How Al came back to life

The inside story of how Gore got up off the mat, became a ferocious candidate and whacked Bradley

March 7, 2000
Web posted at: 2:21 p.m. EST (1921 GMT)

It must have been hell for Bill Bradley. Al Gore was agreeing with him again. Every time Bradley opened his mouth at the Democratic debate in Los Angeles last week, Gore seemed in full accord. "I agree with that statement," he said at one point. "I think it was a very fine statement." Ouch. For months Gore had been treating Bradley's ideas the way a cleaver treats meat. But now that Bradley's campaign resembled ground chuck, the Vice President was showering him with roses--a spectacle that's likely to continue this week, if Gore finishes off Bradley on Super Tuesday. In the press room during the debate, Bradley's campaign chairman, Doug Berman, watched with a resigned eye as Gore heaped praise on the loser. "He should just come out and endorse us," Berman said, a trace of bitterness in his voice.

After the debate, self-satisfied Gore operatives moved about the press room, and Berman caught sight of Carter Eskew, the Vice President's message strategist and principal knife sharpener. Berman leaped to his feet, strode across the room and gave Eskew a big, happy hug. Then Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile, came over and slapped Berman on the back. It was the same thing that had just happened onstage, the victor playing kissy-face with the vanquished, but there was more to it than that, because Al Gore owes Bill Bradley a huge debt. Meeting the stiff challenge that Bradley posed last fall forced Gore to become a far better candidate--to debate important issues, hone his ideas as well as his cleavers, overhaul his campaign and his personal style, and finally say why he thinks he should be the next President. Bradley did many things wrong in the course of this campaign, but what he did right helped trigger the transformation of Al Gore--from the laughingstock of last summer to the focused, effective candidate who will be ready for the Republicans next fall.

The Vice President acknowledges the debt. While stressing that he is "not looking past the battle for the nomination," Gore told Time on Friday that "the strong, bracing competition [from Bradley] has helped me to dig deep and find a better way to communicate and connect and campaign. I would not have preferred that. I've run both ways, and I prefer unopposed. But my preference would have been to my detriment, because the competition has been good for me."

With Gore riding high, it's worth remembering the slough of despondency he trudged through last summer, when Hillary Clinton's Senate bid was sucking up the headlines and campaign cash. Gore talked about his very real technology accomplishments and managed to call himself the father of the Internet. He smothered his announcement that he was running to become the next President with a clumsy attempt to distance himself from the current one. Even a nice photo op in a canoe became painful, when 170 million gallons of water were released--during a drought--to lift Gore's boat. Worst of all, Gore was making forgettable speeches (something called the "livability agenda" was much on his mind) in front of small, dutiful crowds. All the while he was studiously ignoring Bradley, who was working hard and well below the radar: raising money, recruiting a grass-roots army in New Hampshire, offering himself as a pure and plausible alternative.

CONFRONTING THE CRISIS

When Gore's campaign advisers convened for a strategy session at his Washington residence last August, they were steeling themselves to give the Vice President some bad news. For weeks Gore's inner circle--which at the time included Eskew, campaign chairman Tony Coelho, media strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Mark Penn--had been slowly coming to grips with the ugly reality. That day they laid it on the line: not only was Gore trailing George W. Bush, but Bradley was coming on strong too. The challenger's favorable ratings were rising nationwide, and he had the money to fight. When they told Gore he had a primary challenge on his hands, his reaction surprised them. "Thank God," he said. "That's what I think too."

Gore told TIME that as long ago as last spring, he had wanted to challenge Bradley to weekly debates. "I didn't do it because he was still far, far back in the polls," he said, "and because almost everybody whose judgment I respect reacted as if it was a very bad idea." But by August "it didn't come as any surprise to me when the dynamic began to reflect a very close race." In the meeting, Gore and his team agreed it was time to "engage" his rival. As a start, Gore would put out a health-care plan, since Bradley would soon be coming out with his. And Gore, who had been working hard in the gym to get ready for the race, had to get his bloated campaign staff--which seemed to spend more time on palace intrigue than presidential politics--into shape as well.

That task fell to Coelho, the wiry, intense former Congressman and backroom operator who had joined Gore's team in June. Coelho had been working to wrest Gore free from the office he inhabited. That was harder than it may sound. The Vice President's staff had such a tight grip on the candidate that top campaign officials sometimes couldn't get Gore's schedule. Coelho banished nearly all the White House aides from Air Force Two and froze out Gore's small army of ad hoc advisers--a dozen former aides who currently work as lobbyists, and showed up for weekly skull sessions with Gore. Now Gore and Coelho convened strategy meetings about once every three weeks, usually with a group of just six key players. After Tipper complained of being excluded, Coelho made sure she had a place at the table.

But the bad news was still coming. On Labor Day weekend, the campaign discovered that Bradley was not just a theoretical threat. The Boston Globe released a poll showing that Bradley had "vaulted into a virtual tie" in New Hampshire, with many voters "voicing eagerness for political change despite the region's prosperity." Gore's advisers, who had been conducting only nationwide polls, were stunned. They had assumed they were 20 points ahead in New Hampshire. Coelho dispatched field manager Michael Whouley to the state to find out whether the situation was really that bad. Whouley discovered it was worse. Bradley volunteers had been knocking on doors since the summer, while Gore floated through the state in 20-car motorcades, aloof and distant, connecting with no one. Whouley asked former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Joe Keefe, a key Gore supporter, to send a memo assessing the problem. Keefe let it rip: Bradley was "on fire" in New Hampshire, he wrote. Where Gore had the endorsements, Bradley had the people who mattered--the activists who had delivered the state to Gary Hart in 1984. Coelho was ready to blame the New Hampshire organization, but Whouley set him straight. "The problem is not the organization," he said. "The problem is the message and the whole way we're campaigning."

For months Gore had been thinking about a dramatic move to shake things up. Now he was ready to make it happen. Leaving a Maryland fund raiser, Gore quietly asked Coelho if he would ride home with him. Back at the residence, they summoned Eskew and roused Gore's new chief of staff, Charles Burson, from bed. Gore wanted to move the campaign to Nashville, Tenn. Setting up his headquarters on K Street in Washington had been a huge mistake--a symbol of a clueless inside-the-Beltway campaign. But the problem was that no one knew how to get out of the two-year, $60,000-a-month lease. That didn't matter, Gore said; they had to move and shed staff on the way. He was ready with a biblical allusion, the admonition of God's messenger to Gideon as he prepared for battle: Your army is too big, so send two-thirds of it home. Keep only those who are thirsty enough to put their faces in the stream.

Burson was dispatched to Nashville within hours to search for new space. Penn was fired. Brazile slashed salaries, including her own, so that the money could be spent on campaign workers in Iowa and New Hampshire. Aides started rooming together on the road and even gave up their catered lunches, making do with cold cuts from the nearest supermarket. The motorcades were scaled back, and Gore switched from photo ops to town meetings, where his command of the issues could shine. Instead of staging events in the afternoon, to make the evening news, he began doing them at night, to make contact with voters. The campaign canvassed New Hampshire by phone and on foot and invited 2,800 undecided voters to the first round of town halls in October. Gore stayed for hours at each one, taking questions for as long as anyone was left to ask them, sometimes after the cleaning crews had begun folding up the chairs. He listened to complaints about cloudy drinking water and theories about government cover-ups of UFOS.

Eskew, Shrum and senior adviser Marla Romash set about fixing the message. They quit polling nationally and began focusing on what mattered to Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. While they found general support for the things Gore stood for--and for President Clinton as well--they were shocked by how little people knew about Gore. So in mid-October they hit the airwaves of New Hampshire and Iowa with a 60-sec. commercial designed to fill in the basics: Gore had a family, had been in Vietnam, had worked as a journalist. The ads were broadcast for weeks before Bradley's first spots went on.

BUILDING A BETTER GORE

All the staff shake-ups and ad blitzes in the world wouldn't have helped if Gore hadn't helped himself. He took on the difficult process of shedding his vice-presidential carapace and revealing himself to voters. He had a nice new riff about his Vietnam- and Watergate-era disillusionment with politics, but the New Gore wasn't always a pretty sight. He often seemed as hyper and needy as a ninth-grader on a first date. But at least voters realized that he was truly, madly, deeply committed to winning, and they liked that about him. Bradley's cool, take-it-or-leave-it approach to politicking began to pale by comparison.

The Hardest Working Man in Politics made his debut on Sept. 25 in Washington, when Gore and Bradley delivered back-to-back speeches at the fall meeting of the Democratic National Committee. Bradley, who was enjoying his big media moment, went on first. With his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, he gave a wry, understated speech that stressed party unity and common ideals like gun control and help for hungry children; he was warmly received. Then the O'Jays' tune Love Train started blaring, and Gore took over the stage--and the audience. He abandoned his prepared text, stepped out from behind the podium (blocking the Vice-Presidential Seal) and vowed to "work my heart out to win your vote." Some party pros in the audience called it the best Gore speech they'd ever heard. But he was just getting started.

Two weeks later, when the rivals met again at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Iowa, a gathering of 3,000 Democrats, Gore was even more aggressive. Again Bradley spoke first, lamenting the state of politics and wondering why he and Gore couldn't be more like home-run rivals Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, "pushing [each other] to be the best we could be." When it was Gore's turn, he called Bradley a quitter--Bradley left the Senate while Gore "stayed and fought"--and then neatly turned the tables on his reform-minded rival. "I listened carefully to what you had to say about making this campaign a different kind of experience," he began. "I really agree." He proposed a debate a week, each devoted to a different issue. "What about it, Bill? If the answer is yes, stand up."

Bradley didn't stand up--he regarded Gore's move as a transparent ploy, the kind of low gambit that was beneath him. Bradley's contempt for Gore--"He sees Al as a smaller guy," an adviser said at the time--blinded him to the seriousness of Gore's counterattack. He could see through Gore, so he assumed that voters would see through him as well. But there was more to Gore than Bradley believed; voters liked what they saw in the Vice President. He wasn't charming, but he worked hard and came to play. A Bradley strategist calls the Jefferson-Jackson dinner an early-warning sign that the campaign ignored. Bradley should have come roaring back, he says, because "there was absolutely a window open." But at the dinner, the window began to close. The same quality that had fueled Bradley's rise--his high-minded detachment from the game of politics--was now conspiring to ensure his defeat.

Bradley didn't have any cold-eyed operatives around him who could tell him he was wrong about Gore. No one in his small circle of longtime advisers--communications director Anita Dunn, campaign chairman Doug Berman, press secretary Eric Hauser--had ever run a presidential campaign, and they all saw Gore just the way Bradley did. In meetings they referred to him as a "joke." When Gore poached some of Bradley's best lines, talking about wanting "a different kind of campaign" that would "elevate our democracy," they thought everyone would realize that Gore was robbing them blind. Nor were they concerned when Gore started hitting Bradley's signature health-care-reform proposal. They thought that kind of attack was a vestige of the old order.

When Gore and his team drew up their health-care plan late last summer, the Vice President had said no to aides who wanted to make it more ambitious. Gore insisted on an incremental approach that would strike people as realistic and prove he had learned the lessons of 1994. He ended up with a modest proposal that focused on insuring children. But his advisers were troubled. Bradley had been talking about health care all summer; he was clearly going to promise coverage for all or nearly all Americans. Health care remained a huge problem for millions, and Gore's strategists were worried that the race might turn on the issue, with Bradley's plan outshining Gore's. They were right about the issue, wrong about the shine. When Bradley released his proposal on Sept. 28, it turned out to be a gift.

STUFFING BRADLEY'S BEST SHOT

Gore's policy team found fertile ground for attack even before Bradley delivered his health-care speech. The Bradley campaign had given the Associated Press a preview, and based on that Gore was able to denounce the plan as one that was too costly, did nothing to protect Medicare for the elderly and--the fatal blow--replaced Medicaid coverage for the poor with an inadequate substitute. The plan, says a Gore adviser, let the Vice President move "from the fantasy Bradley to the real Bradley." It also demonstrated a crucial difference between the camps. Bradley advisers told TIME they did not use polls or focus groups to test the plan's appeal or measure its weaknesses; to do so would have been to play old-school politics. But Gore's advisers immediately conducted polls to test their attacks. And Gore was ready to hurl them at Bradley on Oct. 27, when the candidates took the stage at Dartmouth College for their first televised debate. The debate was only a few minutes old when Gore charged that Bradley's plan would cost "more than the entire surplus over the next 10 years" and "shred the social safety net." The attack, a Bradley adviser says, "was a dagger to Bradley's heart," but he barely tried to wave it away. "We each have our own experts," he said mildly. "I dispute the cost figure that Al has used." Gore went into Dartmouth with his polls showing him 11 points behind in New Hampshire; after a week of savaging Bradley's health-care plan, he had cut his rival's lead to 3 points.

Bradley and his inner circle suffered from what others in the campaign call "the Gandhi Syndrome"--a turn-the-other-cheek style that assumed voters would recognize Bradley's innate superiority and be drawn by his refusal to match Gore blow for blow. But as Gore threw punch after punch, with some landing at or below the belt (Bradley would "eliminate" Medicaid, offer "a little $150 voucher" and wipe out federal nursing-home standards), Gandhi got rocked. He lost control of the campaign and never recovered. In conference calls with the candidate, Bradley supporters like Congressmen Jim McDermott of Washington, George Miller of California and Jerrold Nadler of New York would scream at him--"Quit letting him pound you!"--and he would reply, "Well, we're starting to take him on some." But the Congressmen didn't see it. "When I signed on," says one, "I thought, 'He's a basketball player. There's got to be a competitor in there.' But he didn't want to get his toga dirty." And when the news about Bradley's irregular heartbeat broke in December, his candidacy suffered another kind of blow. The condition, while not life threatening, underlined Bradley's basic problem. Faced with a robust, aggressive opponent, he appeared to be neither.

Gore's team--and more than a few members of Bradley's--was mystified by the challenger's decision to devote much of January to Iowa. The 17 days Bradley spent there that month only helped Gore get back on top in New Hampshire. The Iowa plan was put in place early, when Bradley was riding high and thought he could beat Gore there. As a son of neighboring Missouri, Bradley was sure he could connect with Iowans and overcome Gore's labor and party support. He was mistaken. When Tim Russert asked Bradley during a Meet the Press debate to name the "defining moment" of his life, he replied, "When I made a decision to leave a small town in Missouri and come East and go to school at Princeton, that was what changed my life." A Bradley adviser watching from Iowa couldn't believe what he was hearing. Iowans wouldn't flock to a Princetonian. "Those people would have been happy to see their kids go to community college," the adviser says.

It was in an Iowa debate that Gore pulled off what may have been the most emblematic moment of the primary season. His staff arranged for farmer Chris Petersen to stand up in the audience as Gore blasted Bradley for his 1993 vote against an amendment providing flood-relief money to Iowa. Gore's advisers expected Bradley to point out that he had voted for the underlying bill. They were amazed when he didn't--"this debate is about the future, not the past" was all Bradley could manage--and so were Bradley's aides, who knew the candidate had rehearsed the better answer. Bradley choked, which is human. What was harder to understand was the way he ignored Petersen--as if the farmer were simply a Gore ploy and not a surrogate for Iowa voters who wanted to know if Bradley cared about them. Sixteen days later, Gore blew Bradley out in the Iowa caucuses.

By then, Bradley's New Hampshire lead was gone. He was down by 6 points with a week to go. Both candidates campaigned hard and well in New Hampshire in that last week, and Bradley closed the gap but came up 4 points short. He tried to claim a symbolic victory, but his words were drowned out by John McCain's 19-point defeat of Bush. For the next month, the McCain-Bush dogfight would command the country's attention. Bradley and Gore disappeared from view--and the invisibility meant Bradley had no chance to get back in the game.

Bradley made one last attempt to catch a wave, scrambling his schedule and putting six futile days into the nonbinding Feb. 29 Washington State primary. He also stepped up his attacks on Gore, but they seemed too little, too late and more than a bit hypocritical. The candidate who'd promised big ideas was now rooting around in the Congressional Record looking for 20-year-old votes to prove Gore had been a "conservative Democrat." Of course he found them--Gore's early opposition to federal funding for abortion and his pro-gun record in the House--but Gore had so clearly evolved since those days that voters seemed untroubled by the news. Gore (unlike Bush) had managed to make it through the primary season without straying too far from the center. And now Gore will be more than happy to tuck the "conservative Democrat" label under his belt and carry it with him into the fall, when it will be a handy way to parry G.O.P charges that he's a screaming liberal. In the end, even Bradley's attacks turned out to be one more gift to Gore.