Who Will Grab Gold In 2000?

CBS News Senior Political Editor Dotty Lynch takes a look at how the race for the White House may unfold in 2000. Don't bet the farm on what the pundits predict will happen.

Gore was efficiently clearing the Democratic field - Gephardt, the two Kerr(e)ys, Jackson, and Wellstone all stopped exploring and Gore was deemed inevitable. On the Republican side, it looked like Bush could face some bothersome competition from the earlier heir apparent, Dan Quayle, that Elizabeth Dole might light a fire under some Republican women, and that Lamar Alexander, who had practically taken up residency in Iowa and shedded his plaid shirt, might just make some headway this time.

Everyone assumed Steve Forbes would spend his megabucks going negative again and Pat Buchanan would galvanize the right. Two mavericks, John McCain and Bill Bradley, were seen as interesting but too contrarian to be taken seriously. At year's end, things look quite different. The field that has now been cleared is the Republican one with McCain - on the basis of "earned" rather than paid media, presenting a formidable challenge to Bush.

Conventional wisdom gets a bad rap - but seems likely to survive into the 21st century. My colleague Eric Engberg says that one great thing about being reporters is that when we predict something incorrectly, rather than be held up to shame, we get rewarded. The bad forecasts become big upsets and give us an even better story. With that as a caution, let's take a look at the race today and try to anticipate some of the flashpoints coming up in the next few months.

As we start the year, events will unfold at breakneck speed. In the first 10 days of January. there are five debates (two in New Hampshire, one each in Iowa, South Carolina and Michigan). The front-loaded calendar became even more compressed when Iowa and New Hampshire - in order to preserve their first-in-the-nation status - went to Jan. 24 and Feb. 1 respectively.

Almost all the candidates are running new ads this week, competing with Christmas and the millennium. In Iowa, the Democratic race is about to get fierce. Word from the Bradley camp is that in January they are planning to spend almost $1 million on TV in Iowa, a state that used to be won on field organization. The Bradley campaign's thinking is that if they can give Gore a scare in Iowa and then take him in New Hampshire, it will propel them into the March mega-Tuesday primaries.

Gore, however, is playing by the old tried-and-true play book, planning to start the year with a lead in delegates before any votes are cast. With his huge advantage in "superdelegates" (party regulars and member of Congress who commit early but are free to change teir minds), they are hoping media outlets will show him with an early advantage (as many as 500 for Gore to about 20 for Bradley).

This worked for both Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984. The current generation of Gore delegate-counters is being advised to do the same thing.

The Republican side is a little less focused on Iowa than it used to be, mainly because Bush's strongest competitor - John McCain - isn't playing there. McCain has the wrong position on Ethanol for Iowa (he's anti-subsidies) and, against the advice of all the CWs, he decided to dip his oar into South Carolina, a state with a large number of veterans. Many predicted that he'd be out of the news if he skipped Iowa but that is one problem McCain doesn't have. The media can't get enough of candid, comfortable John and the South Carolina Republican debate on Jan. 7 is likely to get as much, if not more, attention than the first Republican debate in Iowa on Jan. 15. Once again McCain and the media are in synch. The average high temperature in Iowa in January is 28; in South Carolina, it is 55.

If Gore was blindsided by Bradley, the vaunted Bush campaign with it's unbelievable early money and endorsements, seems to have forgotten about the quirky voters in New Hampshire. Bush skipped the first two New Hampshire debates, telling WMUR anchor Karen Brown in an interview that her station shouldn't complain because his campaign had dropped a wad of money in ads.

The voters in New Hampshire, however, were not satisfied and started to respond to the Arizona senator who charmed them with 45 days of personal campaigning. He shook hands with almost everyone, including Bill Bradley. In January, Bush will have to divide his time between Iowa and New Hampshire (with that brief stop in South Carolina) but has promised to make amends to the New Hampshire voters by spending at least 15 days there before the Feb. 1 primary.

Steve Forbes, who is the king of ads, continued the pattern this year by spending at least $8 million. But Forbes surprised (and some say, disappointed) the handicappers by staying positive. Forbes was stung by claims that he was responsible for Dole's demise in '96 and refrained from doing the same to Bush this time.

Still, Forbes is stuck at 5 percent in national polls and picks up only 22 percent of the voters to Bush's 49 percent in Iowa. And he seems to be inching his way back to becoming the old basher from '96. To try to siphon off some religious right voters, Forbes has also made a course correction from the last campaign, when he mostly avoided social issues in favor of his flat tax. He's hired Pat Buchanan's old public relations firm and signed up a number of anti-abortion and pro-gun conservatives in the early primary states.

Forbes faces competition for these voters from two more entrenched religious conservatives, the fiery moralist Alan Keyes and family values champion Gary Bauer. Keyes wound up with 7 percent of thvotes in the Iowa GOP caucuses in '96 and his performance in the early debates has earned him a bit of notice. The other conservative in the race, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, says he's running a skinny cat campaign. The odds are long for him, but he's managed to remind those who are watching that he has an acerbic wit as well as a sappy songwriter's soul.

The other major piece of conventional wisdom for the presidential nominating year was that we would know the nominees by March 14. By then, states casting 71 percent of the Democratic votes and 67 percent of the GOP ballots will have voted. But if the Bradley and McCain challenges are successful, we may be going off to new lands in April and May and even June.

By then, the Reform Party will be about to kick off its nominating process, which allows members to vote by mail or on the Internet for candidates who are able to qualify in 29 states where the Reform party is not automatically on the ballot. So while the others are debating in South Carolina and California, think of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump going door-to-door in places like Arkansas, West Virginia and Wyoming to get their petitions signed.

The month of August, in which all three parties hold their conventions, (the Republicans in Philadelphia, the Reform Party in Long Beach and the Democrats in Los Angeles) could actually produce some news!

We'll know soon how the conventional wisdom fares. But don't be surprised if no admits he was wrong. Just another blockbuster set of UPSETS!!!

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