Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (65 page)

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ND SO THE FATEFUL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
of 2000 gathered momentum. At the start, the leading contenders, Vice President Gore and Texas governor Bush, faced opponents in the primaries. Gore, however, beat Bill Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey, in early contests and wrapped up the nomination by Super Tuesday (a date when a host of primaries took place) in March. Later, he chose Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut to be his running mate. Lieberman was the first Jew in American history to be honored with such a major party nomination. Bush lost the early New Hampshire primary to John McCain, a maverick Republican senator from Arizona who had spent five years as a POW in North Vietnam. But Bush rallied, buoyed by rough campaign tactics and by a war chest so enormous that he rejected federal funding for the primary season.
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After Super Tuesday, he, too, had sewn up the nomination. He later selected Dick Cheney, his father’s tough-minded, conservative defense secretary, to run with him.

Other candidates—notably Ralph Nader for the Green Party and Patrick Buchanan, this time for the Reform Party—also entered the presidential race. Nader, disdaining the policies of both major parties, directed much of his fire at the power and greed of multinational corporations. Buchanan, an isolationist, demanded a cutback of immigration and a nationalistic foreign policy. It was evident from the start of the campaign, however, that while Nader and Buchanan might be spoilers, they had no chance to win.
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It was equally clear that the major party candidates in 2000—as had often been the case in the recent past—enjoyed the blessings of privileged and politically well-connected backgrounds. Gore, the son and namesake of a United States senator from Tennessee, had grown up in the nation’s capital, where he had gone to private school before attending Harvard University. From his earliest years, he was groomed by his father to run for the presidency.
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In 1988, at the age of thirty-nine, he had made an ambitious but abortive run for the office. Bush, like his father, had attended private school and graduated from Yale. He also received an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School. Moving to west Texas, he later became owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which he sold in 1998 for $15 million. The vice-presidential nominees, Lieberman and Cheney, had also attended Yale (though Cheney eventually graduated from the University of Wyoming, in his home state).

From the outset, the contest between Gore and Bush seemed too close to call, but though the race was tight, it was otherwise unexciting until the election itself. Bush, pointing to optimistic budget projections that anticipated a multi-trillion-dollar federal surplus by 2010, called for huge tax cuts. The surplus, he said, was “not the government’s money” but “the people’s money.” In asserting the virtues of tax cuts, he was following in the footsteps of many GOP candidates, notably Reagan in 1980 and Dole in 1996. Bush proposed to allow younger workers voluntarily to divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes to personal retirement accounts. He favored drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, discounted prescription drugs for senior citizens through private insurance, a larger federal commitment to public education, and tax-supported vouchers so that parents could pay tuition at parochial and other private schools. The United States, he said, must discard its “soft bigotry of low expectations” about poorly performing students and improve its educational standards.

America, Bush emphasized, should become an “ownership society” in which enterprising people, not the federal government, played the dominant role. More of a social conservative than his father, he identified himself as a born-again, evangelical Christian, and he opposed abortion save in cases of rape or incest or when a woman’s life was endangered. He repeatedly criticized the Clinton administration for risking the lives of American soldiers in places such as Haiti and for “nation-building” in foreign policy. “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation-builders,” he said in a debate with Gore on October 11. “I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war. . . . I don’t want to try to put our troops in all places at all times. I don’t want to be the world’s policeman.”
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Like Gore, Bush called for higher defense spending, but neither candidate said much about nuclear proliferation or terrorism. The subject of terrorism did not figure in the three presidential debates, where the focus—as in most elections since the Vietnam era—was on the economy.

Predictably, Gore opposed Bush’s stands on abortion and vouchers. Unlike his adversary, he favored stronger gun control. Bush’s tax-cutting plan, he charged, was a huge and irresponsible handout to the wealthy. Gore proclaimed that he would put the budgetary surplus in a “lock box” so as to preserve the money for retirement benefits. The focus of both candidates on managing what was expected to be a rapidly mounting federal surplus reflected the high expectations in 2000 that Americans cherished about the future of government finances. Three years later, when red ink swamped the federal till, one sardonic observer noted that arguments in 2000 over what to do with the surplus sounded in retrospect “like a debate between pre-Copernican astronomers.”
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Many political pundits predicted that Gore would beat Bush. After all, he was an experienced national politician who had served as a representative and senator from Tennessee before becoming an active, influential vice president. He had solid credentials as a supporter of environmental protection, a record that pleased liberals. His repeated defense of Social Security was expected to appeal to elderly Americans, who comprised an ever higher percentage of the population (12.4 percent, or 35 million of the nation’s 281 million people, were sixty-five years old or more in 2000), and to millions of boomers who were soon to retire. Most important, Gore could claim that he had helped to promote the peace and prosperity that had flourished during Clinton’s presidency.

“Dubya,” as many people called Bush (after his middle initial), seemed in contrast to be unsophisticated and inexperienced. Though he had swept to victory in his races to be governor of Texas, thereby demonstrating surprisingly strong skills as a campaigner, he appeared to have no special qualifications to be president of the United States—save perhaps that the GOP had no one else who seemed likely to win the election and that he was George H. W. Bush’s son.

Gore, however, squandered his advantages. In the first debate, which he had been expected to win easily, he was overconfident and condescending—smirking, sighing audibly, rolling his eyes, and raising his eyebrows when Bush was speaking. Though it was hard to say who “won” the debate, most observers, having expected Bush to be outclassed, agreed that the outsider from Texas had performed far better than had been anticipated. Moreover, Gore never seemed comfortable as a campaigner. Many of his aides found him to be demanding and brusque. Critics observed that he was “stiff,” “wooden,” pompous, and inconsistent, seeming to flipflop in order to cater to critics of his earlier statements and to please whatever constituency he was trying to impress. After supporting the mostly centrist policies of Clinton for much of the campaign, he lurched into a more populist mode toward the end. Many reporters wondered what he really stood for.

Some Democrats complained especially of two tactical decisions that seemed to be damaging Gore’s chances. The first was his failure, as they saw it, to highlight often enough the contributions of the Clinton administration to the economic gains of the late 1990s. Though the economy was sputtering by mid-2000, there was no doubting the high gear into which it had shifted in the past few years. The second was his personal coolness toward the president. Gore, who had two daughters, had been appalled by the Lewinsky affair. So had Lieberman, who in the Senate had denounced Clinton’s behavior as “disgraceful” and “immoral.” Gore seems to have suspected, perhaps wrongly, that Clinton was a political liability. He was therefore reluctant to have him play a major speaking role during the campaign. The two men seldom appeared together on the stump.

Though eager to help, the president agreed to keep a low profile, even in his home state of Arkansas. For the most part, he spoke in African American churches in an effort to get out the vote. Analyses of the election were understandably inconclusive as to whether a larger role for Clinton would have turned the tide for the Democratic ticket. Most people, after all, still disapproved of his personal behavior, and in some swing states Clinton seemed to be unpopular with independent voters. But Clinton’s job approval ratings still exceeded 60 percent. In the aftermath of the election, a number of pundits thought that the president, who was an outstanding campaigner, might at least have swung his home state for Gore. If Arkansas had gone Democratic (and no other states had switched), Gore would have won the election.

Bush, meanwhile, continued to surprise people. To be sure, he was far from articulate, once proclaiming, “Our priorities is our faith.” On another occasion, he exclaimed, “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dreams.” Democrats mocked him as Governor Malaprop. Bush nonetheless came across as a folksy, energetic, physically expressive, and well-organized campaigner. Notwithstanding accusations that he was a threat to the Social Security program, he hoped to win substantial support from the elderly, who tended to be more conservative on a range of social, economic, and foreign policy issues than younger voters. Though Bush (like Gore) did not arouse great popular enthusiasm, many voters believed that he was a straight shooter who meant what he said.

Bush, promising to restore “honor and dignity” to the presidency, made sure that people did not forget Clinton’s sexual wanderings. But he was careful not to repeat the mistake of his father, who in 1992 had allowed the right wing of the party to play a highly visible role in his campaign, or of Dole, who in 1996 had come across as sourly partisan on the stump. Instead, Bush proclaimed at virtually every opportunity that he stood for “compassionate conservatism” and that he would be “a uniter, not a divider,” as president. If elected, he said, he would work cooperatively with Democrats in Congress, thereby breaking the partisan gridlock that had tied up the nation during the Clinton years. Bush’s apparently moderate stance, like Clinton’s appeal to the center in 1992 and 1996, was later said to be his greatest political asset in 2000.
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The contest did not greatly animate eligible voters, only 55.6 percent of whom turned out on election day. Many people who cast their ballots told pollsters, as they had done in earlier elections, that they did not much admire either candidate and that they were disgusted with the partisan behavior of politicians in general. The race, they said, pitted “Gush versus Bore.” Others, including liberals who saw little difference between the largely centrist stance of Gore and that of Bush, derided the contest as a “Seinfeld election”—it was about nothing, and it didn’t matter.

When the polls closed, it was apparent that Gore had edged Bush in the popular vote. That he had: Official tallies later showed that he had captured 50,992,335 votes (48.4 percent of the total) to Bush’s 50,455,156 (47.9 percent). This was a margin of 537,179. Nader won 2,882,897, or 2.7 percent of the total, and Buchanan received 448,895, or 0.42 percent.
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The combined vote for Gore and Nader—51.1 percent—was the best showing for the center-left since Lyndon Johnson had overwhelmed Barry Goldwater in 1964. As in 1992 and 1996, however, neither major candidate had managed to win 50 percent of the vote.

The election revealed that social and cultural divisions had persisted. Like previous Democratic candidates, Gore scored impressively among low-income and new immigrant voters, city dwellers, supporters of gun control, members of labor union households, and blacks, winning an estimated 90 percent of African American votes.
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He was more popular among women than among men and among singles than married people, who were older on the average and (especially in the millions of dual-income families) wealthier.
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Bush, however, fared better among low-income and lower-middle-class voters in rural and suburban areas than Dole had done in 1996. He was the choice of 54 percent of white voters, of 51 percent of white Catholic voters, and of 59 percent of people who said they attended church at least once a week.
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Regional divisions, which had sharpened steadily since Nixon had fashioned a Southern Strategy in 1968, were especially visible. Bush scored impressively among white southerners, carrying (like Reagan in 1984 and his father in 1988) every southern state, including Gore’s Tennessee. He won every Plains and Mountain state except New Mexico. He beat Gore in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia. But except for New Hampshire, which he won by a very narrow margin, Bush lost every state in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic regions. He trailed Gore in the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, and in the Midwestern states of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. Though Gore won only twenty states (and the District of Columbia), most of these were in heavily populated, industrialized areas that had been the heart of Democratic strength since the New Deal years.

But these were later, certified results. On election night many states were too close to call. It was impossible to predict with certainty which candidate would win a required majority (270) of the 538 electoral college votes. At 7:49 P.M. the major networks, badly served by interpreters of exit polls, said that Gore had won the state of Florida. More than six hours later, at 2:16 A.M., FOX News, a conservative channel, announced that Bush had taken the state—and the election—whereupon ABC, CBS, ABC, and CNN followed suit within the next four minutes. Still later in the morning, the networks admitted that the outcome remained uncertain. In the next few days, when battles over Florida began to mesmerize the media, Bush supporters reminded Americans that all the important news anchors had proclaimed him the victor.