September 29, 1999
Web posted at: 5:24 p.m. EDT (2124 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Al Gore announced plans Wednesday to move his presidential campaign headquarters from Washington to Tennessee and the vice president challenged his rival for the Democratic nomination, Bill Bradley, to "a bunch" of debates.

"I want to take this campaign for the presidency directly to the grass roots and directly to the American people," he told a news conference.

Al Gore explains to reporters why he decided to move his presidential campaign to Nashville

The move is designed to distance the campaign from the daily talk in Washington that the Gore campaign is teetering. Bradley, Gore's lone competition for the 2000 Democratic nomination, is gaining on Gore in the polls in the early primary states of New Hampshire and New York.

Gore, a former Tennessee senator and the son of a senator who was raised in Washington, said he is moving the campaign headquarters "lock, stock and barrel" out of the nation's capital and to downtown Nashville. He plans to open his new headquarters in a week.

Three Democratic sources familiar with the decision told CNN that Gore had decided it was best to move his campaign headquarters despite the temporary disruption it will cause. It also will distance the campaign from President Bill Clinton, whose scandal-plagued administration is having a negative pull on the campaign.

"Every election I have won has been headquartered in Tennessee," Gore said. "Fourteen times I have gone to the voters of Tennessee."

Campaign chairman Tony Coelho and chief strategist Carter Eskew will move to Nashville, but it is unclear how many members of his senior staff will follow. The vice president's top advisers expect the staff to be reduced through attrition, because many members will not want to move to Nashville.

Gore also said he planned to recast his campaign style so that he will meet voters in small groups to talk about issues and the nation's future. "I'm going to fight my heart out for every single vote," he said.

Gore also said he wanted to debate Bradley "a lot." The vice president has for months resisted committing to such debates, preferring to focus on the GOP and ignore Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey and pro basketball star.

But Bradley's challenge -- to be highlighted again in campaign finance reports due this week -- convinced the Gore camp to dramatically shift course and deal directly with the Bradley, according to CNN's sources.

CNN Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg says Gore's shakeup is an admission that he can't ignore Bradley any longer. "By saying that he's going to engage Bradley, by calling for debates, by talking about a campaign shakeup, I think Al Gore is saying 'no, the nomination is no longer inevitable, I have to earn it," he said.

CNN sources said the hope is that when Democrats compare the vice president and the former New Jersey senator side-by-side that Bradley's momentum will stall. Gore has a good reputation as a debater, including what many consider a masterful performance against Ross Perot when they went head to head on TV over the North American free trade agreement (NAFTA) in November 1993.

Bradley said in a statement that he had already accepted a number of invitations to joint appearances with Gore and looked forward to more.

"For the last 10 months, the vice president's campaign has been ignoring and now they want to debate me," Bradley told reporters while campaigning in California. "I think that says we're making some progress."

A Bradley aide said while Gore may be making changes, Bradley would keep doing what he has been doing.

"It's their campaign. They obviously feel they need to change things. Our campaign has never been about Al Gore and what he does," said the aide. "We have already accepted the CNN/WMUR debates and even the CNN/L.A. Times debates. We accepted both without a quarrel."

"Al Gore said Bill Bradley's name today. That is a major change for them. We're not changing anything. We're doing what we've always done," the aide said. "If they've decided they need to do things differently, I wouldn't quarrel with that conclusion."

Among those who recommended moving the campaign headquarters are Clinton, whose 1992 campaign headquarters was in Little Rock, Arkansas, and James Carville, the lead strategist for the 1992 Clinton effort.

Clinton kept his 1992 campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, partly to avoid the Beltway buzz. Senior Clinton advisers in the 1992 campaign credited that distance from Washington with helping them keep cooler heads when Washington buzzed with talk that Clinton would soon be knocked from the race by allegations of draft dodging or marital infidelity.

In Gore's case, even many sympathetic Democrats say the campaign lacks a long-term strategy and has failed to confront the serious challenge posed by Bradley.

Younger aides also are often rattled by talk in political circles that Gore's candidacy is off to a disastrous start - and frequent discussion of polls showing early Republican front-runner Texas Gov. George W. Bush so far ahead of the vice president.

CNN's John King, Gene Randall and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Wednesday, September 29, 1999

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