5.15.00
Boxing Out Gore

5.08.00
McCain Endorses — But How Fervently?

5.08.00
Gilligan’s Folly

5.05.00
You Gotta Have "It"

5.02.00
The "Conservative" Gore

5.01.00
A Stray Thot

4.28.00
The "Bipartisan" Bush

4.28.00
Elián and the Psychologists

4.26.00
The Politics of Elian

4.24.00
Shootout in Miami?

4.22.00
Waco Redux

onsider Al Gore "boxed out," at least for now. In rebounding, where you're standing at the moment makes all the difference. So it is in politics. It so happens that Gore is in exactly the wrong spot to attack Bush's Social Security plan. This doesn't mean the idea will be a winner over the course of the campaign, but it certainly plays to Bush's short-term advantage, in several ways:

1) Gore has suffered in recent weeks as he has attacked Bush relentlessly. Some other tactic would seem to be called for. But Bush's speech serves to keep Gore on the attack, which ironically, for Gore, is on the defensive, i.e., it keeps him talking about Bush's positive ideas and thus locks him into a strategy that — so far — hasn't worked.

2) One of Bush's most effective appeals is to bipartisanship. This plays to the public's goo-goo distaste for "partisanship"; at the same time it contains a subtle anti-Clinton message — Clinton and Gore are implicitly faulted for their poisonous partisan attacks. Bush's speech continues in this vein. It contains a naked appeal to bipartisanship, as Bush pledges to work with Democrats in Congress to achieve a jointly agreed-upon reform. And it also provokes Gore to make exactly the sort of partisan attacks Bush disparages. So, the speech effectively reinforces both parts of Bush's bipartisan message.

3) Gore loves to attack Bush as "irresponsible." Bush's Social Security speech actually makes that tougher, in two ways. It is hard to maintain that Bush is irresponsible when he is suggesting a fresh approach to a nettlesome problem. It also becomes harder to brand him as "irresponsible" for proposing a plan that exposes him to sharp attack — in other words, it just might be that the more Gore rips Bush's plan, the more he makes Bush seem courageous, rather than irresponsible, for proposing it.

All of this could change quickly, but there's every reason to believe that Bush's speech will reinforce his current advantage in the race — he has the best position in the lane, and he's keeping it.

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