Election 2000: Defining the Issues

As Americans head to the polls, unemployment is low and the economy is booming. In such prosperous times, what are the issues capturing the attention of voters?

by Alexandra Marks MPA 1991

George Bush smiles confidently into the cameras before a small bevy of reporters on the tarmac at the Pittsburgh airport. He's just alighted from his plane on his way to his so-called summit with former rival Senator John McCain. A reporter asks if Bush will drop his opposition to comprehensive campaign finance reform in exchange for McCain's much needed endorsement.

"I am for campaign finance reform," Bush responds indignantly, but still smiling.

Well, sort of. Under enormous pressure during the primaries, the Texas governor came out with a plan that would ban soft money contributions from labor unions and corporations. But he'd still allow individuals to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the political parties without a cap.

McCain and other reform advocates call that "window dressing" at its best. When pressed on the issue, Bush insisted he was still a "reformer," but he wouldn't back down.

It was a typical political maneuver, attempting to finesse a positive position on a hot topic on which the candidate knows he is vulnerable. And this campaign year, there's a lot of it going around. Vice President Al Gore, who'd called Bush's Social Security privatization plan a "risky scheme," suddenly came up with his own after seeing Bush's idea soar in the polls.

While Gore would leave Social Security intact, he now proposes setting up a separate government savings plan that would allow people to invest in the private markets. In essence, he's trying to have his cake, saving Social Security, and Bush's too, by cherry picking the private investment option.

One reason for all the fancy political footwork is abundance. This election year there is a myriad of complex social issues clogging up the political ether from education to health care to Social Security to morality.

The Shorenstein Center's Tom Patterson calls it "issue fragmentation" and says it¹s become "characteristic" of the modern political campaign.

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There is no kind of "big, big issue out there," says Patterson, professor of government and the press. "There is no Cold War, there is no troubled economy — nothing that people see that they have in common, so you have this whole set of issues that interest the public, at least some."

And polls back that up. While education is the top priority for some, others choose Social Security, and for others it's health care. While there is overlap, what Patterson calls the "fragmented issue structure" makes it difficult for the candidates to figure out how to reach the public and how to put coalitions together. It also has the potential to numb the voters.

"A lot of the issues that are out there and get talked about don't grab a lot of individuals very deeply," he says. "Take campaign finance reform, for instance. People don't like the system, but it doesn't rank all that high in their list when you ask the standard question, 'What's the most important issue facing the country?' The answer is all over the place."

So this election, both Vice President Al Gore and Bush are painting themselves with broad brushes, champions of reform in a "new progressive" sort of way. Bush is promising "Prosperity with a Purpose," while Gore touts "Prosperity and Progress."

And both talk essentially about the same issues. The contest appears to be over approach. Gore generally favors investing more of the nation's surplus in public ventures, while Bush prefers a more typical Republican, private-sector approach.

For instance, on education, both call for increased accountability, raising standards, and improving teacher qualifications, but they different dramatically in how they'll reach those goals.

Gore would spend an additional $115 billion over 10 years to jumpstart the education reform movement nationally in public schools, while Bush would inject $13 billion new dollars over five years, targeting mainly failing schools.

Gore is in favor of giving parents the choice to switch to other public schools if their children's schools get "Fs." Bush favors vouchers, which would allow parents to opt out of public education all together.

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The candidates' decision to highlight similar issues and fixes has prompted some scholars, like the Kennedy School's Robert Blendon, to argue the presidential election could come down not to a question of social issues but one of personality.

"It could come down to whether people want to vote for someone they like, someone they think has leadership characteristics, so it's a leadership-centered vote, or whether they're going to make decisions on the issues," says Blendon.

If they choose to go with the issues, that could help Gore, Blendon says. When queried on questions from the economy to crime, the public in general is traditionally more supportive of the Democrats' approach.

But the Republicans still have the upper hand on moral questions. And with Bush's push for what he calls "compassionate conservatism," he's announced his determination to make inroads into that Democratic issues territory.

And he appears to be succeeding, at least in some. Before the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia this summer, the Gallup Poll indicated that the public for the first time was giving Bush's approach to Social Security reform the upper hand.

When asked if they favored or opposed a proposal that would allow people to put a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts that would be invested in private stocks or bonds, 65 percent liked the idea.

Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore contends that's proof the ground is shifting beneath the conventional wisdom on the issue questions.

"That's the first time in history that's happened with Social Security — that shows Governor Bush's approach is working," he says.

But the Democrats are fighting for every inch of their own threatened turf. Shortly after Bush announced his plan, Gore countered with a proposal that would leave the current Social Security framework intact, but would set up a separate private- investment option that any individual could use. Similar to a private--sector 401K plan, where private business matches workers contributions, Gore would have the government match the savings.

"Let me be clear about what this is," Gore said, on a bunting-draped stage at the New York Historical Society as he kicked off his "Prosperity and Progress" tour in June." This is Social Security plus, it is not Social Security minus. It does not come at the expense of Social Security, it comes in addition to Social Security. It is the best of both worlds, rather than, as the opposition proposed, the worst of both worlds."

To Bush and his people, that smacked of political opportunism at its worst, considering that just a week before, Gore was accusing the governor of promoting a "risky scheme," by investing Social Security dollars in the private markets. The Gore people stand by their criticism of the Bush plan and hammer it home every opportunity they get, particularly at gatherings of elderly people.

But the boldness with which Bush approached Social Security — the cliched "third rail" of American politics — gave him a boost in the "leadership" category. Gore got his hike in that department in August, when he chose Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, to join him as his running mate. The decision was hailed as historic, indicative in Lieberman's words of Gore's "courage and commitment."

Leadership is one of the more ephemeral, but critical issues in people's assessments of the candidates this year. That's due in part to the power one political leader can have in bringing controversial and complex ideas to the fore politically.

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The Shorenstein Center's Marvin Kalb says there's been no better example of that this year than McCain's championing of campaign finance reform. Not only did he take what many in the political elite dismissed as a "process" issue and turn it into one of the hottest topics of the primary season, he was also able to leverage that energy to get at least one major reform, the banning of the so-called stealth political action committees, passed through Congress this summer.

"One of the reasons it passed was that McCain made it 'talkable,' a 'discussable' issue," says Kalb. "Beyond that, both political parties didn't want to seem to be opposed to a popular cause raised by a popular politician."

McCain offered the kind of "imaginative" leadership Kalb finds lacking so far in both the Bush and the Gore campaigns, primarily because they appear to be representative of the status quo — politics as usual.

And that ties into the earlier theme of there being no "big, big" issue on the political horizon. There is no major threat to the nation, no need to look to the President of the United States, the man whose finger is on the button for the survival of the nation.

"And so a significant plurality of the American people seem to be less interested in the candidates and in their programs and more disconnected from the process itself. More people view that the process is for other people, not for them, that it's boring and uninformative, rather than exciting," says Kalb.

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Other scholars agree with Kalb that there's an apathetic quality to the American people during this election. Many believe that it will take a calamity of some kind, whether it's a severe economic downturn, the outbreak of war, or a horrific act of terrorism on U.S. territory, to recapture the attention of the American people and hold it.

"Short of one such calamity taking place, Americans are essentially uninterested in the way in which politics functions," says Kalb.

But others are more optimistic. The Shorenstein Center's Anna Greenberg believes that both presidential candidates have the potential to generate real interest on the issues in this age of increasing "centrism," simply by taking more radical approaches.

"If you look at public opinion, there's no question that the Democrats have an advantage on the issues — when people say, whom do you trust more on Social Security, Medicare, and health care reforms, people still say the Democrats," says Greenberg. "If Gore goes for a moderate, incremental approach to these issues, I'm not sure he's going to capitalize on that advantage. It strikes me that there's a more progressive way to approach them than Gore currently is."

Greenberg also credits the Texas governor with doing better on the "caring for people" kinds of issues than did either Bob Dole in 1996, or Bush's father in 1992, despite the elder Bush's efforts to present a "kinder, gentler" kind of Republican conservatism.

"Bush gets it that the Republicans need to do better on this — the way the government cares for people and actually supports them," she says. "He understands that, and I'm not doubting his sincerity on it at all. He does want to take a strong stand on such issues, but like Gore, his approach is also small and incremental. So in the absence of a radical proposal, I'm not sure who gains ground."

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With all the focus on how candidates handle the issues, many Harvard scholars are also adamant that the press and its role not be forgotten.

One of the striking findings of the Shorenstein Center's Vanishing Voter Project this year was the way in which press coverage affected voters' knowledge of the issues. During the height of the primary season, significantly more people were able to correctly identify candidates' stands on issues such as gun control than they were just a few weeks later, after the presidential campaign dropped off the front pages and out of the networks' nightly news lineup. Indeed, the public lost knowledge and information as the press coverage waned.

"What the public really needs is saturation coverage around an issue to really gain an understanding of it," says Patterson. "You saw that in the hectic period between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary and Super Tuesday. In the absence of that, there tends to be a lot of drift, people pick up a piece of information here or there, then they lose it a few months later."

Alex Jones, the new director of the Shorenstein Center, believes the media has to play a far more proactive role, not only in plumbing issues and bringing them to the fore, but also in examining its own role in the process.

For instance, during the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign took a cue from the Reagan White House and orchestrated a massive outreach to local stations in key swing states. They provided lavish amounts of free satellite time and access to a group of carefully selected Bush surrogates to the local anchors and news operations, bypassing the more critical networks and their correspondents.

That gave the political handlers more control over the substance of the media coverage. At the same time, they effectively limited the access national reporters were given to their corporate fundraising events and other, less politically palatable aspects of the convention.

"I think it's a signal that the media, despite its perceived power in shaping elections, is increasingly acted upon, used, and shut out when it serves the interest of the campaign managers," says Jones, "especially when it comes to politics and policy issues."

Indeed, George Bush won some kudos that day as he smiled into the local television cameras and insisted that he was in favor of strong campaign finance reform, despite what his critics say. But the real assessment of both candidates' effectiveness in winning Americans over on the issues won't come until November.

Alexandra Marks MPA 1991 is a senior writer for The Christian Science Monitor.