PICKING A FIGHT

His work cut out for him, Gore comes swinging out of Los Angeles with a populist pitch aimed at waitress moms and trucker dads. But Bush may have the advantage with the swing voters

Well before Election Day, campaigns tend to be lost or won depending on whose vision of the race prevails. The secret code of the Bush campaign is that politics doesn't really matter, the country is at peace, the market is up, so you can afford to vote for the guy you like because we're all happy centrists now. George W. Bush has all but dared Al Gore to fight on that ground, as he strolled down the middle of the field, threw up a tent and invited every voter to the party.

Gore heard the music and read the polls and saw that this was a contest he could not win. He is sharper when he's in a fight, but Bush has not played by the Gore rules. He's been a confounding foe, he won't say anything specific enough to give Gore a target, and yet he has had the crowd on his side from the start, to the point that even some Democratic voters were drifting toward his corner.

So last week Gore picked a different fight. "The presidency is more than a popularity contest," he declared in his speech on Thursday night. "It's a day-by-day fight for people." All that populism, the hymns to long-haul truckers and late-shift waitresses, is not really about changing tactics; it's about changing enemies. He may not win a popularity contest against George W. Bush, but he might win one against, say, Exxon. You didn't hear him so much as mention Bush last week. Instead he found the enemies he wanted: the greedy HMOs, the polluters, the tobacco and oil companies. If the demons seem real and the stakes are high and issues actually matter, Gore gets to fight on the ground where he is strongest, win back the Democrats who have wandered off, maybe even warrant a second look from the fickle soccer moms. If he's artful, he can do it without sounding too much like Huey Long--just wrap the New Democratic message in an old Democratic tarp. At least that's the strategy.

Centrist Democrats who are desperately rooting for Gore are watching this with their heart in their throat. Nearly everything about the Gore tack--indeed, much of last week's party convention in Los Angeles--left them scratching their head and pining for that old Clinton magic. Why does Gore have to use the word fight 20 times in his speech when every survey shows many swing voters want all the partisan fighting to stop? "It's hard to lead a nation by dividing it, by pitting people against each other," Bush shot back the next day. "That's the rhetoric of the past. That's ... class warfare." For that matter, why was the whole Democratic spectacle so, well, democratic? Every interest group got its five minutes in the spotlight: the Clinton family on Monday, the Kennedy family on Tuesday and then, the next night, a picket line: speakers from the teachers union, the AFL-CIO and the N.A.A.C.P. Four years ago, Bill Clinton won a landslide by serenading independent voters with themes like welfare reform, crime fighting, deficit reduction. Last week Gore sang that refrain too, but you had to listen carefully for it.

But in politics, 1996 might as well be the last century. The hallowed game plan--hold your base, then hook the swing voters--gets trickier with each election, as the loyal party bases shrink and the big clump of independents grows. But it is especially hard for Gore this year. Gore's base is spoiled and soft after eight years in power--in one poll he drew only 78% of core Democrats. Bush's is so hungry to win it put its differences aside long ago: Bush has the support of 95% of the G.O.P. base, and so has been able to run a general-election campaign for a year, with a small detour through South Carolina. Even the right wing wants victory enough to do anything and say nothing. You didn't see Charlton Heston onstage in Philadelphia; you couldn't miss Jesse Jackson in Los Angeles.

The fact that Gore is having to fight for his own base in August is an indication of just how much trouble he is in. In the late spring, the Gore campaign did its research and poked the focus groups and found that it was losing a slice of independents Clinton had conquered in 1996--not just the soccer moms in the suburbs but the waitress moms who punch the clock and still struggle to hold it all together, new economy be damned. Many voted for Clinton last time but favored Perot in 1992 and don't always care enough about politics to go to the polls at all. That's why Gore spent so much time last week trying to convince them that the stakes this time are huge, and it's why he's talking about issues that would have a tangible effect on their life--tame that HMO, get prescription drugs covered for Mom and Dad. If his base came home and the waitresses tuned in, a top Gore aide explained, Gore could tighten the race and then turn his attention to more affluent swing voters with a sunnier, centrist message, and the battle hymn could fade again to the background.

So Gore cranked up the modern brand of populism he has sounded on the trail for weeks. He aimed his message right at working families who "are trying to make house payments and car payments, working overtime to save for college," he said. Even the New Democrats were urged to preach the new doctrine: "Being pro-growth and being aggressive at protecting consumers," running mate Joe Lieberman told TIME, "I think they go together." At Team Gore's convention-planning meeting on Wednesday morning, campaign chairman Bill Daley offered the ultimate reward: 100 floor passes to anyone who could get former Treasury Secretary and gazillionaire Robert Rubin to utter the mantra, "Fight for working families." It was meant jokingly, using Rubin as a symbol of Wall Street power.

Even Gore himself is threading a fine needle: he picked a centrist running mate and shaped a centrist platform, all the while calling for the workers in the hall to unite. He's offering Clintonism in populist garb, centrism in a union suit. He never talks about issues like income inequality or the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. He talks about a prescription-drug benefit, the patient's bill of rights, targeted tax cuts, a secure retirement--ideas that speak to voters who are prospering as well as voters who are not. And his brew also includes centrist ingredients like welfare reform, disciplined government, crime, free trade and values.

Gore's team says it will do all this surgically, with a lot of parts but no sum. His aides think he can take on the pharmaceutical companies over profits and oil companies over price gouging without seeming anti-business. And they point out that the crusade against HMOs appeals to upscale voters as well. "They get stuck on hold when they're trying to get reimbursed too," says a Gore ally.

But nuance has never been Gore's strongest suit, and some Democrats--and some Republicans--say Gore is making a huge miscalculation. "You need to run a dual campaign," says Bill Bradley, "and that's not easy to do." The centrists are worried that the more Gore bangs the populist gong, the harder it will be to woo the upmarket independents who are too busy checking their new stock portfolios every day to see themselves struggling the way many of their parents did. It's almost as if Gore is basing his entire campaign for the next few weeks on the one group that is not fully benefiting from the Clinton economy. "It's the kind of speech you would make during a recession," says a former White House official. And some centrists see that as a risky scheme. "Only your core constituency will respond to the victim message," says Democratic Leadership Council president Al From. "The problem with playing the grievance card is that you undermine your message--if all you can talk about is what's wrong, you can't play your strongest card, which is everything you've done for the past eight years to make things right. "

The people close to him say Gore knows the dangers of his populist approach, but they say he has to stand for something, and Gore the scrapper is the role that worked for the Veep against Bradley last winter. In some ways, it's a role he has been comfortable with, as the son of a waitress and a Senator known for his fiery defense of Tennessee farmers. Besides, Gore tried sensible centrism a year ago, with lots of detailed, 10-point plans on teacher testing and crime prevention and tax cuts, and came off sounding like a pale Clinton. He needs to get his numbers moving, fast. "We're going where we think we can move people immediately," says a top adviser. "We need to build momentum and interest by getting the easiest picks first, draw in the downscale voters, then get the upscale voters to take a second look, talk about investment in education, talk about the role of government, expand the conversation. We're not conceding the upscale voters to Bush: we're just going for them later."

Down in Austin, Texas, Bush aides say Gore's new approach makes a certain sense for someone in his predicament, but can't win him the election. The Governor's strategists concede that working families are swing, but they also believe, as one said, that "they are sick of what's going on in Washington." Another Bush adviser allowed that Gore can get some of the waitress moms, but Bush has a solid lock on their husbands. Bush's huge lead among working-class men, he argues, is the chief reason the Governor is ahead in states where Gore should be ahead by now: Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Missouri and West Virginia--all states Clinton won twice. "Part of Gore's populism would appeal to this group," says the Bush aide. "They like fighters. They wear baseball caps, drive pickups." But, one added, "they don't wear earth tones."

Still, Bush wasn't taking any chances. The day after Gore's speech, the Governor was talking in Tennessee about the nobility of working people, the fairness of the tax code and the fact that after seven years of Clinton and Gore, there was still no prescription-drug benefit "for those who need it" (without mentioning that the Republican Congress played a role in that outcome). And his aides announced that the campaign was buying airtime in 21 states this week to trumpet Bush's record on education reform--the ultimate swing-voter hustle. --Reported by James Carney, Matthew Cooper, Viveca Novak, Eric Pooley and Karen Tumulty/Los Angeles and John F. Dickerson, with Bush

For a daily dose of politics and campaign coverage with an edge, go to time.com/Campaign2000