POLITICAL WRAP

December 3, 1999
		Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot discuss the December 2 presidential debate featuring all six leading Republican candidates.

Online Forum: What issues do you think should shape election 2000? Nov. 11, 1999: A campaign snapshot with George W. Bush Oct. 28, 1999: Bill Bradley and Al Gore engage in a town meeting. Oct. 22, 1999: One-on-one with Bill Bradley. Sept. 9, 1999: The Post's Thomas Edsall on the Bradley campaign. Sept. 1, 1999: The Post's Dan Balz on the McCain campaign July 9, 1999: Shields & Gigot examine Hillary Clinton's run for Senate. July 6, 1999: NewsHour regulars discuss the Hillary Clinton exploratory committee. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the Politics and Campaigns. Browse past Political Wraps	JIM LEHRER: Mark, George W. Bush clearly was the man on the spot last night because this was the first time with the other candidates. How did he do -- overview -- in your opinion? MARK SHIELDS: Well, he was the man on the spot. A good spot it was for him. I mean, the format, which we saw in condensed version here, you were insulated. There weren't asked questions back-and-forth between the candidates. You were insulated. There was time between answers and so forth. So it was tough to really land a punch. And I think in that sense it was a format that worked for him. I thought he did well in the sense, Jim, that he was -- he had his script down. I don't mean that pejoratively. He knew what he was going to say. Everybody goes into it with a strategy. Maybe he had it down too pat, because instead of simply returning a theme, he returned exact language several times. JIM LEHRER: Exact language that he had used before. MARK SHIELDS: In other debates, yes. JIM LEHRER: What did you think, overview? PAUL GIGOT: He was adequate but barely so. The conventional wisdom is that he didn't make a mistake and therefore helped himself but I think that when you're the front-runner you, when you think a lot of people think you may be the next president, you have to reach a little higher standard. JIM LEHRER: What is that high standard?
	The presidential standard
	PAUL GIGOT: Well, he seemed a little too programmed to me, too controlled, too scripted, as Mark kind of suggested. I think he was trying to sit on his lead obviously and not make a mistake. He was sitting on his personality and his vision. His answers were so clipped and so short, it looked like he wanted to get out of there from the minute he was there. He has got to relax a little bit, be a little bit more expansive and share with people what it is he actually wants to accomplish. There was an awful lot of "I" as well in his answers. "I know how to lead." Don't tell us you know how to lead. Show us where you want to lead us. JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that? MARK SHIELDS: That is a good point. The other good point where I thought he did deliver the knock to Mr. Forbes on raising the Social Security retirement age -- I thought that was well done. And I thought it was well done in a couple of respects. One, he did it very easily. He did it in a way that said look, "I'm serious." You're going to take a punch at me, pal, I'm not Gandhi. I'm not going to stand here and just take a punch. I'm coming back at you. Secondly, he did it in a way that did not affect negatively the tone or tenor of the evening. I mean, it was just kind of done as a matter of fact. JIM LEHRER: Just by reading Forbes' words. MARK SHIELDS: By reading Forbes' words. The one thing about the 11th largest -- this is a straight steal from Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 -- Ronald Reagan didn't know what was going on in the world -- if California were a separate entity, it be the sixth largest Gross National Product in the world. George Bush has Texas as the 11th. I checked today, Jim. South Korea is tenth. Do you think George Bush knows what's ninth? JIM LEHRER: I'm not touching that one. What about McCain? Going in, all you pundits said that McCain also had some things he would have to prove if he wanted to move even closer to Bush, he had to do well last night. Did he?
	McCain makes some headway?
	PAUL GIGOT: My guess is McCain helped himself here. I mean on matters of personality he was more relaxed. He tried some humor. Some worked, some didn't. But he tried. The "Weekend at Bernie's" worked pretty well. JIM LEHRER: Unscripted humor? PAUL GIGOT: Well, I'm not sure it was unscripted. JIM LEHRER: That's not a fair question. I'm sorry. PAUL GIGOT: It came off a little better. He was more relaxed. He has a fluency on foreign policy clearly that none of the other candidates do. I mean, he worked on Chechnya, gave a really good solid answer that he didn't look like he was reading from cue cards. I think his weakness right now is some domestic policy -- because he kind of has a big bang theory of domestic policy, which is if you pass campaign finance reform, all of our problems will somehow be much easier and much more solvable. I think that's a vulnerability. He's not as fluent on those issues as he is on foreign policy. But I think his demeanor, his presence probably helped him. JIM LEHRER: What do you think? MARK SHIELDS: He's right on campaign finance reform, of course. JIM LEHRER: We've been through that many times, guys. MARK SHIELDS: Let me say -- he appealed to idealism, to the young people, I thought as I worked for him very strongly the sense to motivate young people -- to heal the breach between the American people and the government I thought was good. I thought his appeal to independents -- his identification with Barry Goldwater, Morris Udall, the temper question turned to his advantage, independent, these are the things that make me angry. I thought all of that worked but I thought there was something missing in John McCain last night. I think, in the final analysis last night Jim, a campaign is about differences. And for the first time last night I got the feeling that John McCain was very comfortable with George W. Bush. I mean, it almost seemed like a love-in at times between them. George W. Bush put in that line, and that was a programmed line about Senator McCain is a "good man" because why? The allegations that his allies and supporters have been dropping a dime, poisoning the well about John McCain that somehow he's unstable, wouldn't make a good President because he spent five-and-a-half years in Hanoi - and George W. Bush was going to inoculate himself against any of those charges. And I just didn't think that John McCain knew the kind of differences that were necessary in a race where he still is very much the underdog.
	Establishing differences
	JIM LEHRER: You're talking a policy differences -- personality differences? MARK SHIELDS: Policy differences between himself say -- this is where Governor Bush and I disagree. PAUL GIGOT: Let me give a good example. Internet taxation, for example, he is for a permanent ban. George W. Bush thinking like a governor is not. McCain mentioned that issue. He didn't mention that George Bush's position is different from his. So if you didn't know -- if you weren't doomed to do this for a living like I am, you wouldn't know that. And he didn't take that opportunity. JIM LEHRER: What about this temper issue, Paul? Is it hurting McCain? Is it ever going to go away? I mean, is it just part of what he has to deal with? PAUL GIGOT: I think it's part of what he has to deal with. I thought he handled it well last night, but I think there are certain stereotypes that were formed about candidates that the media gets in their heads, are not going to let go. That's the one forming about John McCain. The one that's formed about George Bush that he's going to have to resist is he's not smart enough for the job. So he's going to get questions like tier two desulfurization standards in Houston which no sane individual would know anything about. MARK SHIELDS: You can do the temper, you can do it in terms of Dwight Eisenhower had a hell of a temper -- and Harry Truman had a hell of a temper. I'll take them as President. You can't answer the lightweight. I mean, you can't say I'm reading a lot of books. PAUL GIGOT: No. But you can show mastery. MARK SHIELDS: That's right but I think it becomes a tougher thing to deal with. I wondered if the temper charges against John McCain maybe inhibited him a little bit last night from drawing the differences. JIM LEHRER: Because he didn't want to show... MARK SHIELDS: Didn't want to show any meanness. I don't know. JIM LEHRER: What about the other candidates? Did any of them make a dent in the kind of Bush-McCain tandem? PAUL GIGOT: I don't know if they shook either of these two from their pedestals but I think that Gary Bauer, as a debater and as a speaker was the most articulate man on the stage. I thought that his answer on abortion which we excerpted was about as civilized and reasonable and eloquent a statement that anti-abortion cause could have. And he probably helped himself with those voters in Iowa for whom that is a very important subject. Steve Forbes, I thought, was... scored some points on taxes, as you would expect him to do - but, boy, he stepped into it on that question about the eligibility age and George Bush really hurt him with it.
	Bauer scores points
	JIM LEHRER: What do you think? MARK SHIELDS: I thought Gary Bauer had a coherent world view and I thought he presented it well. I agree with Paul. He was quite articulate. He almost seems perhaps to have established himself as the conscience. He's going to remind the Republican Party in that sense. I thought Steve Forbes, you can always tell with the second day story of the debate. He was hurting today on that exchange with Governor Bush. So he charged today that Governor Bush at least in the 70s, he, Steve Forbes was writing editorials. We don't know what Governor Bush was doing in the 70s, of course, -- sort of a very, very subtle pitch on perhaps the alleged drug use. I mean I think that Forbes felt that he was hurt by the performance last night. PAUL GIGOT: The problem with Forbes is that critique of Bush wasn't authentic because in 1996, he was the one who put Social Security reform on the table and got beat up for the issue demagogued by Bob Dole. Forbes. JIM LEHRER: Forbes did. PAUL GIGOT: Now this time George Bush is putting it on the stable and Steve Forbes is saying look, it doesn't sound real. JIM LEHRER: All right. We've got to go. And that is real. Thank you both.