What A Ride It Was!

Bush especially finessed his differences with the Democrats. He made concrete proposals substantively different from Gore's - notably his tax cut and Social Security plans - but he used the rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism" to distance himself from the conservative GOP leadership in Congress and paper over the differences between the two major parties.

Harvard government professor Michael Sandel said Bush and Gore's positions were "difficult to distinguish."

"The result was a campaign where both candidates crowded the center, while procaiming all the while the differences between them were of great and vast significance," he said.

"But in fact," Sandel added, "this was a campaign fought out over things like differences of detail in prescription drug plans. The election was not argued on the basis of fundamental ideological differences. This explains two things: why the public was so evenly divided and why the public didn't desperately care who won."

Lee Hamilton, who was a Democratic congressman from Indiana for nearly 35 years, said there was "an overload of information about fairly technical things" - and so, the candidates lost their audience.

While Bush illustrated his budget for audiences by holding up four greenbacks, Gore's information overkill on long-term solvency, interest payments, and monthly premiums was epitomized by two books of policy detail published on his campaign web site, the 74-page "Medicare at a Crossroads", and a 191-page economic plan.

Hamilton said that at some point during the campaign, people thought of Bush and Gore, "They both want to provide prescription drugs and Social Security, so what's the difference?"

In the absence of a new choice, people voted their old loyalties - party sympathies, guns, abortion, the death penalty.

As Los Angeles Times political columnist Ronald Brownstein observed, church attendance and gun ownership were more reliable predictors of voter preference than income and stock ownership. Gun owners and frequent churchgoers voted for Bush.

Voter turnout expert Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate says these deeply held beliefs show a "cultural divide" that's expressed politically as "two countries: an urban country, a rural country and the battleground is the suburbs." The final electoral map shows Bush's strength in the South, West and Plains - and Gore's on the coasts and in the Great Lakes states.

For a guy who often mispronounced words, misstated facts, and got tripped up by numbers, Bush was a savvy rhetorician.

The Texas governor used his regular-guy charm and "compassionate conservative" platitudes - like "No child should be left behind in America," and "For a mom or a dad, the most important responsibility you'll ever have is to love your children," - to transform the election from a judgment on the candidates' records and agendas into a referendum on Bush's personal virtue and good intentions. When Gore confronted him in debate about 1.4 million Texas children who don't have health insurance, Bush replied, "You quote all the numbers you want, we care about our people in Texas."

Failed Outreach
Bush tried but failed to expand the GOP coalition by attracting different kinds of voters, especially African-Americans. Gore did not even try, sticking with his base of women, seniors, union workers, and minorities.

Running as a "different kind of Republican," Bush campaigned regularly in schools and health care centers that serve immigrants and minorities, addressing Latino audiences in Spanish. In April, he met with gays and lesbians. In July, he addressed the national NAACP.

But Bush's trip to Bob Jones University and his failure to take a stand during the primaries on the state of South Carolina's flying of the Confederate battle flag undercut his efforts early on to bring African-Americans into any Republican "big tent".

While the outreach did not win him many votes - exit polls say 70 percent of gays and 90 percent of blacks voted for Gore - Bush got some credit for the gestures themselves and for the foresight to diversify the Republican Party.

Bush did win among independents 47-45 - and Gore's loss of 15 percent of Clinton's 1996 voters suggests Bush won the swing vote, too.

Republican pollster Linda DiVall pointed out that with 11 million more votes than GOP nominee Bob Dole received in 1996, Bush commanded a larger share of the vote for his party in this election.

The Nader Effect
Gore lost crucial time and money in preventing consumer activist Ralph Nader from tipping the election to Bush in Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Minnesota - traditionally Democratic states that the vice president did carry in the end. But in the last four weeks of the campaign, Gore spent seven days in the top three of those states, every one of them a day he wasn't in Florida.

Almost half of Nader's voters said they would have voted for Gore if Nader weren't on the ballot, and 30 percent said they would not have voted at all. Based on these numbers, the Gore half would have given the vice president a margin of victory in New Hampshire and Florida. And a Gore win in just one of those states would have changed the outcome of the election.

Mutual Assured Destruction
Both parties' grassroots mobilization efforts, the campaigns themselves, and the interest groups allied with them (like labor unions and the National Rifle Association) were so energetic in the battleground states that they may have cancelled out one another.

Bush and Gore campaigned continuously in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Missouri, and Michigan - and they also made several return trips to Minnesota, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, West Virginia, and Ohio.

Thanks to grassroots efforts, there was a 3.4 percent increase in participation in the battleground states, despite flat turnout nationwide. President Clinton told CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather he thinks the NRA was "decisive" in at least five states. In the final weeks of the campaign, Bush had thousands of supporters showing up for his rallies, even during their work hours.

Personality Problems
Neither candidae inspired much confidence, even among his supporters. In exit polls, nearly half of each man's voters said they had reservations about their candidate.

"There was not much enthusiasm for the candidates. A lot of people just had a terribly difficult time making up their minds," and those that couldn't, didn't vote, said Hamilton.

Bush and Gore had image problems they couldn't shake. Doubts about Bush's capability, intelligence, and maturity began a year before the vote with the notorious "pop quiz" on the names of foreign leaders - and they persist even now. A CBS News Poll conducted the weekend after Gore conceded the election to his GOP rival found doubts about who will be in charge in a Bush presidency. By 46-43, respondents thought "other people" - not Bush - will really be running the government most of the time.

Gore was seen as qualified, but not likable. As the campaign year wore on, the vice president relied more on wife Tipper, his adult children, and running mate Joe Lieberman to humanize him. The Bush campaign said Gore was ruthless and untruthful and it worked. In exit polls, 74 percent of voters thought Gore would say anything to get elected.

Economy
In exit polls, half of voters said their own financial situation was better than the year before - 38 percent said the same and only 11 percent said worse.

"Al Gore should not have been in a close race. In a time of peace and prosperity, the electoral winds in his sails. Every (political scientist's) model said he should win comfortably. That's the puzzle," said Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who studied the campaigns' and parties' ads.

DiVall and Hamilton say more people give credit to Alan Greenspan than to Al Gore (or Bill Clinton) for the economy. DiVall said voters never saw Gore as having made a "direct contribution" to the economy, plus investors' enthusiasm for rewarding the Clinton-Gore team may have been dampened in the last four months before the vote when their stocks and 401(k)'s slipped.

The University of California-Berkeley's Bruce Cain also wondered, "Did Gore run away from the economy in his desire to separate himself from Clinton?" And Cain offered a hypothesis: that Gore's potential for benefiting from the strong economy was overestimated in the first place, then hurt by rising gas prices and stock market volatility.

After McCain, A Vacuum
The McCain phenomenon of the primary season suggested a latent mainstream protest vote to be mined, but neither Bush nor Gore tapped it.

Bush called himself a "reformer with results", but people didn't buy it. For starters, he opposed McCain's campaign finance reform bill. Gore promised the bill would be the first piece of legislation he would send to Congress as president, but he had no crediblity on the issue because of the Buddhist temple fiasco and "no controlling legal authority."

Both men were too much machine, too little maverick to wear McCain's mantle. But more seriously, they failed to inspire with crusades of their own. And neither Bush nor Gore adopted a justice issue that people could get excited about.

They answered questions about racial profiling when asked, but neither man adopted it as his cause. Gore soft-pedaled his pro-gun control views because they might cost him in important states (e.g., Pennsylvania), and they did anyway (e.g.,West Virginia). And when Gore took a stand against the marketing of violent and exploitative media to children, he didn't push too hard.

After a government report revealed that entertainment companies were marketing inappropriate content directly to kids, Gore and Lieberman gave the entertainment companies six months to "clean up their act," then went to a $6.5 million dollar celebrity fundraiser with the scolded executives and winked, laughing about the issue.

Harvard's Sandel thinks Bush and Gore failed to engage the hard questions of the time: globalization, and its effects on American community, economics, and even nationhood - and anxiety about the erosion of moral values. He saw "hints and glimmers" of these issues, but only in the Nader and Pat Buchanan campaigns.

And Sandel pointed to public calm (or indifference) in the face of commentators' wild-eyed predictions that popular unrest would develop during the drawn-out Florida recount fight as evidence the American people felt "nothing terribly fateful was at stake" in a tossup between Bush and Gore.

The ennui can be measured in voter participation which was only two percent higher in 2000 than it was in 1996 for the ho-hum Clinton-Dole race, and four points lower than 1992 when Clinton challenged the 12 year-old reign of Reagan and Bush's father.

The chattering class thinks if Gore wants to run again in 2004 he should spend the next few years leading some kind of a reform movement, perhaps an electoral reform initiative to modernize ballots and address black voters' complaints about access to the polls, as was seen in Florida.

If the country is still evenly split next time, perhaps the Republican and Democratic nominees - whoever they may be - should take a page from Nader and McCain, who demonstrated that if politicians talk straight, new votes will follow.