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| CAMPAIGN COUNTDOWN | |
 October 10, 2000  |
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Exactly four weeks before Election Day, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush are neck-and-neck in the tightest presidential race since 1960.
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GWEN IFILL: Now three veteran political reporters assess the state
of play. Exactly four weeks until Election Day and on the eve of the second
presidential debate. David Broder of The Washington Post, Tom Oliphant
of The Boston Globe, and David Brooks of The Weekly Standard.
David Brooks, we heard in Kwame Holman's piece that prescription drugs
is the flavor of the month for Republicans and Democrats. But who's winning
that fight?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it's not clear. The Republicans seem to be in a
state of their own personal hell up there on Capitol Hill, what's striking
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| Chaos, and confused voters | |||||||||||
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GWEN IFILL: David Broder, we've heard the Democrats try to take credit for prescription drugs on Capitol Hill for yea, these many months. And it could also be interpreted that they failed to get what they wanted. Or did they?
GWEN IFILL: Tom, we just saw the two candidates kind of giving each other the old back and forth there, but the state of the race seems to be so chaotic, so crazy, I read somewhere today where they said this was like a Jim Carey film fest, "Dumb and Dumber" versus "Liar, Liar." TOM OLIPHANT: Well, yes, what's... for so many people involved in this
campaign this year, it's been a long time since anybody experienced
a close election. Close elections are close. They go back and forth.
They are confusing. That's the nature of the beast. But I think you
saw, even in GWEN IFILL: David Brooks, I spent the weekend in Pennsylvania where all the voters told me they were simply confused. Is that the chaotic fallout from this campaign? DAVID BROOKS: I'm totally confused myself. I don't know what the heck is going on. Bush goes up, Gore goes up, a butterfly flaps its wings in the rain forest and Bush goes up another four points. I can't predict what's going to happen in the future. I can't even predict what's going to happen in the past. You know, we had a surge. I don't know why it happened. And we have these post-hoc explanations. I don't think any of them are very convincing. The striking thing about what's happening in this race is the detached voters. I've been doing a lot of non-political stories over the past few weeks, going around the country, and asking people about politics. And one of the things that strikes me is how low it is on people's radar screen. The election is happening as if across a crowded restaurant on television or across a crowded nursery school. And I think this detached electorate, more detached than I think we've really ever seen before, is whimsical, and the results could be that no matter who wins, there'll be a very muddled mandate because there will be almost no forum to the election, and that would really be a recipe for the sort of gridlock we've seen now, cubed. GWEN IFILL: Dave Broder, you've been traveling a lot too. Have you been picking up on the same thing?
GWEN IFILL: Not wishful thinking on your part, you don't think? TOM OLIPHANT: I see it a little differently. And I'd maybe make a division here, because I think David Brooks is on to something. The partisans, you can sense, are engaged now -- people who have followed this to a certain extent, people perhaps who have made up their minds -- and that you can now see and feel and go to and -- my venue in the last several days has been the Ohio River valley. But the people who may end up deciding this election, who are not strongly tied to party or to candidate are the people who have other things on their minds, still. The fall, their education, their own lives, their own social lives. It is very hard to, say, go to a shopping mall and easily engage people in political conversation. DAVID BRODER: Gwen, there's a connection between the two pieces that you had on before our discussion began. To the extent that what comes out of this session of Congress is gridlock the public is not going be able to say it's the Democrats' fault or the Republicans' fault. But because Governor Bush has really made a major theme of his claim that he is the kind of leader who can enlist support from both parties, I think gridlock works to his advantage.
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| The vice presidential candidates | |||||||||||
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GWEN IFILL: Dave Brooks, let's talk about the vice presidential candidates. They had a very gentlemanly debate, by all accounts. They shook hands; they smiled; they kissed each other's wives. And then they went out on the campaign trail and went on the attack. DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I'm coming out in favor of the Cheney-Lieberman
ticket. That's my ticket, and I'm supporting them all the way. Listen,
I was tremendously disturbed by the debate and by the GWEN IFILL: Tomorrow night we have the second big presidential debate, what do you think has to happen and what do you imagine these guys are going to try to do, David Brooks? DAVID BROOKS: One thing Gore cannot do is tell a lie. If he does, we're almost in a Gary Hart situation where we dared him to tell us a lie and he told us a lie. That would really be catastrophic. The rest I think is really personality - you know, this detached electorate we're talking about -- I really think people are looking at it as a personality sense, trying to get a sense of which candidate has an intuitive feel for the country, not so much on the issues, because those are relatively clear cut, but which one is in tune with the times. And I think it's really the projection of personality more than anything else tomorrow night that will really determine how it plays. GWEN IFILL: That's interesting, because George W. Bush is on the air with ads that talk about trust and integrity. Maybe that's more of doing what David Brooks is talking about, which is just more of a personality issue than an issues issue. Do you think that works? DAVID BRODER: I think if either of these men is capable of kind of rising above the back and forth on health care, or education and so on, which has become inexplicable to most people, and begins to draw a picture of where he thinks this country is and where it ought to be at the end of two terms of his presidency, I think to use the cliché, the "vision thing" could be very powerful at this point.
GWEN IFILL: Full circle back to Kwame's piece for a moment, do you think it matters at all in this fall election which Congress does or doesn't do? TOM OLIPHANT: Not at all. As David said a second ago, there's no blame
that falls easily on one or the other shoulder here. And I think Republicans
who are defending on some of these issues like prescription drugs are
d GWEN IFILL: How about that, David Broder? DAVID BRODER: I think gridlock plays into Bush's hands, in part because President Clinton in his interview with Joe Klein in the "New Yorker" for the first time that I'm aware of, acknowledged that it was Monica and the year of scandal that broke the momentum of the budget agreement of '97 and stopped them from agreeing on Social Security and Medicare. GWEN IFILL: Okay. David Brooks, really quickly. DAVID BROOKS: I agree it plays to Bush's hands. And that's a surprise, because the issue map favors the Democrats. The people agree with the Democrats more. But on the issue of bipartisanship, which is not a real issue, they seem to favor Bush more. GWEN IFILL: Gentlemen, thank you all very much.
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from that report and the last few months is the way they spend so much
of their time having lost the issue agenda, avoiding issues one way
or the other, really in a state of almost panic. They really haven't
recovered from Newt Gingrich from five years ago. They haven't recovered
from that defeat. When you transition from the Capitol Hill over to
the presidential race, you see really a tremendous contrast between
the House Republicans, who really are almost playing defense, and Bush,
who really has to his credit given us something which is post- Gingrich,
which doesn't say "Government is the enemy. Government can never
be the solution." He says, "Government can be the friend,
can be the supporter," not in the big way that Al Gore wants. But
it's a more affirmative use of limited and energetic government that
Bush has brought to the stump and really helped move the Republicans
past what we're seeing on Capitol Hill, which is pure defensiveness.
DAVID
BRODER: Well, I don't think they think they failed. They want the issue,
and they have made it very clear, really, months ago that they were
not prepared to compromise at all with the Republicans, because they
wanted to campaign on this issue. I think, by and large, the issue is
working for them. Although in a couple of states, in Michigan and in
Montana, where it looked as if the Democratic challengers for the Senate
were really cashing in on the prescription drug issue, the Republican
incumbents have fought back, and I think have made some hay now at the
expense of their opponents. 
these
little clips just now, how the two sides are not just approaching tomorrow
night, but I think the last four weeks of the campaign. I think Vice
President Gore, you know, it's no sighs, no lies, no wise guys. And
I think it's a sober discussion of issues at the risk of being boring.
I think what you're hearing from Governor Bush, and you've heard it
a little bit from Tennessee, is a kind of momentum campaigning. And
I've sensed this change in the last few days, sensing that the campaign
had shifted to him a little bit in the last few days, to try to push
that perhaps further than it can really go. So they're quite different
right now. But nothing changes the closeness of this race no matter
how hard we try. 
DAVID
BRODER: There has been a very reluctant growth, I think, in the public
attention to this. The night after the... or the day after the last
debate, I was up in Wisconsin, and for the first time with either of
these candidates, I saw people who had come out to see them pass on
the road, had brought their children. And that was a little reminiscent
of that very close election... my first election in 1960. So I'm beginning
to think perhaps the voters are going to tune in just because of the
closeness of the election. 
campaign,
not by the attacks. I think that's a fair part of politics. It's certainly
a fair part of the job of being a vice presidential nominee. But the
fact that the two men seemed to me so superior to the two men at the
top of the ticket makes me think we really have to take a look at the
primary process, the way the party establishments now seem to cohere
around a candidate before anybody has a chance to vote and look at them;
and the fact that no sensible person wants to go through the process.
And to me, that's something we have to talk about after the election,
but something that really was illuminated by the whole situation with
the two tremendously qualified vice presidential candidates. 
TOM
OLIPHANT: But the Bush version of it, I think, would be basically, "I
can bridge these differences. And here in outline form are my thoughts
and how it can happen." That is his strongest moment tomorrow night,
I am positive. For Gore, it's a little tougher to gently nudge the public
to make a choice. In the cut that you were showing a second ago, he
went further, and I think offered a sample of what will happen tomorrow
night. And that's where he says, "Look, you can have, for example,
universal preschool for every child in this country, or you can reduce
the top two income tax rates." You can't do both. You must choose.
And I think it's possible to say that in a conversational tone without
lying or sighing.
oing
very well.