Politics

This Just In...It Was A Ploy

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 20, 1999 / 6:34 PM EST / CBS

In this Reality Check, CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg subjects Al Gore's no-more-commercials ploy to his usual counter-intuitive, I-don't-run-with-the-pack analysis. His conclusion? Yup. It's a ploy.

The vice president of the United States offered Bill Bradley a deal, face-to-face, on a Sunday talk show. Swear off all campaign commercials, Gore challenged Bradley, and I'll do the same. Right here, right now, let's shake.

Bradley scoffed at the proposal and called it a "ploy." The pundits declared it a ploy. A six-year old girl in Toledo, Ohio, called it a ploy.

Reality Check, committed to against-the-grain thinking (well, actually assigned to it by our editors and paymasters), refuses to leap to the cynical conclusion that the vice president of the United States would deploy a ploy in a political debate. That, in the words of Richard Nixon, would be wrong.

But, man, is it hard to think otherwise.

Trouble spot number one: The "moratorium on commercials" proposal was utilized by Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., in his 1998 campaign to unseat incumbent Sen. Lauch Faircloth. Edwards won the election. He happened to have the same pollster, Harrison Hickman, as Vice President Gore. And Edwards' media adviser is now a consultant to the Gore campaign, Bob Shrum.

Indeed, The New York Times reported that, "Bob Shrum, a media consultant for Mr. Gore, said the vice president modeled his challenge to Mr. Bradley after one made in the 1998 by John Edwards of North Carolina."

Okay, well, that doesn't mean it was a cheap ploy. Maybe Gore heard about the Edwards idea and thought giving up TV ads would really be good for the country and just happened to reveal his thinking while debating Bradley. Could have happened.

That brings up trouble spot number two, again from The New York Times: "Mr. Gore's advisers said afterward that they had not expected Mr. Bradley to take up the challenge, which they had hit upon last week. Instead, they said they intended to knock him off stride . . ."

In the words of Maxwell Smart, "Would you believe . . . ?" Would you believe that even though the Gore camp didn't expect Bradley to accept the challenge, it was still a serious attempt to restore civic virtue by ridding the airwaves of 30-second spots? Would you believe that the vice president wanted to knock Bradley off stride only to make the debate more engaging, thus bringing more Americans into the political process?

And besides, Bradley wasn't even nudged off stride for a split second. This is, after all, a man who routinely went one-on-one against the likes of Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor. He knows a playground stunt when he sees one.