Gore Isn't As Strong As He Looks

One of the things that makes America great is its old tradition of admiring underdogs and despising losers. Poor Bill Bradley has made the transition from the first to the second at near-record speed.

The professional second-guessers are already chastising Mr. Bradley for a long list of mistakes. They complain he went too far left with his health-insurance proposals, while his endless ruminations about "white-skin privilege" threatened to turn a Bradley presidency into a four-year-long transcontinental version of the race-and-"gender" orientation sessions forced on college freshmen.

This is fair so far as it goes: Mr. Bradley did run an awful campaign. But the noteworthy thing is not that Mr. Bradley lost, but that he managed to mount a serious challenge at all.

Every election is a referendum on the simple question: More of the same? Or something new? By every conventional measure -- peace, prosperity, domestic stability, crime -- 2000 should be one of the strongest more-of-the-same years on record: stronger than 1988, stronger arguably even than 1964. Al Gore should have been able to lock up all the Democratic money he needed by Christmas, scare off all serious potential challengers and then glide to the nomination as effortlessly as Hillary Clinton in New York state.

Instead, a senator with an undistinguished record and an unappealing manner managed to raise $20 million to challenge Mr. Gore, and then came within four points of besting him in New Hampshire. And although Mr. Gore has now beaten off that near-debacle, he continues to trail George W. Bush in almost every opinion survey. His troubles in a year that should have been all smooth sailing remind us of a truth that too often gets obscured: the abiding weakness of the Democratic party.

Tom Wolfe tells a story about sharing a platform with a famous German writer at an American university in the late 1960s. The writer announced: "The dark night of fascism is falling on the United States!" Mr. Wolfe replied with a question: "Why is it that the dark night of fascism is always falling on the United States, but always landing in Europe?"

An analogous question could be asked about the news coverage of the two parties. For all that we hear about the fabled "issue map" favoring the Democrats, they in fact have owed their presidential successes in the 1990s less to any increase in their own strength than to Republican dissension. Despite a rip-roaring economy, after all, Bill Clinton won a smaller share of the vote in 1996 than Jimmy Carter did in 1976.

Since George Bush pere violated his antitax pledge, the U.S. has been in effect a three-party system: Democrats, regular Republicans and dissident Republicans. Many of the last group deserted their party for Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, leaving the Democrats the plurality party -- for the moment. They have not yet succeeded in regaining their pre-1968 majority, despite the most favorable circumstances.

Imagine, for instance, that the economic conditions of 1996 had prevailed in 1992. What percentage of the vote would George Bush have got? At least as much as he got in 1988, and probably more: upward, in other words, of 54% and maybe close to the 58.4% Ronald Reagan won in 1984. Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, did not manage to pass the 50% mark. And that was before his reputation was indelibly stained by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In the end that scandal may prove more consequential than Watergate: Watergate delayed but did not halt the Republican realignment of the 1970s. The Lewinsky scandal, which has elevated ethics and morality into first place on voters' list of concerns, may turn out to have wrecked whatever hopes the Democrats had of transforming Americans' positive feelings about the Clinton years into support for Mr. Clinton's party.

Now, nobody should close the betting books early on this election. This will be an even stronger pro-incumbent party year than 1996. And while Al Gore may be a robotic, condescending race-baiter whose pockets are stuffed with illegal foreign donations, a 4% unemployment rate and a 10000 Dow Jones Industrial Average can turn even the slimiest frog into a prince.

Mr. Gore is especially lucky that an unexpected primary contest has caused his opponent to burn through in the first two months of the election year the money that was supposed to have lasted him till November -- with the result that at exactly the moment when the George W. Bush master plan calls for pivoting leftward, the Republican candidate will instead be televised hobnobbing with banquet halls full of millionaires. Mr. Gore has the advantage, too, of being able to link English words into sentences without any of the alarming squeals and crashes you hear when Mr. Bush tries to bang them together.

And yet, despite all these advantages, in a year when Mr. Gore ought to have been laughing his way to certain election, he found himself ominously vulnerable to an awkward, inept challenger from the far-left fringes of American politics. Despite an allegedly unpopular impeachment, his party has zero hope of retaking the Senate and not much more of regaining the House. So let him celebrate his triumph of last night -- he's still a weak candidate from a weak party who stands only one Federal Reserve rate hike away from losing an election that ought to have been wrapped up with the first-quarter unemployment statistics.