By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

It's way too early to be making any predictions in this year's presidential election, but hey, fools rush in...

I'm not actually making a prediction on the outcome. I'm predicting the tenor of the race.

George W. Bush has this one in the bag, but bags have been broken out of before.

Dubya might lose, but it won't be because Vice Prez Al Gore didn't do his best to give it away.

I've learned over three decades of watching the electoral process work that the American public is pretty gullible. Sad but true.

If you can just come up with a catchy phrase that people can repeat without thinking, you can do pretty well on the political scene.

For instance, if you get caught perjuring yourself in a court of law and lying directly to the American people, you just get your spin doctors to keep repeating the words “personal life” on TV and radio talk shows, in newspaper columns, in interviews with the media... and pretty soon a sufficient number of Oprah-watching, wine cooler-sipping, clueless Americans will pick up the chant, et voila! You're off the hook.

But Al Gore is not as good an actor as his mentor and boss, and apparently his people aren't as good at coming up with the right catch phrases.

Even if they do a better job in the future, I think there is, after all, a limit to what people will swallow. And Gore has made the same mistake that Newt Gingrich did.

Gingrich painted an image of himself in the media as not only a brilliant political strategist and dedicated fiscal conservative, but also as a moral icon. “Mr. Clean,” we used to call him when I worked in his office back in the early `80s, and we meant it as a compliment.

When he got caught fooling around, it didn't make him any less brilliant as a political strategist, or any less dedicated as a fiscal conservative. But his earlier moral posturing was a too-obvious contrast with his dallying, and Mr. Clean became Mr. Hypocrite.

Al Gore has painted an image of himself as Mr. Clean when it comes to the environment. Those of us who value freedom fear that he would go to any extreme, throwing thousands of people out of work to save a single snail darter.

But he has, to some extent, been able to use the catch phrase “common sense,” in referring to environmental legislation, to deflect some of that fear. When he accuses Republicans of blocking “common sense” environmental laws, those who are surfing between “Oprah” and MTV and happen across CNN for just a second might hear that and think to themselves, “Right on, Dude.”

But the word is getting out that on Gore's own family farm he is leasing property for a zinc mine that is polluting a river that runs through it. This pollution is in direct violation of “common sense” environmental laws, and Mr. Clean has pocketed a cool half million in the process.

Add that to the embarrassing debacle in which he denounced tobacco and tearfully told of a family member who had cancer when talking to an antismoking crowd, but proudly boasted of having picked tobacco as a youngster when talking to farmers in North Carolina, and the credibility gap widens.

Gore keeps getting caught talking out of both sides of his mouth, and I don't think he is adept enough at the spin game to make it go away.

Bush's image is that he's probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he's got some ideas that some on the right won't like, and some other ideas that some on the left won't like, but on balance he's pretty middle of the road and his policies are pretty consistent.

As long as he doesn't do anything stupid and keeps talking in generalities, using catch phrases like “compassionate conservative,” he should be able to win.

Unless, that is, Gore finds a way to shed his wolf-in-sheep's-clothing image.

That's it, from where I sit: Bush cautiously steering the middle of the road, careful not to say anything that sounds rash (wouldn't be prudent), and Gore fighting to erase the “disingenuous extremist” label and obtain the same bland, colorless, centrist position as Bush.

Should be about as exciting as a race between the tortoise and the tortoise.

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