Less than two months before primary night, the new Gore has yet to find his footing in New Hampshire. His tendency to stretch the truth is only one of his troubles. Bill Bradley, flush with cash, has poured at least a million dollars into television ads for the Boston and Manchester markets. And after enduring a month’s worth of Gore’s shrill attacks on his health-care plan, Bradley finally had enough. He all but accused Gore of lying about the cost of his proposal, and of falsely claiming that he wanted to raise the eligibility age for Social Security. His counteroffensive may be paying off. The new NEWSWEEK Poll shows Gore has once again dropped behind Bradley, 47 percent to 40 percent. It is not a huge deficit, but does show slippage from last month’s survey, which gave Gore a 10-point lead (46 to 36).
Gore still has time, but changes in New Hampshire’s political environment have clearly hurt him. The vice president is pitching much of his message to traditional Democratic constituencies that are in decline there, like labor. His old slash-and-burn style of campaigning has alienated the state’s burgeoning contingent of upscale “Volvo and Brie” voters, who value civility over food fights. Gore remains strong in other regions, especially the South, where Bradley has only begun to organize. But his challenger’s more avuncular style–even given the elbows he threw last week–may be a better fit for New Hampshire in 2000.
Despite the much-hyped makeover, Gore struggles with old problems. The veep is still figuring out how to be his own man and yet keep Bill Clinton close enough to get credit for the president’s achievements. While often deleting his boss’s name from the conversation, Gore at other times embraces him, as he did in a speech last week on the booming economy.
Perhaps most disabling for Gore are episodes like the Love Canal stretch: small but easy-to-spot untruths. Together with past misstatements–like claiming to have created the Internet–they feed the notion that he’s a phony. With the campaign press now on full embellishment alert, the slightest deviation from fact, no matter how innocuous, will stick like chewing gum to the heel of his shoe. What’s mystifying is that, in each instance, the straight story is just as laudable. He didn’t uncover Love Canal, but he did help lead the fight against toxic-waste dumping. Gore wasn’t the father of the Internet, but he was arguably an uncle, sponsoring legislation that fostered its growth. Gore, who has devoted himself to loosening up in public, may discover that while voters will accept some stiffness in their candidates, grandiosity never sells.
