In the presidential debate that focused on foreign policy, Texas Gov. George W. Bush praised several actions by the Clinton-Gore administration. Then he caught himself.
“It seems like we’re having a great love fest tonight,” Bush said.
He got no argument from Vice President Al Gore.
But despite the assessment, the two differ sharply on key foreign and defense policy issues. And both have weaknesses and have committed missteps and gaffes in the foreign affairs field that could sway voters come Tuesday, Gore as a result of his long record, Bush because of his lack of one.
For differing reasons, the two candidates have downplayed foreign policy during the campaign.
Gore wants to focus on the domestic issues he believes have traction with voters: Social Security, health care and the economy. Bush steers clear of foreign policy because he has little experience in the field.
As a result, neither candidate enjoys a clear advantage: Gore leads Bush 47 percent to 42 percent on the question of who would better manage foreign policy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, but Bush leads Gore 50 percent to 40 percent on managing national defense. The Pew poll also shows the candidates about even–41.5 percent for Gore, 41.3 percent for Bush–when people are asked who would best handle a crisis in the Middle East or another trouble spot.
In broad brushstrokes, they outline similar priorities. Both want to find ways to reduce nuclear weapons; both are free-traders; both pledge to support Israel and to work for Mideast peace; both would add billions of dollars to the defense budget.
Yet they differ fundamentally in how they view the role of the U.S. in the world.
Gore takes a more expansive, interventionist stand, while Bush cautions against overcommitting. Sticking to his Democratic roots, Gore sees U.S. foreign policy as based on values. Bush, hewing to the GOP view, says his policy stands will be based on national interests.
Gore sees it as a basic U.S. duty to help others around the world, while Bush cautions against arrogance in telling others how they should live.
The language the two candidates use underscores the difference.
“Like it or not, we live in an age when our destinies and the destinies of billions of people around the globe are increasingly intertwined,” Gore said last April in Boston. “We have a profound responsibility to open the gates of opportunity for all the world’s people so that they can become stakeholders in the kind of society we would like to build at large in the world and at home.”
Compare that with Bush, who said in the first of three presidential debates: “I would be guarded in my approach. I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world.”
At the second debate, the one that focused on foreign policy, he said: “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, `We do it this way, so should you.'”
By rights, foreign policy should have been Gore’s issue.
Nearly three decades in public life have given him broad foreign affairs experience. He served in Vietnam; he became one of the Senate’s experts on nuclear arms control in the 1980s; he supported intervention in the Persian Gulf war; under President Clinton, he took the lead on key issues, including eliminating nuclear weapons in former Soviet republics Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakstan, and on non-proliferation talks with Russia.
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Bush, by contrast, has had little experience in foreign affairs outside of dealings with neighboring Mexico. He did not serve in Vietnam, and has been overseas only a handful of times in his life.
He famously flunked a pop quiz posed by a reporter last year when he could name the leaders of only one out of four foreign countries.
Yet Gore has gained little discernible advantage. The Bush campaign and GOP allies in Congress have worked to turn some of Gore’s experience into a liability. GOP lawmakers have been hounding Gore with the charge that he signed a secret agreement with then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin that let Russia off the hook for exporting defense technology to Iran. Gore has rejected and then largely ignored the charge.
Gore’s campaign and U.S. diplomats who took part in the 1995 negotiations say Bush is blowing the issue out of proportion. They say Russia agreed to stop sales of sophisticated weapons in exchange for the U.S. agreeing to Russia’s selling older weapons that would not upset the region’s strategic balance.
Gore also has been criticized for his support for keeping Elian Gonzalez in the U.S., his only major break with Clinton on a foreign policy matter.
Bush also seems to have gotten the worst of his foreign policy missteps out of the way early.
During the primary campaign, Bush was slow to take a position on Kosovo and stood by as Arizona Sen. John McCain, who urged a forceful U.S. response, ran away with the issue. But in May, when the Senate appeared on the verge of halting funding for the U.S. peacekeeping mission to Kosovo, Bush came to Clinton’s rescue, urging Republicans not to undercut the president on the world stage.
In the debates, Bush avoided the flagrant gaffe that Gore partisans seemed to be anticipating. Bush did talk about how he would remove U.S. troops from Haiti when, in fact, they have already gone home.
But whatever Bush lost on that misstep he gained when he suggested that the U.S. should enlist Russian help to push Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic from power–an idea Gore scorned, only to find out that’s just what President Clinton was doing.
To some extent, Bush has stolen an issue that Gore should have owned. Where Gore cautiously recommends further study before going beyond nuclear arms cuts that have already been negotiated with Russia, Bush would unilaterally slash weapons from the U.S. stockpile, calling them “expensive relics.”
Not to be outdone, Gore has tried to swipe an issue that traditionally falls to the Republican side. The Gore blueprint for defense spending over the next decade would use $100 billion out of the anticipated budget surpluses for defense, while Bush would use $45 billion.
On Iraq, the two campaigns have battled to what appears to be a draw.
Leon Fuerth, Gore’s top national security adviser, called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein “a legacy bequeathed to us by the last Bush administration, which had a sword at his throat at the end of the gulf war, but elected not to use it.”
Bush says the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy is in tatters and adds that the anti-Iraq coalition carefully assembled by his father has been reduced to little more than the U.S. and Britain.
The Gore campaign has tried to emphasize Bush’s inexperience.
“Do we want in the job a person who is experienced and tested and grounded on the one hand, or are we prepared to take a chance with on-the-job training?” asked Harvard University professor and Gore supporter Graham Allison.
Bush himself awkwardly drew attention to the issue at the Wake Forest University debate that focused on foreign policy. Asked about his vision of America’s role in the world, Bush seemed to flounder, talking about how “an administration is not one person” and adding that while “I haven’t started naming names” he planned to put together “a good team of people.”
Advisers to Bush say all governors running for president, including Clinton, have faced skepticism about foreign policy credentials.
“Whenever you have a governor this question will come up,” said Bush adviser Robert Zoellick. “The question is, what do you see about the person’s character, his sense of governing?”
But foreign policy barely rates in the top dozen in polls examining issues that voters consider most important. In three elections in the last 26 years–1976, 1980 and 1992–the ticket with less foreign policy experience won.