President Clinton Monday night presented an appealing, vigorous, apparently believable and grossly misleading case for sustaining the Clinton-Gore prosperity by electing the Gore-Lieberman ticket. Clinton’s valedictory sounded a clarion call that surely will be echoed by Gore in his acceptance speech Thursday and hammered home repeatedly until election day. In the World According to Clinton, this election is a “fundamental choice” between sustaining the “new Democratic agenda that has taken our country to new heights of prosperity,” or plunging back into economic darkness by returning a tax-cutting Republican to the White House. Surely, though, the Bush-Cheney campaign was standing ready with both barrels blaring to aggressively separate economic fact from Clinton-Democratic fiction. Right?   

Well, no. The only retort to Clinton’s speech Tuesday was a three-sentence statement issued by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, which read in part: “This speech was about Bill Clinton trying to write his own legacy, not about Al Gore’s future.” That might be true enough, as far as it goes, but it seems to miss the larger point. A few quotes pointing out that the economy has been in secular expansion since the Reagan tax cuts took hold in 1982, or that growth didn’t accelerate -- and interest rates come down – until after Republicans took control of Congress in the ’94 elections, would at least have gotten some mileage in the media.  But direct engagement on this turf, it seems, is not the campaign’s preferred approach. It was left instead to commentators on conservative web sites and chat rooms to set the record straight. While this preaching to the converted might be a useful pedagogic exercise, it is unlikely to mean much to a swing voter in Flint, Mich., who on the basis of Clinton’s remarks might be willing to give Gore a serious second look. (The best reality check on the Clinton fairy tale is probably this piece by Stephen Moore posted today on the National Review web site.

This points to the potential Achilles heel of the Bush campaign revealed in the midst of the largely effective, feel-good, Philadelphia GOP convention. For all Bush’s improvement as a candidate since the end of the primary season, his speech and the rest of the convention program left a gaping hole in terms of confronting the Clinton-Gore economic record. Senior campaign strategists may want to believe the polls which show Gore getting very little credit for the economy’s robust performance, and see no need to divert attention from their preferred themes. That strategy, though, is unlikely to survive until November, and at some point George W. Bush inevitably will be faced with the challenge of adroitly making the case for a major change of governing economic principles despite the apparent success of the incumbent administration. The sooner he takes on that task, the better off he is likely to be in the end.