Edition: U.S. / Global

Politics In The Burbs; Soccer Mom 2000

By James Bennet
Published: April 9, 2000

For months now, Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who studies Americans with the discipline and delight of Darwin in the Gal1/3pagos, has been conducting a focus group of just one. Every once in a while he calls up Ruth Cullison, a homemaker and former art teacher in the suburbs of Baltimore whom he has come to think of as the quintessential swing voter. Like a lot of Americans, Cullison is following the presidential campaign at a distance, with a keen sense of anticipatory disappointment.

''This is going to be like a retro election,'' she says. ''Do I want an old Bush, or do I want an old Clinton?'' Of George W. Bush, the potential retread of his father, she says, ''If you're going to cast him for president in some movie, he might have the look, but I'm not sure he has anything else.'' Of Al Gore, the potential Bill Clinton retread, she says, ''It looks like he gets lessons on being sincere -- and it doesn't work.''

So-called soccer moms were all the rage in political circles in 1996. They symbolized the female suburban swing voters who supposedly held the key to victory in that year's presidential race. They didn't, but that's not the odd part; there is probably no profession more prone to snake oil and fads than politics. What's really strange is that this year, when the cliche has substance, soccer moms seem to have wandered off the political field.

Four years ago soccer moms were the same suburban women with demanding spawn, but they were not teetering between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. The term ''was just a good metaphor for middle-aged women who were going to support Clinton over Dole in any case,'' says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. In the end, suburban women, and suburban mothers, favored Clinton by 53 to 39 -- even as suburban men voted for Dole.

But this year these independent-minded women are up for grabs. Bush, younger than Dole, warmer personally and far better positioned politically, may be able to peel suburban women away from Gore. Without a strong majority of them, Gore will almost surely lose.

Of course, no one voter is an archetype (Cullison's soccer-playing daughter is in college now), just as no one group swings like Tarzan from candidate to candidate. Yet some groups, including senior citizens and Catholics, have more ambivalent voters than others. Among the potential sources of swing voters, none are shaping up to be more powerful than suburban women, and that is significant for a couple of reasons. It points to the limits both of Gore's appeal and of Clinton's success at repositioning the Democrats as the mainstream party, the one most committed to helping children -- especially children whose parents happen to live in the suburbs.

These days, with Democrats dominating the cities and Republicans controlling the countryside, suburbanites pick presidents. ''Everything that a strategist does -- everything that I do as a strategist -- is focused on suburban voters,'' says Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster. ''That's the story of American elections.''

Suburban men are pretty reliable Republican voters, but suburban women -- whether wealthy or blue collar -- are fickle. Pollsters like to say they are ''cross-pressured,'' torn between a desire for lower taxes and a yearning for government -- for anyone -- to help in caring for their aging parents and protecting their children from guns and dirty air. Cullison would love a whopping income-tax cut, but she suspects that the government would just turn around and raise some other taxes to pay for needed programs.

Bush entered the primary season with a commanding lead over Gore among suburban women, who have accounted for about a fifth of the vote in the last four presidential contests. In early November, when he was still Cullison's favorite, Bush was crushing Gore, 54 percent to 37 percent, among women in the suburbs, according to a New York Times/CBS news poll. But after the New Hampshire primary, once Gore had righted his campaign and Bush had begun rallying the faithful at Bob Jones University and other South Carolina hot spots, soccer moms started moving back to the Democrats. By mid-February, Gore and Bush were tied among suburban women, and remained so in late March.

Cullison, who grew to like John McCain, was turned off by the nasty tone of the Republican contest. Bush seemed to have shed the good-guy image she had found so appealing. So she started to give Gore a serious look. ''But if he had just one ounce of charisma -- just one -- it would be nice,'' she says. ''Just try to picture him being in the same mess Clinton was in and not being drummed out of the United States.''

The visit to Bob Jones University, and the way Bush initially handled it, still stick in Cullison's craw. But while Bush's drive to the right in the primaries may have set him back, his campaign is still well positioned to bring in women. ''The next 60 seconds are just for you, ladies,'' Bush's father declared in a commercial in 1966, as a candidate for Congress from Texas. George W. Bush's appeal is more sophisticated. His central campaign theme -- compassionate conservatism'' -- is mostly for you, ladies.

Like previous Republican candidates, Bush envisions a limited role for the federal government. But unlike them, he emphasizes what it can do, rather than harping on what it can't. That message attracts suburban mothers. ''Compassionate conservatism is geared straight to them,'' says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. ''They want a role for government.''

Bush has used his imagery to support a message of tolerance, underscoring compassion ahead of conservatism. His schoolboy Spanish and appearances with blacks may not help him much with minority voters, but they go a long way toward reassuring suburban women that he is not another nasty Newt Gingrich Republican. For the same reason, women love to see him photographed with children. Among Republicans, Lake says, ''they think of George W. Bush as their first modern candidate.''

Cullison has the political essence of compassionate conservatism pretty much nailed. ''I think he's trying to do like a spinoff -- and I can't imagine why -- on Clinton's I-feel-your-pain kind of stuff,'' she says. The slogan, she insists, doesn't work for her. Yet over and over, she cites Bush's ''warmth'' as his most appealing quality; she hopes he takes after his personable mother, Barbara, whom she prefers to his father.

Most suburban women, like Cullison, favor abortion rights. Even during the primaries, Bush did not overtly promise to appoint a running mate or judges who, like him, oppose such rights, using code to reassure conservatives. Cullison did not know Bush's position until I told her. But her reaction suggested that he could still win her support if he can soft-peddle the issue, since she hates blanket statements either way about abortion. ''I guess it's like a mark against,'' she says, ''but these are not big black marks, and I'm not chiseling them in stone at the moment.''

As soon as he secured the nomination, Bush began edging to the center on gun control. He even defended Clinton against attacks by the National Rifle Association, shrewdly linking himself to the president on an issue on which the Democrats hold the high political ground.

Here again, Cullison has enough ambivalence to give Bush an opening. ''You have Moses telling us that guns are great, and everyone else screaming up and down on the other side,'' she says, referring to Charlton Heston, the president of the N.R.A. ''It's a ridiculous situation.'' She believes that there must be some compromise that does not bend the Second Amendment, and she is waiting for a candidate to propose it.

On policy grounds, Bush's chief appeal to suburban mothers, like Gore's, has been his emphasis on education, the issue that Cullison and her suburban sisters rank No. 1. His strategy is to turn the Democrats' traditional dominance on education against them. In addition to proposing his own literacy initiative, he is asserting that Democratic policy has hurt the people it was designed to help. ''They own it,'' says Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist. ''They own failure.'' Sound familiar? It worked for the Republicans during Gingrich's most visible social policy success, welfare reform.

For his part, Gore is trying to reveal compassionate conservatism as political sleight of hand concealing the same old Republican policy, a ''risky tax scheme'' that will prevent the government from addressing the schools' needs.

Cullison has yet to tangle with the details of either candidate's positions. She knows, however, that she doesn't like Bush's voucher proposal, because she thinks it abandons most poor students. But she is also skeptical of some of Gore's ideas for spreading high technology: ''I don't think the answer is putting a computer in every classroom.'' By the time the computers are hooked up they are obsolete, she adds, and teachers don't know how to use them, anyway.

One topic that Cullison never mentions is suburban sprawl, which Gore tried early on to turn into a signature issue. As it turns out, pollsters have found that it bugs voters to think that their president might be spending his time unknotting the local traffic snarl.

Suburban women consistently rank ''values'' as their second-greatest concern after education, and here Bush starts with the advantage. ''These suburban moms really think their kids derive role models from the presidency,'' Lake says. Clinton, who might have been Gore's strongest ally with these voters, has, not surprisingly, become a liability, a weakness that Bush has thoroughly exploited. ''I think it's really important for moms and dads to be able to point to the White House and say, 'That person has brought honor and dignity to the office,''' he said in a commercial first broadcast in the fall.

Gore's response has been to present himself as Clinton without the wandering eye. But when it comes to values, Gore's problem is more complex than that. Earlier this winter, when Peter Hart asked his quintessential swing voter what one question she would put to Gore, Cullison replied: ''Are you going to be the same person tomorrow, the same person all four years?' He seems like the ultimate politician, and Clinton jaded my view of politicians.''

Months later that sense of slipperiness still gnaws. ''I wish he looked a little more comfortable with himself,'' she says. ''He seems too willing to reinvent himself and be whoever everyone wants him to be, and I don't get a sense of who he is -- unless that is who he is, and I don't want that in a leader.'' Bush's victory in the primaries came at a cost, but so did Gore's efforts to remold himself into a rowdy fighter in earth tones. By insinuating that Gore is a phony, the Bush camp is calling his honesty, not his fidelity, into question -- and slyly exploiting his greatest weakness among suburban women.

Apart from policy issues and their character, the candidates will also be looking to sway the soccer moms with their choice of running mate. Even people like Cullison, who do not take the vice presidency too seriously, will read deeply into the picks for signs of each candidate's judgment. ''At least they're making a decision,'' she explains. ''Then I can look at that person too.''

The vice-presidential question also injects an element of drama into a race that badly needs it, at least in Cullison's view. Her interest was piqued when Colin Powell was floated as a possible running mate for Bush -- though she doesn't think Powell would take the job. And her ire was raised when her own lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, was mentioned as a possible running mate for Gore. Standing quietly behind Maryland's governor, Parris N. Glendening, seemingly anticipating her own turn, Townsend reminds Cullison too much of Gore himself.

And so begins the general election campaign -- or, really, the specific election campaign for the suburbs, where the independent-minded have always wondered, Is this really all there is? In mid-March when Hart asked Cullison what she would do if she had to vote that day, she said: ''I'm going to run screaming from the room. My situation is, that's when you start to consider going abroad.'' In the end, she says, if the economy stays strong she will probably vote for Gore, though she figures the only interesting thing about his State of the Union speeches will be to see who snores.

There's just no pleasing some people. Suburban women have two presidential candidates practically begging for their votes, and their response is to roll their eyes. Politicians had better get used to this high-handed reception. With party loyalty in steady decline, and with the suburbs looking demographically more like the rest of America, and vice versa, every person over 18 is becoming a potential swing voter.

That is all to the good. The more swing voters there are, the freer candidates are to move away from their bases toward the center -- in fact, the more compelled they are to move. Voters will probably complain even more that they see little difference between the candidates. But a debate over how to fix the public schools, rather than over whether to eliminate the Department of Education, could actually result in useful public policy. If it does, you will have Mom to thank.

Photo: Suburbanites like Ruth Cullison hold the outcome of elections in their hands. (Jake Chessum)