Cedar Rapids, Iowa
e have a doctor here with us?" Al Gore is asking. He's in the middle of addressing a rally, and an eleven-year-old boy on the stage with him has fainted.

This is not a good day for Gore. The second presidential debate was held two nights before, and the consensus is that he lost it. His lead in the polls has melted away. The crowd at Greene Square Park is small and not too enthusiastic. It is Friday the 13th. Gore is off his stride. And now there's an unconscious child at his feet.

Fortunately, there is indeed a doctor at the park, and the boy is carried off for care. Gore picks up where he left off, grinning: "I believe I was just talking about health care for children…" Al Gore: Getting Health Care to Children, 24/7.

It's a moment that captures some of Gore's strengths on the stump. He's quick, undaunted by setbacks, determined to get his message out. But this rally is, for all those qualities, a failure. And listening to Gore helps explain why his campaign, too, is failing — and why, absent a shift in strategy, he will lose.

Lest the wrong impression be given, it should be noted that the next day Gore held a much larger rally at Wayne State University in Detroit. The crowd there was more excited, and Gore gave a better performance as a result. Like most politicians, he feeds off a crowd's energy; unlike the best ones, as he demonstrated in Iowa, he cannot supply that energy himself.

Gore is almost always fast on his feet, but not fast enough to keep his moves from showing. When storm clouds gather during his speech in Detroit, he makes a reference to the fact that gets people to laugh, and draws their attention back from the skies. In Iowa, Gore doesn't mention racial profiling; in Detroit, where the crowd includes a lot of black people, he pledges to end it — and mentions that he will also do so for Arab-Americans, an important Democratic constituency in Michigan. He condemns discrimination on the basis of race, gender, national origin, or "who you select as your partner," presumably figuring that the fabled Reagan Democrats of Macomb County don't want to hear about "sexual orientation."

All these fine adjustments to Gore's message, however, do not alter the fact that the message itself is not compelling. It is, to begin with, exceedingly negative. These days, Gore himself is keeping away from the personal shots. Those he leaves to his surrogates. By way of introducing Gore, Lee Clancey, the Republican mayor of Cedar Rapids, offered this rationale for backing the other party's candidate: "I wanted a president who has the intelligence to understand the issues. Who has the ability to articulate those issues." The crowd whooped.

Gore himself has been hammering Bush over his record in Texas, apparently figuring that it's the only tactic that worked for him in their second debate. Gore was in the middle of castigating Bush for not getting health insurance to children in Texas when the boy fainted (no doubt from fright).

The argument about Texas can get pretty silly. Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa, warmed the crowd up for Gore with this blast: "I just have one thing to say to the vice president's opponent: We are proud of Iowa, we have the highest quality of life in the country, we've got the greatest education system in the country, we've got the best health-care system in the country, and we don't want Texas up here! We don't want your education plan! We don't want your health plan! We don't want you!" He made it sound as though if Bush were elected, everyone in Iowa would have to wear cowboy boots.

It's hard to believe this line of attack will succeed. Bush effectively parried it in the second debate: If he's been such a lousy governor, why was he reelected with 68 percent of the vote? But Gore is sticking to it. The press release accompanying his visit to Detroit started blasting the Texas health-care record in its second sentence; it spent far more time on Bush's health-care record than on Gore's own health-care plans. Bush is "bad news for Michigan," according to the campaign, because "Texas ranks near the bottom nationally in the number of children with health insurance; Michigan ranks 13." And from these facts the good people of Michigan are supposed to conclude . . . what? That Bush would spend his time in the Oval Office revoking the health policies of kids in Detroit?

Some Democrats fear that Gore is making a mistake not only in what he is saying but also in what he is not saying: notably, the words "President Clinton." Gore isn't mentioning Clinton on the stump. In part, this silence reflects a vice president's need to establish himself as his "own man." (Apparently he still has work to do: At the Michigan rally, Senate candidate Debbie Stabenow almost calls him the vice-presidential nominee, then catches herself.) But it also suggests that Gore still believes that his connection to Clinton is a political liability in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. Most journalists and Republican strategists have shared this assumption. But lately Bush has stopped trying to link Gore to Clinton. Bush now seems more eager to draw distinctions between Gore and Clinton, with the former cast as a dangerous left-winger lacking the latter's moderation. In the second presidential debate, Bush praised Clinton more often than Gore did.

It was prudent for Gore to separate himself from Clinton's morals. But Gore has also, to some extent, separated himself from Clinton's administration — which is odd, considering that it is more popular than he is. For that matter, Clinton is more popular than he is. (If Gore loses, Clinton will be the one trying to separate the two.)

Democratic strategists always assumed that some of the credit for all the successes attributed to the administration — the stock-market boom, the decline in crime, etc. — would rub off on Gore. It hasn't yet. And Gore isn't doing much to claim the credit, either. He says that Bush would roll back the gains of the last eight years far more often than he pats the administration's back for them. As has often been remarked, Gore is most comfortable on the attack.

Gore's inability to exploit good times is, in part, the price he has paid for his exaggerations. Aides have shied away from boasting about Gore's reinventing-government initiative because he has been caught overstating its success before. And while Bush may give a speech about the New Economy soon, Gore can't. He may have spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and he may have plenty of thoughts about the subject, but there have been too many inventing-the-Internet jokes for Gore to say anything without being ridiculed.

The effect of all this is to pull Gore away from the center and toward the Left. Because he isn't running on Clinton's record, he has to run on his own government-expanding plans. And his attack on Bush's record is that he didn't expand the government of Texas enough.

Gore is aware of the danger, of course. In the second debate, he was careful to say that his health-care plans would not involve more bureaucracy and that his gun-control proposals would not be confiscatory. He's even taken to arguing that he would shrink the federal government while Bush would expand it, although the sheer absurdity of this line may limit its usefulness. He's quit talking about the mortal struggle between "the people" and "the powerful," at least using those terms. All the same, the Gore campaign's ideological position puts it in dangerous territory.

No wonder Gore's aides are getting a little testy. They're complaining that reporters are too hard on Gore, pouncing on his every misstatement while giving Bush a free ride. And the press is just sympathetic enough to Gore to convince itself that it's biased against him. But when a Democratic campaign starts whining about media bias, it's safe to say it's not doing well.