The 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Head Table Guests

Bart J. Mindszenthy, APR, FCPRS, Partner, Mindszenthy & Roberts Communications Counsel and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; The Rev. Stephen Drakeford, Associate Priest, St. Matthew's Anglican Church, Islington; Anton Vidgen, Grade 12 Student, Western Technical-Commercial Collegiate Institute and Secretary-Treasurer, Toronto District School Supercouncil; Shauneen Bruder, Senior Vice-President, North American Markets, Personal and Commercial Banking, Royal Bank of Canada; Charles S. Coffey, Executive Vice-President, Government and Community Affairs, The Royal Bank of Canada and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; and Janell Blue, Vice-President and President-Elect, Canadian-American Business Council and Senior Vice-President, International Group RIGGS National Bank.

Introduction by John Koopman

Mr. Cook before you rise to speak it is incumbent upon me to warn you a bit about Canadian attitudes toward our neighbor to the south. We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the United States.

We Canadians can often be critics of your domestic policy. Although we are certainly are in a material sense poorer than you, we are fond of claiming that we are a gentler, kinder society. Whether that is true or not is a nice question for another day. You should note however note that we did not start talking about our gentler, kinder society until NAFTA had safely secured our own economic future by hooking our tiny caboose to the great vibrant American economic locomotive.

The attitude is not new. It was ever thus. Throughout the cold war we were often vigorous critics of American foreign policy. We made our criticisms however from a position of great safety, safely ensconced, as we were and are, under the American defense umbrella.

Our collective paranoia is best exemplified by an incident involving former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson at a state dinner in Washington. Pearson was seated beside Dean Rusk the courteous, erudite Secretary of State in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. After dinner Secretary Rusk got up to speak first, thinking that as Pearson was the more senior of the two officials protocol demanded that Pearson have the opportunity to speak last. As Secretary Rusk got up to speak, Pearson grabbed his arm and said ""no let me me speak first"". Rusk responded ""but that would be inappropriate, you are more senior and should speak last"". Pearson responded ""well usually I would, but it has been such a nice dinner and I would not want to ruin it, and if you speak first, for domestic political reasons I would be forced to disagree with everything you say""

In yesterday's National Post Allan Gottlieb our former Ambassador to the United States, in discussing Canadian-American relations quoted Lord Palmerston who once said that nations have no friends, only interests. Mr. Cook, the United States is a good neighbor, and we all know that a good neighbor is worth more than a distant friend.

Mr. Cook is widely described as one of the most astute impartial analysts of the Washington political scene. The New York Times has described him as ""the best political handicapper in the nation"", and the Wall Street Journal has described him as ""the Picasso of election analysis"". He is the Editor of the Cook Political Report and his subscribers have included each of the Reagan, Bush and Clinton White Houses. He is reputed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics and to be a veritable storehouse of memorable political tales and anecdotes.

Mr. Cook is a native of Shreveport Louisiana and obtained a Bachelor's degree in American government at Georgetown. Judging from the breadth of his accomplishments and reputation I don't think he has left Washington since. He has worked on Capitol Hill for Louisiana Senator Bennett Johnston, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He writes a weekly column for the National Journal and appears regularly on CNN's ""Inside Politics"" program. He has appeared as a sought after political expert on every major news network in the United States.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Charles Cook to the podium of the Empire Club of Canada.

Charles Cook

Thank you very much John for that introduction. It really is an honour to be asked to speak before such a prestigious group as the Empire Club. I also want to thank the Canadian-American Business Council, which is doing a terrific job in Washington watching out for Canadian interests and cultivating a closer relationship between our two countries. I also want to thank the Royal Bank.

I started dealing with Canadians long ago when Derek Burney was the Ambassador to Washington and he was probably one of the biggest political junkies I've ever met. About every three or four months I would get an invitation to come to the Embassy and the two of us would have lunch in his dining room with a phenomenal view of the Capitol. No other embassy in Washington has a location with such a beautiful view of the Capitol Building which has the appearance of a wedding cake. He wouldn't let the staff in because he wanted to talk about American politics. I think he probably knew as much about American politics as most of the people who dole out millions of dollars for political action committees in the U.S.

My background was all on the democratic side. I had worked in Democratic party politics and campaigns, worked on Capitol Hill and then I found myself voting for Republicans about half the time. This is in poor taste if you are working for the Democratic party. I wasn't becoming a Republican. I was just becoming a swing voter. It was before Dick Morris made it fashionable to work both sides simultaneously. I tried to figure out how to stay in politics but not work for either side so I started a political newsletter.

My primary qualification for being a political analyst is the fact that I was born and raised in Louisiana where politics is in our blood and culture. Huey Long was our governor back in the 1930s and Huey didn't go to Louisiana State University, but he was a huge LSU football fan. One year he was trying to convince the Louisiana State Legislature to appropriate money for the expansion of the football stadium in Baton Rouge. The legislature was in an obstinate mood that year and refused to do it, but the governor noticed that they did appropriate some money for a new dormitory. So he had them build a horseshoe-shaped dormitory around the perimeter of the existing football stadium. He then had them put seats on the roof of the dormitory facing inward. To this day if you go to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you will find that Tiger Stadium is also a functioning dormitory.

A few years after that, his brother, Earl Long was our governor. Some of you may have seen the movie ""Blaze"" with Paul Newman that came out a few years ago about Earl and his relationship with a stripper from Baltimore named Blaze Starr. The best part of the movie, and this part was absolutely historically accurate, was how Earl Long was committed to an insane asylum while he was governor and how he got out. He fired the state commissioner of hospitals and then put in a new one who discharged him from the insane asylum.

A few years after that Jimmy Davis, the Country and Western singer and songwriter, was our governor. He is famous for the song ""You are My Sunshine."" Now most people assume that Sunshine was his wife or sweetheart but Sunshine was his horse. When Jimmy Davis became governor he wanted his horse to see his office. He brought his horse up the 48 steps into the State Capitol Building and into the governor's office. Someone at the time noted it was the first time they had ever had an entire horse in the governor's office.

I just wanted to give you an idea of where I learned my politics before I came to Washington 28 years ago.

This is truly a fascinating year in politics in America and around the world putting aside the close election. We saw a dead man elected to the U.S. Senate in Missouri. According to this morning's New York Times a half dozen eunuchs have been elected to public office in India. The idea is that they generally don't have homes, don't have cars and are not having children. They're probably therefore not likely to steal from the government, which is certainly an interesting concept. In fact the current governor of Louisiana is a multi-millionaire and that's pretty much the reason why people elected him. They figured he was too rich to steal. Anyway it's been a fascinating year in American politics. Personally I think that overtime is best for basketball; not for elections.

This was an election between George Bush who speaks English as if it's his second language and Al Gore who speaks English as if it's your second language. A fascinating year.

I want to talk briefly about what happened in the election and then look forward to the Bush administration in the next couple of years. I think there are four things that jump out as really important in this election.

The first is that the United States is a country amazingly evenly divided between the two parties right now. We are a country that is split right down the middle no matter how you look at it. For example, the popular vote: 49 per cent Gore, 48 per cent Bush. The electoral college vote: 271 Bush, 267 Gore. The U.S. Senate: 50, 50. The House of Representatives: 51, 49. State Legislative Chambers: Republicans hold both Chambers in 17 States and Democrats hold both Chambers in 16 States with 16 more being split. State Legislative seats around the country: there are six or seven thousand State Legislators with fifty-one per cent of them Democrats and 49 per cent Republicans. Only in governorships do we have a lopsided ratio where Republicans still have a big advantage.

NBC and The Wall Street Journal released a survey this morning that indicated that if an election were held again today, George Bush would get 43 per cent of the vote and Al Gore would get 43 per cent of the vote. This is a country that is split straight down the middle. Having said that, this was one of the most partisan elections we have ever seen. Al Gore received 86 per cent of the vote among people who call themselves Democrats. There were very few defectors to Bush. George Bush got 91 per cent of the Republican vote. Very few Republican defectors to Gore. The parties held firm. And then an independent split--117 per cent for Bush; 45 per cent for Gore. The reason the math works out that way is that there are simply more Democrats than Republicans so it evened out to the 48,47 popular vote.

The second important thing is, as in all elections, this was a choice between continuity and change. People were split straight down the middle about whether there should be continuity or change. If you think back over the last eight years, what have we gone through in the United States? Back in 1993, after Clinton was elected, Democrats had control of the House and the Senate. And what happened? It's as if Democrats loaded up in buses and they drove to the left as far and as fast as they could, going off a cliff crashing and burning. The cliff was the 1994 election where Democrats lost control of the House. They lost control of the U.S. Senate, which they had controlled for 34 out of 40 years. And then after that election Republicans took over Capitol Hill and started moving to the far right almost going off the cliff in that direction losing seats, losing the Presidency in 1996 again and losing seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Then they started moving back towards the centre. So both parties moved back towards the centre with Clinton and the Democrats occupying the central-left position and Republicans and Congress occupying the centre-right position, each one having previously gone out to the extremes. You had a centre-left Democratic President kept in check by a centre-right Republican Congress and a centre-right Republican Congress kept in check by a centre-left Democratic president. In the end they couldn't decide on a lot of things. They couldn't decide on what kind of tax cuts to give us so they didn't give us a lot of deep tax cuts. They couldn't decide on a lot of big domestic spending so we didn't expand domestic spending by a significant amount. And given the growing economy a budget deficit evaporated, budget surpluses went through the roof and voters thought this was good. Certainly a lot of voters would like to have seen us spend more money on education, or more money on defence, or cut taxes more, but the second choice for the vast majority of these voters was simply to eliminate the deficit and to start knocking out the national debt. And that's exactly what happened. Voters were very, very satisfied with this sort of centrist government.

But on the other hand, they were looking for change on another level. They were sickened by the endless scandals. They started with Jennifer Flowers and culminated with Monica Lewinsky. They were just tired of it all. While Clinton's job approval rating ran from 60 to 66 per cent approval of the job he did as president, when you asked people whether they approved or disapproved of him as a person, his disapproval rating was 60 to 65 per cent.

People wanted change, so the question in some ways came down to this. Did George Bush represent too much change from what they liked in American politics or government or did Al Gore represent enough change from what they didn't like? They ended up splitting straight down the middle on the idea of change versus continuity.

Third. Republicans had figured out a recipe to win presidential elections and from 1968 to 1988 Republicans won four out of five presidential elections. That recipe worked like this. They would win small-town and rural America by a big margin. They would win the suburbs by a big margin. And then they would hold on for dear life in the middle-sized cities and big cities because that's where Democrats were going to win and really run up the score.

The balance was tilted very heavily in favour of Republicans and they won all those elections. That changed in 1992. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the suburbs by two percentage points. In 1996, Bill Clinton won the suburbs by seven percentage points. In this election George Bush won the suburbs but only by two percentage points-very very different from the 10- to 15-point Republican victories that had been occurring in the suburbs. At the same time Gore was winning urban America by a much bigger margin than Clinton had or previous Democrats had while Bush did much better in small-town and rural America than Republicans had before. So there was a bigger gap between the cities and rural America and the suburbs moved from fairly heavily Republican to swing areas. The biggest issue was guns. The gun issue was hurting Democrats and helping Republicans in smalltown rural America. It was hurting Republicans badly in big cities and it was hurting Republicans fairly significantly in the suburbs. But abortion and a wide range of other social cultural issues have turned the suburbs from a Republican bastion into a real battleground. One thing to watch over the next four years is whether the Democrats can continue to keep the fight going in these suburbs or whether Bush can solidify the Republican's position in these key suburbs.

And finally the two men themselves. If you sat during the election behind the glass and listened to these independent voters and heard them talk about the two candidates, what you would hear them say is this. They would look at Al Gore, say he was a very smart guy, knows everything about all the issues and has an enormous amount of experience. They liked all of that about him. But there was something about him they didn't like. They didn't trust him and they didn't connect with him as a person. They saw no warmth in him at all. They would then look over at George Bush and they really liked George Bush and they really trusted George Bush, but they wondered whether he was smart enough and knew enough about the issues. Did he have the right kind of experience? These voters found themselves torn. They were willing to concede that Al Gore was eminently qualified to be president but they did not want to vote for him. They really wanted to vote for George Bush but they just weren't sure if he was qualified. In the end they just split straight down the middle.

Now what's going to happen? Even if Bush had won by three, four, five, six percentage points, frankly he would still have a huge challenge ahead of him because when you've got a 50-50 U.S. Senate you've got a problem. A party doesn't have control of the U.S. Senate until they have 60 votes and can cut off a filibuster. But he will have a very difficult time getting his agenda through. House of Representatives 51, 49. Very very difficult, particularly given the sort of poisonous environment that we have. Is George Bush the most experienced president we've ever had? Of course not. Is he the most knowledgeable about issues? Of course not. I would argue that he is a reasonably intelligent person. He just lacks any intellectual curiosity. John and I were talking over lunch and I pointed out that somebody leaked the SAT scores for many of the presidential candidates and that Bush had actually scored higher on the SAT than Bill Bradley did. So it is not a matter of IQ points; not a matter of intelligence. It is just that he is not a very curious person.

But ultimately the success of a presidency I believe is whom you hire, whether you listen to him and at the end of the day whether you make the right decisions. When you look at the Bush cabinet it is a phenomenally experienced cabinet. Much more experienced than Clinton's was eight years ago.

I think we could have had a more skilful president selected, no doubt about that at all, but there's one important skill set that George Bush has that quite frankly At Gore didn't have, Bill Bradley doesn't have and John McCain doesn't have. That skill set is that when you put him in front of a big room George Bush is very unimpressive. When you put him on television, he's very unimpressive. With a group this size, he'd do okay but if you put him with a small group of people, one or two, five, 10, 15, 20 he is as impressive as Bill Clinton is. He really comes across very well. You like him and you trust him. It's important to remember what he did when he took over as governor of Texas because this man had never been elected to so much as a school board or a city council. There was no reason to think that he was the least bit qualified to be governor of Texas.

The second problem he had was that the governorship in Texas was the weakest governorship in the country constitutionally. A lot of the powers that governors in the United States normally have have been given to the lieutenant-governor in Texas. Some of those powers have also been given to the State Legislature so it is a very weak governorship. And to top it all off the lieutenant-governor was a Democrat, the State House and the State Senate were controlled by Democrats. So George Bush with no experience and essentially no knowledge about the inner workings of state government in Texas comes in and the first thing he does is he befriends the crusty old democratic lieutenant-governor and they became very, very close. Then he befriends the democratic leaders in the State House and the State Senate. The next thing he did was that over the course of the next few months he sat down and met one on one or in small groups with every single member of the Texas Legislature, even all the Democrats. There were some members of the legislature who had never had a one-to-one or small group meeting with his predecessor in four years and yet Bush did it in the first month. He created a relationship with them because that's his forte. Big groups no, but small groups yes so with no knowledge and no experience, he became a reasonably effective governor. That's his strong suit; that and surrounding himself with good people.

Now coming into a snake pit like Washington, those skills will be sorely tested. For example, the speaker of the House, the democratic leader and the minority leader of the House of Representatives met the week after the election. It was the first time they had spoken to each other in five months. Their offices are probably 100 feet apart. That's how ugly the situation is in Washington. And so I would argue that while there are certain qualities that Bush doesn't have he clearly has some that are very good.

I think it's going to be a fascinating four years. You're seeing a transition from one mainstream government to another mainstream government. I think the differences will be somewhat subtle, certainly in the area of trade and foreign policy.

I had a couple of trips to Europe during the campaign but before the election and two trips after the election to do some speeches. The conventional wisdom among Europeans seemed to be that George Bush was a moron. Americans would never elect a moron president. Al Gore would therefore win. I tried to explain to them that he was not a moron. He may not be intellectually curious and his family may have got him into Yale and into Harvard's Business School but they didn't do his homework for him. They didn't take his tests and they didn't do his papers. The guy's not a moron.

Does the name Ronald Reagan mean anything to you? Our presidential elections have never been IQ tests. There is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between IQ and winning presidential elections. There is no correlation between IQ and successful U.S. presidencies either. Consider Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. One of them was extremely intelligent and the other was a successful president. So it is whom you hire, whether you listen to him, and it's luck. It is how the economy does while you are there and most importantly it is how the economy is doing when you're leaving. That is how you will be remembered. I think it's going to be a fascinating challenging time in Washington and American politics but frankly I wouldn't look for any big changes. We're really shifting from slightly centre left to slightly centre right.

You have been a terrific audience. Thank you all very, very much.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Janell Blue, Vice-President and President-Elect, Canadian-American Business Council and Senior Vice-President, International Group RIGGS National Bank.