Politics never really “stopped at the water’s edge,” but now, as the Y2K campaign gains speed, there’s no “edge” at all. The distant war in Kosovo has become the first, perhaps defining issue. Why? The reasons range from planetary to partisan. Bill Clinton’s economic record is hard to attack, but world security seems to have deteriorated on his watch. Baby boomers remember Vietnam and dread repeating it. The foreshortened primary schedule in 2000 makes raising your profile–and your money–imperative right now. And the heir apparent–Al Gore–looked beatable even before Kosovo. Now the war threatens to immobilize him, and his foes want to tie him down by focusing on it.
Dole had an especially urgent need to go global: her candidacy seemed to be going nowhere at all. The buzz produced by her departure from the Red Cross was gone. Her fund-raising efforts were lagging, and she hadn’t expanded the rationale of her candidacy beyond her gender and bureaucratic resume. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, in fact, Texas Gov. George W. Bush has lengthened his fat lead over her among Republicans–from 46-20 in early March to 51-16.
So Dole decided to get into Kosovo big time. First, advisers (one of whom worked for former Defense secretary Dick Cheney) tailored a “Hawkish World View” speech for delivery at the Naval Academy. Colin Powell read it, Dole aides say, and offered some suggestions (but no endorsement of her candidacy). Then aides elicited a come-to-the-Balkans invitation from a humanitarian group she’d known at the Red Cross. Dole announced the trip at the Academy and visited two refugee sites. Attired in garden-party casual, she moved among the ragged Kosovars offering sympathy and gathering fresh, Oprah-esque material for use on the campaign trail in Iowa this week.
For Sen. John McCain, another GOP presidential contender, the issue isn’t money but memory–his own. He can’t forget what it felt like to be a POW for years in Hanoi, suffering beatings and solitary confinement while Americans at home dithered over how to fight–or quit–in Vietnam. “What I learned is that we either get in to win or we get out,” he says. McCain amplifies the theme in a new book, “Faith of My Fathers.” “War is too horrible a thing to drag it out unnecessarily,” he writes. “It was a shameful waste to ask men to suffer and die… for a cause that half the country didn’t believe in, and our leaders weren’t committed to winning.”
While the administration tries to avoid a wider war, McCain is willing to start one of his own–within the GOP–as leader of the send-in-the-troops wing. Among those on the other side: Rep. John Kasich of Ohio and Patrick Buchanan, two presidential aspirants, and “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett. McCain has been lionized by pundits and featured in a continuous loop on TV. But the exposure hasn’t helped much among Republican voters, who tend to view Kosovo as “Clinton’s war”–something to be avoided, not expanded. In the NEWSWEEK Poll McCain was running fourth, at 6 percent, behind Bush, Dole and Dan Quayle (9 percent). McCain was in nearly the same place–and at 5 percent–in early March.
Only two candidates are eager to avoid being sucked into the Kosovo conversation. One is Bush, whose painfully cautious and tepid statements about the war have hurt him on the op-ed pages but not in polls or fund-raising–yet. The silence is deliberate, but can’t last. “Once we start talking about this, we know we’re not going to be able to stop,” said a top adviser. The other is Gore, whose polls are sagging under the weight of his leaden public persona and his unavoidable loyalty to a much-distrusted president. Indeed, Gore’s only Democratic challenger, Bill Bradley, is gaining rapidly in what–perilously for Gore–is a two-candidate, zero-sum race for the Democratic nomination. At a high-level White House briefing last week for congressional leaders, Gore managed only the briefest of drop-bys. “Normally he would have stayed for hours at a meeting like that,” one leading senator said. “Gore got out of there fast.” But he was not, for now, hurrying off to the Balkans.
