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| POLITICAL WRAP
OCTOBER 25, 1996TRANSCRIPT |
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Time seems to be running out for the Dole campaign. The NewsHour's political analysts Mark Shields and Mark Gigot discuss what they see as the major flaws in the Republican candidate's campaign and what may be the real issue of this election year -- money.
First, on Kerry-Weld, Mark, you are a native of Massachusetts.
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: I am.
JIM LEHRER: And Mike Barnicle--you said that with great pride.
MARK SHIELDS: I am.
PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: It explains a lot, by the way.
JIM LEHRER: Yes, it does. Never mind. But Mike Barnicle used the word to Margaret, "fun." Is that race as much fun as it appears many hundreds of miles away?
MARK SHIELDS: It’s a good race. It really is. I mean, there are probably very few Senate races
in the country that will end with both candidates having favorable ratings from the voters on election day, and I think this is one. I mean, both John Kerry has a more than positive rating from his services as Senator. Bill Weld has a high rating, his service as governor. I thought the Jim Hughes question in Margaret’s piece about why should I vote for Bill Weld to send him to Washington when he’s a governor whom I like. And somebody said to me, and when I asked about the race, they said that the only way you could keep both of them there, if you like both of them, is to vote for Kerry, because that keeps Weld as governor and Kerry in the Senate. Do you want to replace him? But it is a fascinating race. They’re both quick; they’re agile; they’re articulate.
JIM LEHRER: Does it have any meaning beyond Massachusetts, Paul, do you think?
PAUL GIGOT: Well it would if Bill Weld got down here, I think, to Washington, he would because of his ideological profile on the cultural issues, you know, there are a lot of--
JIM LEHRER: You mean pro-choice.
PAUL GIGOT: Pro-choice and pro gay rights and--
JIM LEHRER: Yeah.
PAUL GIGOT: --he would--
MARK SHIELDS: He would carry him.
JIM LEHRER: He might have to--somebody said he might have to sit outside the room of the--of the Republican Caucus in some issue.
PAUL GIGOT: You can almost say the Democratic voters can’t lose, because if Kerry wins, they get the vote, and if Weld goes, they get a thorn in the side of the Republican Caucus in the Senate. I think there are a couple of interesting things about the race. I went up there and covered it. One is the power of personality, which is something that Republicans and Newt Gingrich forgot this year. It’s very important in politics, and Weld has it. He’s got some life. He seems to be enjoying it--doesn’t take himself too seriously, he shouldn’t be in the race, given the Democratic profile in this state. I think registration is like three times more Democrats than Republicans. And the other thing that’s interesting to me is that taxes are working for Weld, and I think they don’t seem to be
working for Bob Dole as an issue.
JIM LEHRER: You mean as an issue.
PAUL GIGOT: The tax cut issue. But I think that one of the reasons is because Weld has credibility on the issue. His time in the executive branch he’s never violated his no new taxes pledge, and he’s cut taxes, and--
JIM LEHRER: So you believe him?
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah. Okay. When you support the Dole--he makes the case for the Dole tax cut better than Dole does.
JIM LEHRER: All right. To the national thing, Mark, what do you make of Bob Dole’s approach through his campaign manager to Ross Perot, why don’t you bow out and endorse me?
MARK SHIELDS: I think, Jim, when you’re in a trailing campaign, and Bob Dole’s in a trailing campaign, and time’s running out, there is a bias in favor of action. There’s a bias in favor of doing something. The--you’re like this. You’re going to lose. Time’s running out on you. So someone comes in with an idea. And--
JIM LEHRER: Why not try this?
MARK SHIELDS: Why not try this? And so the other side--what’s the rebuttal? It’s going to cost
us Illinois, you know, we’re 22 points behind in Illinois. It’s going to cost us Wisconsin. We just pulled our television out of Wisconsin. So I think in a strange way I think it’s going to work for Bob Dole because it gave Ross Perot what he hadn’t had, which is oxygen, I mean, the microphone and the spotlight, and Ross Perot makes the case better on campaign finance and the excesses and wrong doing of the White House and the Democratic campaign of 1996 far better than Bob Dole can because Bob Dole’s up to his elbows.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Well, we ran last night on this program a long hunk of Perot’s speech at the National Press Club. It was right, right on against Clinton.
PAUL GIGOT: He torched him. I mean, he explained the Indonesian connection which Bob Dole made one of his flip, whatever, references during the debate that I’m sure, you know, maybe one percent of the public even knew where Indonesia was, much less what this whole issue is about.
And Perot might do that. I disagree with Mark about whether this was, this was a smart move. I don’t know that you want to elevate somebody who’s 5 percent in the polls at this juncture. The argument in the Dole campaign was well, look, Perot might want to avoid humiliation because he got 19 percent last time. If we go to him, maybe he’ll withdraw. I’m not so sure he wouldn’t have withdrawn even without any coaxing because what they did was they gave him the microphone, they gave him the megaphone again, and now he’s back--
JIM LEHRER: That oxygen kept him alive you mean.
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah.
JIM LEHRER: So you think it was possible that he might actually withdraw.
PAUL GIGOT: I think--look, he’s impossible to predict. If you’re talking about where he was in the poll now at 5 percent, had been at 5 percent versus 19, if he gets 5 percent on election day, it’s going to be seen as a humiliation, I think.
MARK SHIELDS: 1992, Jim, Ross Perot pulled out on the eve of the Democrat convention, and his life from that point forward, once it settled in, instead of being known as billionaire entrepreneur, patriot, POW, MIA, save Texas public schools, it was Ross Perot, quitter, was to repeal that. That’s what got him back in the race. He was not going to pull out of this race, in my judgment, and face that same--that humiliation of being a quitter again. I think what, what Ross Perot in a strange way, not to change the race, could be the vice presidential candidate that Bob Dole never had. You know, what Bob Dole in the final analysis really wanted on the ticket with him was another Bob Dole--a young, tough, mean Bob Dole. I mean, Jack Kemp--Jack Kemp is not that. All right. Remember what Perot did in ‘92? He made the case for change against George Bush. I mean, the status quo was unacceptable in 1992. You--the only way you’re going to vote against Bill Clinton in 1992 after you heard Perot’s argument was that somehow his character was so defective or so unacceptable to you, I mean, because there was no reason after Perot had finished with him to vote for George Bush, so I think--I think in that sense he--you know, why not--why not roll the dice?
JIM LEHRER: Why not roll the dice? Paul, what about the other thing that, that they talked
about it earlier with, with Elizabeth, the earlier group did, but this new thing of Dole’s this week, where’s the outrage in America? I mean, he said it today several times, he said it again yesterday. Is that going to work?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, nothing seems to work. I tend to think that the Dole campaign has made a fundamental misjudgment right from the start and that they have tried to outmaneuver tactically the greatest tactical politician that I’ve ever seen, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is all about tactics. He’s all about maneuvering and slicing and making distinctions and finessing things. Dole is trying to do--so it’s one week it’s taxes--well, that doesn’t seem to be working, let’s get off it--the next week it’s drugs. Then they’ll try character, but that doesn’t seem to be working. Then we’ll go after the media. Then we’ll try something else, maybe we’ll see if Perot will--well, you can’t beat Bill Clinton that way. If you’re going to beat Bill Clinton, you have a strategy, you have to go right at it, you have keep pounding away and pounding away and pounding away at some themes that people actually begin to say, yeah, he means it. And they resonate, and Clinton’s the guy who begins to look a little bit too cute. Instead, the Dole campaign seems to try to beat Clinton at his own game, and it hasn’t been working.
JIM LEHRER: Does it make sense to you?
JIM LEHRER: What is it Susan Garment quoted Gore Vidal "the chattering class," we’re part of the chattering class.
MARK SHIELDS: Yeah. I mean--go here, he’s gone there.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah.
MARK SHIELDS: Is he spending too much time in the Sunbelt, you know--I think what--if you look at the Dole campaign, Jim, the problem is that the central idea of the campaign, the tax cut, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, was more unpopular in August than it is in October. I mean, it’s just never caught. I mean, it’s--it has had all the appeal to the American electorate of flossing after meals. I mean, it just has not--it has not engaged.
JIM LEHRER: But what if he’d stayed on that, Paul?
PAUL GIGOT: That’s my point.
JIM LEHRER: Every day and never talked about anything else except that.
PAUL GIGOT: He’s put no muscle--zero in terms of positive ads behind it. They have dropped it. There has never been a consistent two- or three-week period, other than the convention, where they did do it, when they were popular. And Bob Shrum, a Democratic pollster--excuse me, consultant, not pollster--has observed that that’s when Bob Dole had his most--when he was closest to Bill Clinton. If you keep driving that and driving that--and that’s when I talked to the Dole strategists at the convention, that’s what they said they were going to drive, they were going to do a Christie Whitman campaign in New Jersey, when she drove the tax cut. It wasn’t popular. It wasn’t popular. It wasn’t popular. At the end people finally said, maybe she means it, and then it cuts for you. Instead, they’d gotten off it, and I think that people had just doubted his credibility on it.
MARK SHIELDS: He got off it because it’s not working, and it’s not working because he got off it. I mean, I honestly don’t think--I don’t think it was for Bob Dole in 1996, it was not a message that was plausible or compelling. There, there is a certain I think poetic justice in the fact that we’re concentrating the central subject of our campaign in the last couple of weeks is money because money has been central to the politics of 1996 all the way through, whether you’re talking about Steve Forbes coming in with his unlimited bank roll and really attacking Bob Dole and Bob Dole never really recovering from the negatives that were inflicted then, of Bob Dole running out of money, or Bill Clinton spending his own money you know, to, to advertise--the--
JIM LEHRER: Spent his own money but spending his campaign money, right?
MARK SHIELDS: His campaign money. I mean, his campaign money because he wasn’t challenged because Bill Clinton wasn’t challenged was because he raised all the money early, and the price of poker just went up so high that no challenger got in to challenge him in the Democratic primaries. The AFL-CIO’s money to--efforts to, to win the Congress--and so money has been the key to this election.
JIM LEHRER: And the Indonesia story that you mentioned earlier, it’s, it’s still there, and, and Dole complained again today about the fact that the press isn’t covering it, but everybody’s talking about it, but there’s no traction there yet, is there?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think that the problem is that Dole frankly I think made a blunder when he
JIM LEHRER: Well, he’s begun to do that the last couple of days.
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah. He turned what could have been an advantage to him into a--sort of a good government issue that everybody does. I mean, you know, they--they have been able to track down this fund-raiser who’s
JIM LEHRER: John Huang.
PAUL GIGOT: John Huang, yes.
JIM LEHRER: Well, speaking of good government, good night, gentlemen.
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