What does a state-of-the-art campaign do? In spin-doctor terms, it “gets ahead of the story.” Since the report was circulating on Capitol Hill, campaign aides worked their sources there to get a feel for the FTC’s charges. Then they put together a “Gore-Lieberman Plan,” which gave the industry six months to control its marketing to children or face new regulations or laws. When The New York Times reported the essence of the FTC study the day before its scheduled release, campaign staffers were ready. They invited a reporter to the vice presidential mansion, where Gore solemnly agreed with the FTC’s findings, vowing to hold the industry more accountable. Gore also gave some Hollywood CEOs a heads-up on his new position. By the time the agency held its press conference the next day, Gore seemed to be leading the parade, not following it–and Bush appeared to be a bystander on an issue any Republican should have called his own.
So it goes in the presidential race. Gore is leading among registered voters by 12 percentage points, 50-38, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll completed late last week. Bush still seems unprepared for the furious pace and complexity of the fall sweepstakes. Gore shrewdly focuses on the future, not the (Clintonian) past, and has managed to project a sense of energy, strength and even charm. Joe Lieberman is a hit; Dick Cheney at best a wonk in progress. The leading issues–health care, education and Social Security–tend to be “Democratic” ones, and only now is Bush realizing the need to sell his market-based ideas in a systematic, vivid way.
But there’s another factor. The media-savvy Gore campaign is spinning circles around Bush in the news-cycle-by-news- cycle war for headlines, air time–and undecided votes. Staffed by blooded veterans of the Clinton years–from the “war room” in Little Rock to the impeachment hearings in Washington–the Gore campaign is outmaneuvering and outmanning a Bush campaign that sometimes seems to be run from a cigar box in the back of the old family store.
All campaigns try to manage the conversation of the contest–spin it in their direction–but none is doing it with more relish than Gore’s. In Nashville the spinners operate out of a room they call “The Kitchen,” but it has the feel of an Ivy League law-review conference room. (Indeed, four of the top five “message” purveyors in the Gore campaign are graduates of the Harvard Law School.) The Bush team, by comparison, is a down-home unit essentially run by two longtime loyalists–consultant Karl Rove and communications director Karen Hughes–with input from the candidate’s dad, The Kibitzer of Kennebunkport.
The list of victories in The Kitchen keeps growing. Bush tried to set the agenda for the time and format of presidential debates, but lost the debate on debates. (Last week he caved entirely, agreeing to the original schedule of three debates in October.) When news broke that someone had anonymously mailed Bush’s debate prep materials to a Gore adviser, the veep’s spinners went on the offensive, hinting–with no evidence–that the Bushies might have been trying to set them up. Kitchen commander Ron Klain seemed almost disappointed by the lack of competition. “There hasn’t been much incoming,” he said.
In the Gore campaign, staffers win “Kitchen Helper” awards for particularly successful work. Fabiani won last week for managing to derail Bush’s plan to concentrate on his health-care and prescription-drug proposals. He did it by focusing on a GOP attack spot that accused Gore of wanting bureaucrats to dispense prescription drugs. Gore aides came up with a frame of the ad that flashed a fragment of the word: rats. They made the tape available to the Times, which checked its accuracy and ran a front-page story on the ad as a possible example of “subliminal” tactics.
The Bush campaign was unable to mount a coordinated counterspin. The producer of the spot–who technically works for the GOP, not for the campaign–dismissed the complaints as frivolous. But after at first professing ignorance of the matter, Bush expressed earnest opposition to the use of subliminal advertising–which came out as “subliminable” in his pronunciation. For Bush it was yet another verbal pratfall, and yet another mother lode of material for merciless late-night comics. The TV audiences loved the jokes, but they were laughing loudest–at least for now–in Nashville.
