The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

Politics, Bill Clinton has explained, is like football. Elaborate strategies are crafted in advance, but execution and stamina trump planning and practice. Reality defies theory, confusion reigns, new tactics are implemented on the spot. At some moments, the best defense is a good offense; at others, the best offense is a good defense. In both battles, the winners are hailed as professionals and the losers are derided as amateurs -- and for more elections than the Democrats care to recall, the Republicans have been the professionals. Until now. With the G.O.P. convention only two weeks away, the Republican incumbents are acting like amateurs and the Democrats are performing almost flawlessly. "We've finally met our match," says a senior Bush aide. "Clinton punches and counterpunches like a Republican -- and worst of all, he obviously understands how important it is to strike back in the same news cycle. So far, nothing we've thrown at him has gone unanswered by the evening news broadcasts."

Which is no accident. "You know how, in college football, coaches let up on * the other team to spare them embarrassment?" Clinton asked. "Pros don't do that. You never let up. You keep scoring till the game's over. You hit back, and you hit back again. If you don't, you lose."

No incident better illustrates the Democrats' ability to counterpunch than last week's attack on Clinton by Bush's Southern campaign chairman, South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell. At a Washington press conference last Wednesday, Campbell blasted Clinton's Arkansas record and reiterated the G.O.P.'s standard line: Clinton's a closet liberal who favors "tax and spend all the way." Thanks to the news wires, Campbell's pending appearance had been noted in Little Rock, and thanks to Betsey Wright, Clinton's former gubernatorial chief of staff, the Democrats struck back even before Campbell spoke. Wright has collected just about everything anyone has ever said about Clinton (a research task that required poring through 1,200 boxes of Clinton's papers), and as journalists listened to Campbell's thrust, they had in their hands Clinton's two-pronged parry: a January 1989 letter in which Campbell praised Arkansas' "innovative ways," designed to make the South "more internationally competitive," and an August 1989 newspaper article in which Campbell said Clinton's "not one of those liberals. He's not a radical." "We got our clocks cleaned on that one," says a Bush aide. "We expected a nice sound bite that evening. We got bitten instead."

The Clinton camp considers its Campbell rejoinder "simple stuff." True elegance was on display last Wednesday, when Clinton visited New Orleans, the site of Bush's 1988 "Read my lips" pledge. The centerpiece of the G.O.P. strategy is hardly mysterious. Two words, values and trust, symbolize Bush's attempt to portray Clinton as publicly "too slick" and privately "too loose" to be President. Until last week, when Clinton finally found a way to expand the definition of those words to his benefit, his responses had been less than satisfying. On Tuesday the Administration's Budget Director, Richard Darman, told a congressional hearing that everyone but the White House should be blamed for the nation's sagging economy. After learning of Darman's remarks, Clinton's chief strategist, James Carville, fairly screamed, "That's the hook we need!" So the very next day in the Louisiana Superdome, Clinton attacked Bush for failing the ultimate values test -- the willingness to assume responsibility for one's own shortcomings. "That was some piece of work," says a Bush campaign official, "and I'm sure we'll be hearing more in the same vein. We're trying to remind people of Clinton's sordid past, and he's saying the President lacks the guts to face his own complicity for what's wrong. We look cheap, and Clinton looks presidential."

Where does all this leave Bush? In a deep hole. After the 1988 campaign, then G.O.P. chairman Lee Atwater said, "The ticket of admission to play in the ((general election)) game with a chance to win meant we had to hold Dukakis' lead to under 10 points at the time our own convention began. Anything worse, and we'd likely lose." By this standard, Bush is flirting with disaster; the latest polls have Clinton ahead by at least 20 points. "At the rate we're going we may end up having to do the McGovern spot," says a Republican consultant. At the end of his disastrous 1972 campaign, George McGovern ran a TV commercial in which a conflicted citizen considered his choice in the voting booth: "Either way it won't be a disaster," the man muttered to himself. "So I'll be voting for Nixon. Why rock the boat? I'm not crazy about McGovern . . . But me vote for Nixon? . . . My father would roll over in his grave . . . Maybe McGovern can do the job . . . Yeah, McGovern."

"Sometimes," says the G.O.P. consultant, "all you've got is the 'lesser of two evils' argument. McGovern did it kind of nicely." Yes, he did, but he lost.