By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

As I predicted weeks ago, the 2000 presidential race is a contest to see which team can position itself closer to the center.

It’s like the last round of musical chairs, and it’s already reaching the point that we’re going to have a hard time distinguishing one party from the other.

Al Gore took a giant, sideways step away from the philanderer in chief last week with the announcement of Joe Liebermann as his running mate.

Democrats are praising the “courage” Liebermann showed during the Monica Lewinsky chapter of the Clinton l gacy. He criticized Clinton severely, and almost went to the floor of the Senate to demand his resignation.

The press once again is failing to do its job, though. Not once have I heard a member of the national press ask Al Gore or Joe Liebermann why Liebermann changed his mind about demanding a resignation.

The answer, obviously, is that Liebermann either caved under pressure from the White House, or he was convinced that silence would be advantageous to his future political prospects. In either case, “courage” is not a word that comes to mind.

Liebermann also is touted as being several notches to the right of Gore... Gore’s bid for that last chair in the center. According to conservative groups that rate politicians’ votes on key issues, nothing could be further from the truth. Liebermann scores way to the left on most issues.

But, again, the Democratic Party supplies the white wash and all the members of the national media dip their brushes in it. The big papers and the networks choose to concentrate on a few minor issues where Liebermann has managed to appear conservative, like labeling nasty lyrics on musical albums. The idea is to help plant a seed in the minds of the religious right, suggesting they might want to consider the Democratic ticket.

They might not draw many religious right votes, but they might be able to siphon a few off in Pat Buchanan’s direction by blurring the lines.

W. and Cheney, meanwhile, will be pushing Bush’s brand of “compassionate conservatism,” and working hard to keep the Clinton/Gore connection alive. And they’ve managed to put a muzzle on the main spokesmen for the religious right, the Revs. Falwell and Robertson.

Again, by down-playing the religious right element in the party, they probably won’t draw many votes from the libertarians who usually vote Democratic, but by blurring the lines they might convince a few of those to vote Libertarian or Green, siphoning off a few Gore supporters.

I don’t really object to the “compassionate conservatism” thing if it works. But I don’t much like the implication that conservatism is not by its own nature compassionate. In fact, on some levels I resent it.

Why is it non-compassionate to suggest that we should reduce the size of a federal government that is sucking up a third of the incomes of struggling, working Americans?

Where is the compassion in making married people pay higher taxes than single people at the same income level?

Since when is it a mark of compassion to send our military people into harm’s way without the necessary equipment, training and strength of numbers to improve their chances of safety and success?

But, I also can understand the need to distance today’s conservatism from that of the ’50s and ’60s, when mainstream conservatives (most of them Democrats) were fighting for segregation and second class citizenship for black people.
Even today there’s a contingent of so-called conservatives who are opposed to any form of government help for poor people. To the contrary, most conservatives simply argue that it’s false help to set up a huge bureaucracy of dependency from which it’s almost impossible to escape. They push instead for programs with time limits that help move people up and off the welfare rolls.

And they understand that, no matter how worthy a program is, there has to be a limit somewhere.

That’s how we wind up with these emotional displays in which the president asks for a 15 percent increase in spending for a given program and Republicans in Congress cut that increase back to 12 percent, and Democrats tear their clothes and pour ashes on their heads and scream and wail about how Republicans are killing old people and putting poor children out on the street.

So, “compassionate” it is.

As for the strategy of tieing Gore to Clinton, it’s risky at best.

In the first place, Clinton is a popular president. Although most people definitely don’t look up to him as a human being, the economy is good and most people are simpleminded enough to believe he had something to do with that.
So Gore can turn the whole thing around and take credit for the economy while distancing himself from the Lewinsky thing, which most people think of as a sex scandal anyway, in spite of the facts.

Secondly, Gore has plenty of ethical questions of his own to answer without bringing Clinton into it at all.

Thirdly, too much noise about “integrity” as an issue will obscure other issues like tax cuts and a stronger military, and those are issues Bush and Cheney can ride to victory if they play it right.

No matter how subtly they play the morality card, too much use of it will send the MTV crowd scurrying back into the Democratic fold.

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