By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
October 18, 2000
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Some weeks ago I predicted that "trust" would be a major factor in this year's presidential race. If I was right about that, I predict that, once in the polling booth with a decision to make, the majority of the voters will vote for George W. Bush, in spite of what appears to be a very strong pro-Gore media bias. Most people vote for candidates they like. If they don't really like either one of them, regardless of what they may tell a pollster, on election day they don't take the time away from busy schedules to go to the polling booth.
That, I believe, was one of the major reasons why Bob Dole's campaign never caught fire. He had been in Washington for too many years and while he came across as a competent Washington insider, he didn't come across as a likeable or really caring person.
When the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll asked "How did Bush do?" a whopping 71% answering that he did "good" or "excellent" against 28% saying he did fair or poor. Strangely, the same question was not asked about Al Gore.
What CNN chose as their headline and lead paragraph, of course, concentrated on which was the best debater. That paragraph said:
"Registered voters who watched Tuesday night's third and final presidential debate of the fall campaign were split almost evenly over which candidate did a better job, with 46 percent choosing Democratic Vice President Al Gore and 44 percent picking Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush."
However, on the factors that get people out to the polls, trust and likeability, Bush was the runaway winner. Sixty percent of those polled believed George W. Bush was "more likeable." Compared to thirty-one percent who thought Al Gore was "more likeable." Almost twice as many registered voters came away from the debate feeling that George W. Bush was more "likeable" than Al Gore.
On trust or believability, there was also a double digit spread between the two candidates. Fifty-one percent believed George W. Bush was more believable. Only forty-one percent believed that Al Gore was more likeable.
It is a bit hard for me to believe that the 46% of those polled who thought Al Gore did "a better job" are going to vote for Gore, which CNN/USA Today/Gallup infer, even though many in that 46% don't like him and don't believe him.
In the FoxNews poll, which is probably skewed to a more conservative audience, 89.9% said they believe George W. Bush will be the next president, against 9.6% who said they thought Al Gore would be the next president. The rest were undecided.
However, it wasn't just that George W. is likeable and Al Gore again last night was in his attack and divide mode that seems to have given George W. the edge. People like what he says because they AGREE with what he says and they believe by a majority of Gore's 56% to Bush's 25% - a spread of 31 percentage points, that Al Gore made more unfair attacks on George Bush.
Many people seem ready for a leader who will "unite, rather than divide" the people. Al Gore gave some very good examples last night of how he would continue to divide the American people. In the very first question which came from a pre-selected audience, Al Gore offended some by using the untimely death of the Democrat Governor of Missouri, the state in which the debate was held last night, to make a veiled attack on Governor Bush about health care. Later the attacks were not veiled. Gore managed, in one sentence to attack not only George W. Bush, but the pharmaceutical industry. He said, gesturing towards George W. in response to Jim Lehrer's question about lowering the prices on pharmaceutical drugs and revamping FDA processes:
GORE: Now look, if you want someone who will spend a lot of words describing a whole convoluted process and then end up supporting legislation that is supported by the big drug companies, this is your man.... Listen, for 24 years, I have never been afraid to take on the big drug companies.
Later in the debate, Gore made a similar attack on the industry which produces oil needed for gasoline, heating fuel and the plastics industry:
GORE: The big oil companies are against the measures to get more energy independence and renewable fuels. They ought to have their voices heard, but they shouldn't have a big megaphone that drowns out the American people.
In his closing statement, Al Gore tried to make his nearly life-long pursuit of a non-industry job in Washington, D.C. a plus, rather than a minus in a veiled attack on Bush's private industry experience:
GORE: I have not spent the last quarter-century in pursuit of personal wealth. I have spent the last quarter-century fighting for middle class working men and women in the United States of America. I believe very deeply that you have to be willing to stand up and fight, no matter what powerful forces might be on the other side.
That is an old labor union kind of promise. It arises from the notion that the socialist-communist philosophy that the business owners are evil and the laboring class is good and the struggle between the two is inevitable.
Of course, that confrontational view of management and laborers was developed long before the majority of the public owned stock and 401 K's and were thus also capitalists who have a personal stake in the success of large companies. In his closing statement, Bush spoke to the laborer-capitalists in our midst:
BUSH: I think, after three debates, the good people of this country understand there is a difference of opinion. It's the difference between big federal government and somebody who's coming from outside of Washington who will trust individuals.
In a nutshell, Bush captured the essence of the presidential debate. Do the American people want the federal government to control their lives, or do they want to control their OWN lives? Al Gore last night advocated a massive government takeover and expansion of its powers into the private lives of everyone. Not only did he promise another effort to create socialized medicine he also promised socialized child care that would put ALL the mothers of pre-school children into the workforce to pay the family taxes:
GORE: It means, in my plan, hiring bonuses to get 100,000 new teachers in the public schools within the next four years. It means also helping local school districts, that sometimes find the parents of school-age children out-voted on bond issues, to give them some help with interest-free bonding authority so that we can build new schools and modernize the classrooms.We need to give teachers the training and professional development that they need to -- including paid time off to go visit the classroom of a master teacher and to pick up some new skills.
I want to give every middle-class family a $10,000-a-year tax deduction for college tuition, so that -- so that middle-class families will always be able to send their kids on to college.
I want to work for universal preschool, because we know from all the studies that the youngsters learn -- kids learn more in the first few years of life than anywhere else.
As the mother of six adult children and the grandmother of 25, nothing alarms me more than Al Gore's inability or unwillingness to see that BECAUSE children learn more in the first few years of life than at any other time in their lives they need individual, loving parenting in those first years. Those are the years when little ones learn to love and relate to others. They need the loving care of a mother in those first tender years, not a classroom and a "care-giver." The cost of Gore's "universal preschool" is not in the huge amount of money it would take, but the huge amount of government processed children it would create.
As one of the pundits on Fox News observed after the debate in St. Louis, all of the debates boiled down to one overall issued: Government control. If you want more government control and a higher federal budget, vote for Al Gore. If you want more control over your own life and less government interference in your life, vote for George W. Bush.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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