Gush And Bore
...There's a conventional wisdom developing that the reason Al Gore is running a tractionless, Bob Dole-style campaign is that he's "weighed down" by the baggage of Bill Clinton. Isn't there something fishy about that? Didn't Clinton win the last two presidential elections by a wide margin? Didn't he rally a solid two-thirds of the country behind him to defend his right to lie to them? Under this same c.w., Bush benefits from being the anti-Clinton. Now isn't there something fishy about that? Bush, after all, is a sweet-talking, can't-give-a-straight-answer, centrist-mush-specialist Southern governor...
That's why one can be so grateful that The Washington Post cleared the air last week by conducting the most brilliant poll of the young campaign. It compared public perceptions of Bush and Gore by asking whether their positions were like Clinton's. Sixty-two percent thought Gore's positions were similar, versus 25 percent who thought they were different. But 67 percent thought Bush's positions were similar, versus only 21 percent who thought they were different. Unless I wasn't listening in first-grade math, it sounds like there's a slim but outside-the-margin-of-error consensus that George Bush is more like the president than even the president's number-two is.
By the way, that 67 percent who think Bush's positions are Clintonesque are divided into 41 percent who approve of this similarity, and only 26 percent who disapprove. This is hardly a message of Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead.