FROM THE
OCTOBER 23, 2000 ISSUE

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ
The Cookie Crumbles

RAMESH PONNURU
The Serious Candidate

he presidential campaign has been a clash of caricatures: the frat boy vs. the grind, insouciance vs. discipline, daring vs. safety, the appeal of personality vs. the appeal of issues. George W. Bush has been cast in the happy-go-lucky role. If Al Gore actually reads his 500-page briefing books, Bush makes do with an executive summary of the executive summary. Martin Peretz assures us (and assures us, and assures us . . .) that Gore is a bona fide intellectual. Peretz worries only that Gore may be too intellectual for Americans (who do not, perhaps, deserve him?).

As with most caricatures, there is a truth that these exaggerate. Gore does know the ins and outs of national policy better than Bush does, as one would expect given how much of each candidate's life has been spent on it. Nobody doubts that Gore is more well-read than Bush. But don't be fooled: It's Bush who's running the more conscientious, public-spirited campaign. The surprising truth is that Bush is the serious candidate in this race.

Bush has been more serious, to begin with, about identifying national priorities. One can disagree with Bush's proposals to address the inadequacies of the schools and of the armed forces; one can even disagree about the extent of those inadequacies. But the importance of the schools and the military to the country's future is not in doubt; if they're in trouble, so are we. Who, by contrast, thinks that there's a pressing national need for more subsidies for the elderly? Gore plans to spend $338 billion over the next ten years expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs, plus $100 billion more increasing Social Security benefits. (These are Gore's cost estimates.) This is pure pandering.

Gore has largely gotten a free ride in the press about his spending plans. As a result, he's been able to pose as the candidate of "fiscal responsibility" while arguing that Bush's tax cuts would bring back deficits. Whether deficits are so awful is a debatable question, as is whether it's worthwhile to try to predict what the budget will look like ten years from now. But since Bush and Gore both accept these premises, the salient question is whose numbers add up better.

Bush wins that contest. His estimate of the "cost" of his tax cut — he assumes federal revenues would be $1.3 trillion lower over ten years if it passes — is high; he doesn't factor in the effects of the increased economic growth his tax cut would cause. Gore, on the other hand, consistently lowballs the price tag on his programs. He says his universal-preschool program would cost $50 billion over ten years. Even sympathetic observers, such as Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, say it could easily cost twice as much.

Gore estimates that his Retirement Savings Plus program would, when fully phased in, cost $35 billion a year. Now Gore's proposal, designed to increase savings among low-income workers, may be a good idea. But it's more expensive than Gore lets on. If half the eligible population participates in the program, as Gore adviser Alan Blinder has suggested is likely, the cost will be closer to $75 billion a year. Gore's cost estimate could be true only if very few people signed up — in which case Gore is overhyping the program.

Gore also fudges the numbers by double-counting $66 billion in revenues from tobacco taxes: He earmarks them for an initiative to increase funding for health research, and then uses them again for the rest of the budget. Nor is the campaign's double-counting confined to its own budget. It uses the same method to attack Bush's tax cut. The campaign pads its estimate of the size of Bush's tax cut by adding in tax cuts passed by the Republican Congress. But some of the congressional tax cuts are already in Bush's plan, and are therefore counted twice.

The upshot is that over ten years, Bush cuts taxes and increases spending by $1.6 trillion and pays off $1.5 trillion of debt, with $900 billion left to finance new personal retirement accounts in Social Security. The cost of Gore's program is, as mentioned, hard to calculate, but it could easily reach $2.5 trillion or even higher. The prevailing assumption that Gore would pay down more debt than Bush would is probably wrong.

Then there's the question of specificity. For more than a year, Bush has been accused of vagueness. Gore has taken up the charge. "What's good for the American people is to have an adult, intelligent discussion of the specifics of these issues," he said in late August, implicitly slamming Bush. It's true that Bush has sometimes been coy. He has not committed to a plan to reform Social Security. He argues, reasonably if conveniently, that a presidential candidate should get the public behind the idea and leave the details to be worked out with Congress. Bush refuses to say whether he even hopes that any justices he names to the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Gore, on the other hand, has sometimes suggested that he would have a pro-Roe litmus test for judges: That's certainly specific.

But all in all, it's Bush who has offered the most detailed plans. Gore, too, has failed to offer a plan to save Social Security — or rather, he has offered a non-plan: He transfers IOUs to Social Security but doesn't say anything about how they would be paid off. It's a meaningless accounting gimmick that does nothing to make the program easier to finance. Gore has something similar in mind for Medicare. In September, the Bush campaign released a comparison of the candidates' platforms: Bush's had 93 specific proposals while Gore had only 74. And Gore refuses to provide details that would make it possible to evaluate his plans. The Joint Committee on Taxation says some of his major tax proposals are so vague that their costs cannot be estimated.

Bush's speeches, too, are more serious than Gore's. Bush's major speeches are extremely well-written; they have themes; they advance arguments. Gore's convention speech was written, as Peggy Noonan remarked, in a kind of vapid "politico-bureaucratese." It was a rambling and repetitive list of payoffs to interest groups (including a public conceived as an interest group). Often, Gore's rhetoric does not even rise to the level of "adult discussion." His attack on "Big Oil," for instance, pretends that "price gouging" is the explanation for rising gas prices. But companies generally try to set prices that will maximize their profits. Their executives don't just wake up one morning and decide that it's time to make money. There is enough anticorporate sentiment and free-floating paranoia in our culture that Gore's "populist" rhetoric has an audience; but surely Gore himself knows better.

Bush has not demonized any group in this way. Some of Bush's rhetoric, it is true, has tended toward the utopian. He promises to "leave no child behind," which is impossible; he indulges the fantasy that politics need not involve division. Gore's sentimentality is less pronounced, but it is more programmatic in its implications. The vice president, like President Clinton, is fond of the formulation that "no one should ever have to choose between," say, filling a prescription and putting food on the dinner table. But senior citizens spend, on average, $1,200 dining out and only $673 on drugs each year. To suggest that they should never have to reallocate those funds as prices change is demagoguery.

Of course, Bush too panders and cuts corners. One doubts that he really thinks the Violence Against Women Act, which he has recently said should be reauthorized, is a good law. His campaign has claimed that he vetoed an HMO-regulation bill in Texas because it wasn't strict enough, when he really vetoed it for being too strict. His budget includes a suspiciously specific figure for savings from "government reform." But this is penny-ante stuff. The Bush campaign has been, in general, pretty high-minded.

Maybe too high-minded. Dick Cheney was a great pick for vice president; as a vice-presidential candidate he hasn't been nearly as helpful to Bush as Joe Lieberman has been to Gore. While Bush may be right in his pious declaration that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists to serve national security, Gore might score points by using it to cater to voters' momentary wishes. It may be noble of Bush to concentrate on helping the poor through school choice, tax credits, and aid to charities — but Gore has zeroed in on the middle class in a more politically profitable way. And Bush, in his evident desire to make the campaign turn on matters of the spirit rather than of the economy, can get downright ethereal.

So the good news for Bush partisans is that their man has taken a far more serious approach than Gore to governing the country. The bad news is that it might lose him the election.