Working-Class Act: Why Gore's new populism is selling.

Could it be that Al Gore's recent swing into populist politics developed in a single moment, when he looked in the mirror? No, really, this may be a serious insight. Although we know that an honest biography of Young Al would read like a fun-free version of Eloise at the Plaza, Gore might well have smiled enigmatically at his mirror image and thought aloud: I look just like a socialist-realism painting of a New Soviet Worker.

And he does. Our vice president has the oversimplified and sculpted features of a standard Proletarian Hero, the identical brawny physique straining uncomfortably against his suit, and the kind of visionary gaze into the middle distance that in real life suggests a man who left his contact lenses on the bedside table.

Show me a Dawn of Progress, he doubtless thought as he glimpsed his own rugged grandeur, and watch me stride ruthlessly towards it. It might well have dawned on him in that epiphany that-though a child of Privilege himself-he would not look completely implausible as the People's Tribune in the fight against it.

Looks apart, of course, Gore is not the most convincing populist. Born into a wealthy political home in the segregated South, brought up in a smart hotel in the dark heart of the Beltway, educated in the Iviest of Leagues, and drawing large incomes from his family's connections with the oil and tobacco industries, he seems ill-suited to lead the workers and peasants of Middle America against the corporate behemoths, the malefactors of great wealth, the economic royalists, the power elite, and some of his closest friends and contributors.

Nor is his record as a congressman, senator, and vice president helpful in this regard. Gore has been more or less identified with two broad political groups during his time in Washington-the moderate New Democrats with their treasured links to corporate America, and the radical-environmentalist pressure groups. Or, to put it another way, he has been the faithful ally both of the economic elite and of the cultural elite. Normally these groups are at daggers drawn, of course, but they join together in hating the forces of populism.

Only dire necessity, therefore, would seem likely to propel Prince Albert into an alliance with polyester politics. Recall, however, that dire necessity dominated the scene leading up to the Democratic convention. Whereupon Gore swallowed hard, strode to the podium, kissed his wife, and denounced the oil industry, tobacco firms, pharmaceutical companies, and HMOs on behalf of the little guy.

Just how dire was necessity, however? Well, it was pretty dire. Gore had wrapped up most of the (recently) traditional Democratic constituencies and was still 17 points behind in the polls. He could still make up valuable ground by wooing the women's vote, which he triumphantly managed to do with The Kiss. But his real opportunity lay with the white working class.

As the left-wing political analysts, Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, pointed out in their book, America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, this bloc accounts for 55 percent of the electorate. It had been the foundation of the political coalitions that kept America Democratic from FDR to LBJ, Republican from Nixon to George Bush the First, and confused when Ross Perot gained a plurality of its votes in 1992. Gore was not doing well with such voters: He was even with George W. Bush among white working-class women, but losing two-to-one among the men.

But the good news for him was that these voters are volatile. Their support for the GOP dropped 22 percent between 1990 and 1992, as a result of President Bush breaking his tax pledge and then presiding over a mini-recession. And the Democrats lost 20 percent of these votes between 1992 and 1994, when a newly elected President Clinton adopted such culturally liberal policies as "gays in the military."

So these voters were up for grabs, and-as Joel Rogers noted-the Democrats were suddenly more appealing to them, as a result of the Clinton years. Thanks to Clinton, Democrats were no longer seen as soft on crime or hostile to welfare reform. With a little effort, the party might reverse the view that had begun to take hold with these voters that the government did something for every group but them. Hence the vice president's passionate reinvention of himself as New Proletarian Gore.

And, sure enough, he rose rapidly in the polls, took back his lead among women voters, and even began to eat into the Republican base of white men.

Still, this strategy is not without its risks. Gore has been identified, after all, with such pro-business initiatives of the Clinton years as NAFTA and ratifying the World Trade Organization. Big Labor is prepared to forget these lapses in the larger interest of keeping out the Republicans, but a whiff of hypocrisy lingers over the campaign. What has made Gore's new populism relatively successful, however, is the failure of the Republicans to exploit these weaknesses or to counter with a strong visceral appeal of their own to these voters. Look at three such failures.

First, most American voters now own stocks, either directly or through pension funds. Many of the blue-collar workers who would once have been attracted by anticorporate rhetoric now have their own 401(k)s and follow the market avidly. So, even when he limits his populist attacks to such politically unpopular targets as Big Tobacco, Gore still takes a risk that he will alarm not merely the markets but also the millions of blue-collar investors. Yet people do not always realize their interests spontaneously. So the investor-voters won't necessarily be alarmed unless the Republican candidate points out forcefully that the Democrats threaten their investments-which, of course, the GOP would safeguard. So far the Bush campaign has been slow to make such points. Bush should borrow from Lady Thatcher's rhetoric in the 1987 British election, when she said: "Labour believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners."

Second, as several reporters have noticed, when Gore is addressing white blue-collar voters, he never mentions the words "affirmative action." That is doubtless because these target voters are what Frederick Lynch calls the "invisible victims" of racial preferences. They (and their wives) know they have been denied jobs and promotion because of them. And they are accordingly resentful. In political terms, however, that means little unless a candidate is offering them relief. Not only is Bush not offering such relief; his campaign is based on avoiding the issue altogether. The net effect is to persuade white working-class males that they can expect no help from Bush on race preferences, and might as well go with Gore in return for his pro-labor stance.

Third, there is a general weakness in the Bush campaign when it comes to moral populism. Traditionally, Democrats have appealed to economic populists by denouncing corporate elites, while the GOP has wooed moral populists by assailing the cultural elites of Hollywood. Gore is a tempting target for moral-populist attacks as a defender of partial-birth abortion, gay rights, etc. Witness his recent squirming on whether he supports "gay marriage" (yes and no) and his naming of Sen. Lieberman, which was designed to set at rest the anxieties of traditionalists.

But Bush seems disinclined to arouse such anxieties because they might make him look like, well, a Republican. Which allows Gore to make inroads into the white working-class vote on economic grounds, as the only populist in town.

Of course, the towns he appeals to most are Washington and Hollywood; whether his act will play in Peoria is still an open question.