tryin' to get back in was running the show and ran the economy into the ditch. You remember what it was like here in Pennsylvania!" The labor-heavy crowd drowned him out with cheers.

This is what Gore aides call the "economic disqualifier" for Bush--the notion that when voters focus on the race, they'll choose Gore's policies and track record over Bush's. Pointing to gaudy new estimates of the ballooning budget surplus, Gore proposes to spend the money in "disciplined" ways to keep the prosperity going while Bush would "squander" it and "put prosperity beyond our reach." In an interview with TIME last Friday, Gore warmed to this theme: "The new estimates really bring into sharp focus not only the success of the past eight years, but also the big choices we have to make now. And the contrast is really quite clear. Governor Bush proposes to spend $1 trillion attempting to privatize Social Security and almost an additional $2 trillion on a huge tax cut. Combined, [they] would completely spend even the most expansive surplus estimates. And that's before you start adding in the so-called Star Wars proposal."

The Bush camp disputes those numbers and points out that Gore's tax cuts are getting heftier too--$500 billion over 10 years. Some of that money would be deftly spent on what Gore is calling "Social Security Plus," a plan for voluntary, tax-free retirement savings accounts with federal matching contributions for working families. "I've always encouraged investments in the stock market [and] private savings accounts," Gore told TIME, "but they should come on top of the foundation of Social Security. That's why I call it Social Security Plus. And the difference is, Governor Bush proposes to drain $1 trillion out of the Social Security Trust Fund, which makes his plan Social Security Minus." (For more excerpts from the interview, visit time.com

Gore hopes the themes of prosperity and progress will be enough to keep him within striking distance of Bush, at least through the summer. In the fall the strategy will shift to hand-to-hand combat in half a dozen or so key states, Gore strategists say, and that is where they think their candidate will have the advantage. The terrain of issues varies--guns in New Jersey, the economy in Michigan, the environment in California--and the plan is to hammer each one hard enough to put Gore over the top. "It's not the wave but the strange riptides of this election" that will determine its outcome, says a Gore strategist. At the Bush camp, ever more confident and ever more disdainful of all things Gore, no one is intimidated by the prospect of what one Bush adviser calls "a campaign of Zip codes." Aides say it can't work, arguing that there's no way to narrowcast a message in a national campaign. "If he runs on gun control in New Jersey," says Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, "you can be sure the press will make an issue out of it in Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri."

That fight is months away. "There will be plenty of chances to return to it before people go to the polls," Gore said last week, relaxing in a wicker armchair on the sunny wraparound porch of his official residence. "People like this prosperity and progress," he said, savoring the moment--and hoping the rest of us will too.

--With reporting by James Carney/Austin and Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by James Carney/Austin and Viveca Novak/Washington