BUSH WINNING ON STYLE POINTS

Campaigns, as Dwight Eisenhower once said of war, will always surprise you. The biggest surprise of the current contest is the double-think shown by undecided voters at the end of the presidential debates. A surprisingly large number said in polls and focus groups that they thought Al Gore won, but they liked George W. Bush more.

And in the battle between smarts and personal likeability, guess who wins?

In the television age, brains and a golden resume of experience with national government tend to be no match for a sincerely delivered outpouring of charm, generously sprinkled with “caring.”

Jimmy Carter’s folksy charm beat incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976, then lost to the superior folksiness of Ronald Reagan in 1980. John F. Kennedy’s use of TV to beat Richard M. Nixon’s experience is legendary.

Eisenhower staged the first TV ads in 1952. Adlai Stevenson scoffed at the need to sell candidates “like soap.” Stevenson lost badly twice, and television image-making has been a defining element of politics ever since.

Gore should know. Bush is turning on the same sort of empathy offensive (“I’m a person who respects other people”) that Bill Clinton used to beat George Bush the elder in 1992 and the seasoned ex-Sen. Bob Dole in 1996.

Sure, issues matter. Issues enable you to establish your political base. But in a tight contest like the current one, it is the last-minute undecided voters who tilt the balance.

Many of them are undecided precisely because they have not paid much attention to issues. Instead, they care about which candidate seems more like the kind of person they would want to pal around with. They want the kind of person they would like to sit next to on an airplane. They want the kind of person they would trust the most at vacation time to watch their house and water their plants.

So the younger Bush does not share Clinton or Gore’s command of facts, statistics, programs or the ins-and-outs of Capitol Hill? No problem, says the young W; All of that is just so much silly old Washington stuff.

More important, the young Bush says time and again that he is a “caring” and “compassionate” person, “a uniter, not a divider,” who can “get things done” in the capital city that he relentlessly ridicules. Not much original thinking there. Carter used almost the same lines in 1976. But you don’t have to be original in modern politics when you deliver lines like that. You only have to sound as though you mean them.

Gore, for example, tried to nail Bush’s past opposition to laws that would protect the right of patients to hold HMOs accountable. Gore said he would “specifically like to know whether Gov. Bush will support the Dingell-Norwood bill,” which was the main piece of pending legislation to create such a patient’s bill of rights.

Without revealing whether he knew which bill Gore was talking about, Bush responded by ridiculing Gore’s “Washington, D.C., focus.” Bush then listed the features of health insurance that had passed during his governorship. He did not mention that some of those reforms passed despite his opposition. He said only “that’s the kind of leadership style I’ll bring to Washington,” as though Congress ought to be a snap after wrestling with that tough-as-nails Texas legislature.

In an earlier debate, Gore challenged Bush to respond to the charge that Texas ranks nearly last among states in insurance coverage for women and children. Bush responded by noting “if he’s trying to allege that I’m a hard-hearted person and I don’t care about children, he’s absolutely wrong.”

Of course that was not what Gore was trying to allege. Gore’s quarrel was with Bush’s policies, not his personal feelings.

“I don’t claim to know his heart,” Gore said. But Gore’s claims didn’t matter. All Bush had to show about his heart was that he had one. That might have been more challenging were Bush competing with Clinton. Against the resiliently wooden Gore, it was a breeze.

Similarly, Gore later pressed the governor to explain what he means when he says he supports “affirmative action without quotas.” Gore asked whether Bush favors “what the Supreme Court says is a constitutional way of having affirmative action?”

Bush paused for a hot second, then turned to moderator Jim Lehrer, as if seeking rescue in the time-limit rules. Lehrer got the hint and tried to move to another question. Some of the audience laughed. Gore, half-smiling, said, “I think that speaks for itself.”

Bush suddenly swung back into the fray, sniping at Gore for not sticking by the debate rules. More laughter. Within the rules that his own campaign had demanded, Bush avoided the particulars of affirmative action. Still he seized the opportunity to get personal with a swipe at Gore. Getting personal with big issues is a key element of the empathy offensive. One’s political positions become good because one’s “heart” is good. Don’t trouble yourself with the details.

Bush and his advisors appear to be mindful of the elder Bush’s critical inability in 1992 to show that he cared about the plight of average Americans who had been buffeted by the recession. Today’s voters are not buffeted by recession. But the younger Bush wants you to know he cares anyway. He may not have Ronald Reagan’s deep ideological convictions or stirring oratory, but Bush has the big heart. He may not need the music, as long as he knows the words.

After years of chafing under the feeling they had been out-hustled by Clinton’s charm offensive, Republicans have found a charmer of their own. Surprise, surprise.

More Top Picks Best Electronic Dartboards

———-

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]