Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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I, George Albert Walker Gore, Do Solemnly �

Friday, May 15, 2000

Two major polls in the past five days have pointed out how badly Al "I'm-Just-Like-George-Bush-Senior" Gore is doing among White men and women. The Voter.Com/Battleground poll released last week showed Bush leading Gore among White voters by 14 points: 52-38. Bush leads among White women in that poll by 12 points: 52-40.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday showed a similar lead for Bush: 15 points, 49-34. That poll also showed Bush leading Gore among White men by an astounding 23 points: 58-35.

Watch for this: Gore supporters will begin - probably this week - the drumbeat of a "Racial Gap" from which George W. Bush suffering. Headlines will scream: What Bush Must Do to Close the Race Gap."

Gore, for his part, is now running on the coattails of George Bush, Senior! All last week Democratic pundits were telling me, "remember, in the race between [Vice President] Bush and [Massachusetts Governor Michael] Dukakis, Bush trailed in the polls all summer long."

Sure enough, in an interview published in the Washington Post yesterday, Ceci Connelly and Dan Balz wrote: "� Gore compared himself to Bush's father, who as vice president in the spring of 1988 trailed the Democratic challenger by double digits. 'Mike Dukakis was ahead of Vice President Bush by, what, 17 points at this stage or 20 points at this stage of the race way back when 12 years ago,' Gore said."

All, right, children, to the Way-Back Machine, again. If Gore is going to throw himself into the Sitting- Vice-Presidents-Running-For-President pool, let's go to the shallow end and look at the one before Bush: Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon, for our younger readers, was Eisenhower's VP for eight years and ran against Senator John F. Kennedy.

Jack Kennedy, not Dick Nixon, won that election. And what do we know for certain about Al Gore? We know that Al Gore is no Jack Kennedy.

Another point on historical parallels: As the person whose lips got chapped whistling past the graveyard in 1998 claiming that the "mid-term-election-in-the-sixth-year-of-an-Administration-curse" would save our bacon, let me remind you that the GOP lost seats in the House.

Hey Al! If you need help getting past your own historical graveyard, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you Al? You just put your lips together and � well, you know the rest.

Here's another rule which will be imposed when I take over the world. If you bill your event as the Million Anything - Man, Mom, Manatee, whatever - March then you should be held to that standard. It appears that yesterday "tens of thousands" (according to Larry Margasak's AP piece) of people were on the Mall in Washington for the Million Mom's March. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say the "tens of thousands" were 40 thousand. Let's give them another benefit of the doubt and say it was five times that - 200,000. They were still 800,000 short of their goal of a "Million Moms."

Yet more evidence that President Clinton is a lame duck. He suggested, yesterday, that he would like to attend the funeral of former Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi who died over the weekend. This would normally be the duty of the Vice President but, given Gore's recent self-comparisons to George H.W. Bush, he might not welcome the memories of the Former President's most famous trip to - and his most infamous dinner in - Japan.

If you live in Indiana, the Bobby Knight story is the equivalent of the Rudy Giuliani story for New Yorkers in terms of importance. According to one report, 10 people gathered at the basketball arena on the campus to express their support for Knight. That's one more than the number of University Trustees - nine - who were meeting to decide his fate.

If the Knight supporters had access to a decent P.R. firm they would have called it the "Billion Basketball Bash for Bobby." They would have only been 999,999,990 people short. Close enough.

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Copyright © 2000 Richard A. Galen

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