Stick a Fork in Him, He's Done!
Dubya's Campaign Starts its Death Spiral
by Tamara Baker

Saturday, Sept. 2, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- Smell that?

It's sweat. Flop sweat, to be precise.

Highly expensive, too. About $150 million worth, I reckon.

Now that the pressure's on, now that the real campaign has started, we are finding out who the real campaigners are in this Presidential race.

Al Gore has kept an even keel for the past two years, despite the active and obvious high-handed contempt ladled onto him by a spoiled-brat celebrity press corps more interested in writing cutely facile put-downs and rewriting RNC blast-faxes than in committing actual journalism.

George W. Bush, he of the need to be in bed by 9:30 sharp every night, sees Gore inexorably coming from what once was a 30-point deficit to take a 10-point nationwide lead (make that 20-point-plus lead if you factor out Texas), and he turns to mush despite the active pampering of CelebCorps -- though, truth be told, the press sharks, belatedly sensing that their golden boy is not the winner they tried to convince themselves he was, are now starting to point out some (if by no means all) of his campaign's many, many mistakes.

The AP's Ron Fournier did the most concise job of describing how Bush's handlers failed to deal with the humongous post-convention boost Gore received.

Among other things, Fournier noted how Dubya's team has been trying like mad to avoid appearing in the time-honored debate format every other Presidential candidate has submitted to for decades. (Kinda like how he refused to answer the "have you used cocaine?" question, which has been asked of every major Presidential candidate since 1988. But I digress.) The vice-president rightly and immediately seized on this chance to show Dubya for the craven twit he is.

But wait! There's more!

Later that week, a federal judge ruled that Texas failed to adequately care for the 1.5 million low-income children in its Medicaid program. Gore and the media, for once in sync with each other, picked up on this ruling and publicized it widely. Now remember, folks: Shrub says he's campaigning on his 'excellent' record of 'leadership' in Texas.

If this is what he calls 'leadership', God help the Lone Star State.

The Texas Medicaid ruling played right into Gore's hands, meshing well with Big Al's emphasis on health care in his appearances that week. And what did the Bush team do to counter this? Not much.

Even as Bush's people tried to blow off the lawsuit (perhaps because they didn't know very much about the ruling at first), Big Al's team, in the finest Jimmy Carville "Rapid Response" tradition, cranked out a bunch of TV ads about the ruling. The ads haven't aired yet, but the Democrats say they will soon, thus keeping the Medicaid issue upfront in voters' minds.

Desperately seeking to distract from the Medicaid flap, and seeing his once-formidable lead slip away, Bush's handlers then authorized yet another stupidly vicious campaign ad in the hopes of reversing the momentum of the campaign. Bush's handlers did succeed in one thing: they got the press to stop talking, temporarily, about the raw deal being given the 1.5 million kids in the Texas Medicaid program. ("Temporarily" is the operative word in that last sentence. When Gore's ads on the subject are released, it will fly up to smack Dubya in the face all over again.)

As for reversing Dubya's death spiral, well.... not exactly.

If the ad had come out a month ago, when Shrub was still on top, the front-running sucked-up-to press would have given him a free pass. But now, with Bush behind, suddenly every bit of press coverage of Dubya's new attack ad was prefaced with the media's acknowledgment that Bush, who 'fessed up to personally approving the ad (and isn't THAT interesting, considering it's supposed to be a "soft-money" ad that legally he isn't allowed to have anything to do with), was breaking his pledge never to go negative.

Most polls one week after the Democratic convention showed Gore either holding his six-point lead or slipping slightly to a four-point lead. After Bush allowed the latest attack ad to be released, Gore's lead suddenly shot up to double-digits.

Oooops.

And in the midst of all this hoo-ha, the delicate Shrub suddenly felt the need to take a few days off from campaigning, even as Gore and Lieberman hit the ground running after their triumphant convention and haven't let up since -- and will not let up until they make their victory speech come November 7.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and -- as I noted in a previous column -- the closest parallel can be found in the pro wrestling industry.

Some years ago, Eric Bischoff, who was then running WCW on behalf of Ted Turner, decided to see if he could compensate for his near-total lack of understanding of the wrestling business by throwing around large gobs of Turner's money in an attempt to drive Vince McMahon, owner of the rival World Wrestling Federation, out of business. For a while, it looked as if his plan might succeed.

But McMahon was patient, just like Al. He didn't panic. Instead, he got more creative, doing well-planned scripts, encouraging his wrestlers to have more of a say in the workings of the business. That's how the middlingly-successful "Stunning Steve Austin" wound up shaving his head, growing the facial fungus, and becoming the hyper-cool tough guy "Stone Cold Steve Austin". Young Rocky Maivia, whose original ring persona hadn't caught fire, suddenly became "The Rock", spouting clever catch phrases and striking poses worthy of Ric Flair in his styling-and-profiling heyday. And Mick Foley, famous among hard-core "smart fans" as Cactus Jack, finally hit superstar status as "Mankind".

Suddenly, the WWF was overtaking WCW in the Monday Night Wars. Then, the WWF was beating WCW handily, often by three-to-one margins, in the Nielsen ratings.

Meanwhile, Bischoff's bosses were starting to look askance at the obscene amounts of money "Ken Doll" was spending in order to get his clock cleaned by Vincent Kennedy McMahon Junior. It was one thing to spend that much money and win, quite another to do so and lose. Bischoff' stalled, stammered, came up with excuse after excuse, but all he did was delay his inevitable firing.

The moral of the story? All the money in the world won't help you if you don't know what the hell to do with it. Eric Bischoff learned that lesson a few years ago, to his cost. George W. Bush is learning that same lesson right now, to his cost. 

Stick a fork in Dubya. He's done.