The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, an evening of politics. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Haynes Johnson, and Suzanne Garment explore tone and scandal. Margaret Warner presents her final update of the Kerry- Weld Senate race in Massachusetts, and Mark Shields & Paul Gigot analyze the presidential race, among other things. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, was quite today, following last night's riot. Burned out buildings and looted stores were left by the violence. It was triggered by the shooting to death of a black teenager by a white police officer. Police said the victim was trying to run over the policeman. A witness disagreed. Hundreds of rioters pelted police and firemen with rocks. At least 11 people were injured. Today, the mayor called for a review of race relations in the city.

MAYOR DAVID FISCHER, St. Petersburg: It was suggested this morning that we get together with the black and the white leaders of this community and work through this and, and come up with goals so once--we can raise the level in the city, so we get this to that point someday, where we don't have this reaction. We will always have instances that take place. Every city does, and we're never going to be immune to that, but we want to get a population that doesn't feel it has to react on itself when these things happen, and we're going to work towards those goals.

MR. LEHRER: The Justice Department in Washington today launched a preliminary inquiry into possible civil rights violations in last night's incident. In the presidential campaign today, Bob Dole blamed the news media for ignoring unethical behavior in the Clinton administration and fostering voter apathy. He asked a crowd in Houston, where is the outrage in America? He cited foreign campaign contributions, Whitewater, and confidential FBI files obtained by the White House as under-reported scandals. Later in Dallas, he urged supporters of Ross Perot to reconsider.

SEN. BOB DOLE: And let me say to Perot supporters, we are the party of reform. We are the party of reform. [applause] I don't like having to run against two people because every vote for Perot is a vote for Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton knows it. I think Ross Perot would know it. If he doesn't want Clinton, he ought to say vote for Bob Dole, but every voter for Perot is a vote for Bill Clinton.

MR. LEHRER: Dole later traveled to Arizona and California. President Clinton was in Atlanta today, campaigning with fellow Democrats. He urged young people to vote and said he would ask Congress to approve a plan to help schoolchildren learn to read.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: 40 percent of the eight-year-olds in America today, 40 percent of them can still not read a book on their own. All these children I want to go to college, all these children we want to fool with the computers, if they can't read, they can't succeed. I have proposed to put together one million volunteers so that we can help the parents and the schools of this country, so that in four years, every eight-year-old in the United States can pick up a book and say I can read this all by myself.

MR. LEHRER: We'll have more on the campaign after the News Summary. On the FBI Files story today, a federal appeals court authorized a perjury investigation of former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr will determine if Nussbaum lied to Congress in the Files matter. An FBI report said Nussbaum told investigators in 1993 First Lady Hillary Clinton recommended hiring a White House aide who gathered the confidential files from the FBI. This year, during testimony to a House committee, Nussbaum denied knowing who fired the aide, or having discussed it with Mrs. Clinton. A federal judge in Denver today ordered separate trials for the defendants in the Oklahoma City bombing. The judge said Timothy McVeigh's legal rights could be compromised by a joint trial with Terry Nichols. McVeigh and Nichols face murder, conspiracy, and explosives charges in the April 1995 bombing. If tried together, McVeigh would not be able to cross-examine Nichols about statements he made to FBI agents after his arrest. In Denver, a federal prosecutor explained today's ruling.

LARRY MACKEY, Federal Prosecutor: Today's rulings stems primarily from the special circumstances surrounding Terry Nichols' lengthy statements to the FBI following the bombing, a statement that the court has ruled was voluntarily given and may be offered as evidence against Terry Nichols. Our position has remained the same. Any jury hearing the Terry Nichols case should know what he told the FBI. Today's ruling ensures that the Nichols jury will hear all of the details of that statement without risking any potential consequence to his co-defendant.

MR. LEHRER: The explosion in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, injured more than 500. The judge said today Timothy McVeigh would be tried first, but he did not set a trial date for either. A U.S. helicopter crashed in the Persian Gulf today. One person was killed; two are missing; nine were rescued. The Sea Hawk Helicopter was on a routine training exercise when it went down. It was part of a fleet sent to help patrol the no-fly zone in Southern Iraq last month. A Navy spokesman said there was no evidence the helicopter was the target of hostile action. Divers have recovered another body in the crash of TWA Flight 800. It was the first one found in six weeks. Officials made the announcement today after identifying the victim. Two hundred and thirty people were killed when the plane crashed off the waters of Long Island in July. Two hundred and fourteen bodies have now been recovered. In Afghanistan, fighting spread overnight as a Taliban--as Taliban warriors sought to take more territory. The strict Islamic faction opened a new front Southwest of the capital city of Kabul. The Taliban now control 2/3 of the country, including Kabul. They are also fighting former government troops trying to retake the city from the North. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Beschloss, Goodwin, Johnson, and Garment, Kerry and Weld, and Shields and Gigot. FOCUS - SOUNDING OFF

MR. LEHRER: We set the stage for our evening of politics now with a report on what President Clinton and Bob Dole were up to today. Kwame Holman reports.

KWAME HOLMAN: President Clinton traveled to Georgia today for the first time since he attended the summer Olympics in July.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Hello, Atlanta! Are you feeling good? [applause] You made the sun come out!

MR. HOLMAN: At a large lunchtime rally in downtown Atlanta, he urged the crowd to get out on election day and support Democratic congressional candidates, including Senate hopeful Max Cleland.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: And Georgia is about to be given a chance to add another person to the list of distinguished, nationally significant servants of the people of this great state in our country, and I hope you will send Max Cleland to the United States Senate.

MR. HOLMAN: Four years ago, Gov. Clinton barely edged out President Bush in Georgia. This year, polls show President Clinton with a slight lead over Bob Dole for Georgia's 13 electoral votes. For the last two weeks, the President mostly has refused to respond directly to Dole's attacks on his integrity and that of his administration. He continued that pattern today.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now the other side, their idea of sacrifice is to take Head Start away from five-year-olds, college loans away from students, to take the economy--the environment away from all of our people and to weaken our future economy for short-term promises. I think Max Cleland's idea of service to America is the right one, and I believe Georgians will agree. [applause] Now, you know I want to talk most, if anything, to the young people today. This is your election, and we need you. You have most of your tomorrows in front of you. You have your future out there ahead of you, and you have to decide about that. I appreciate what Sen. Nunn said about the last four years. It is true that we're better off than we were. It is true that we have more jobs, that the other side talked about being conservative, but our administration is the first one to take the deficit down in each of our four years in the 20th century. [applause] It is true that the other guys talked about how bad the big old federal government was, but it's our administration, working with our allies in Congress, who has cut the size of the federal government, the number of regulations, the number of government programs, and we have privatized more government operations than the last two Republican administrations did in 12 years combined. That's the truth. [applause] But, but there is a difference. We still believe, we still believe that we have responsibilities to move forward together, and that's what you have to decide, all you young people, whether you want a future in which you're told you're on your own and we hope you have a nice life, or whether you believe it does take a village to raise a child, protect the environment, and build a future. [cheers and applause]

MR. HOLMAN: Meanwhile, Bob Dole rallied his Southern supporters in downtown Houston. A "Houston Chronicle" poll released this morning shows Dole clinging to only a three-point lead over Clinton in Texas, despite the traditionally heavy Republican leanings of the lone star state. Dole used his speech to step up his charges of White House ethical lapses and the news media's alleged failure to report them fully.

SEN. BOB DOLE: I don't read all these political things, but somebody told me the press reported that Bob Dole was frustrated. Well, I'm not sure I'm frustrated, but I'm a little--I don't understand--Vice President Gore goes to a Buddhist temple where everybody takes a vow of poverty and comes out with $122,000. And so good old Al, he explains it to the media, oh, I was on an outreach program. So that'll be the end of that. Nobody'll look beyond that in the media. That's the end of that one. And then we have the President of the United States sitting down here with 900 FBI files, might be one of yours, might be one of yours. And then we have the President of the United States who won't say he will not pardon somebody who did business with him and might implicate him later on. Where is the outrage in America? Where is the outrage in America? [applause] Where has the media gone in America? [applause] Where is the outrage in America? [applause] Can you imagine former President Bush doing one of those things? No! And you'll never imagine Bob Dole doing one of those things either. [Crowd shouting "No!"] So where's the outrage? Where's the outrage? When--when will the voters start to focus? I think they've started about right now. They've started to focus. [applause] This is serious business. This is serious business--this is about the public trust. Remember the public trust? Well, they never understood the public trust. It was always a game with this White House. It was always a game. How far can you push the envelope? How much can you get away with? What can you do? Bringing people into America, raising money all over, and I tell you we're going to have a change. When Bob Dole and Jack Kemp are elected on November 5, America will start to change, and we're going to be a lot better off as we go into the next century.

MR. HOLMAN: This weekend, the Dole campaign moves on to California for two bus trips in a state where Dole promises to make a stand. President Clinton is staying close to home this weekend, in part to celebrate the First Lady's birthday. FOCUS - CAMPAIGN '96 -HISTORICAL VIEWS

MR. LEHRER: Now, some comparisons between the tone of '96 and other presidential campaigns and to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

MS. FARNSWORTH: We get that longer view from three NewsHour regulars, presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss and journalist and author Haynes Johnson. Joining them tonight is Suzanne Garment, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics." Welcome to all of you. Suzanne, what is--how would you compare the tone of this campaign to the tone of campaigns in the past?

SUZANNE GARMENT, American Enterprise Institute: Well, we've certainly had nastier campaigns in the past than this one is. What seems to be interesting about the tone of this one so far is that at this late date candidate Dole is trying to raise ethical issues, and no one is listening. Very few people care, or even, I think, understand what he's referring to.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And is this different, very different from in the past?

SUZANNE GARMENT: This is a rather new experience. In the past, in the past couple of decades, the coin of scandal and ethics has been so debased that I think many people now feel cynical about all politicians, and unwilling to listen to talk about distinctions among them.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What do you mean when you say the coin of scandal has been debased?

SUZANNE GARMENT: We've had a lot of scandals. Some of them have involved very serious offenses, and some of them have been real junk. And there aren't many of us anymore who can tell the difference.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So what do you think about that? Do you think it's quite different from the past, and then let's move into this, this other subject too, about whether the scandal of the--the coinage of scandal has been debased.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: There has always been talk about this kind of thing, but it's been talked about differently in recent years from most of American history. Presidential campaigns for most of our history were very gentile things, mostly candidates not only did not barnstorm, they rarely mentioned their opponents' names, and only in recent times, do you see the kind of campaign that we've seen with candidates taking a train, or flying around the country, and also denouncing the opponents by name. The other, I think, very big change is that you now have television commercials, so that one campaign can make really scurrilous charges about another candidate, but it doesn't have to be in the voice of the candidate, himself. It can be done by commercial and very effectively so that nowadays it's very possible to run a really nasty campaign but don't force the candidate to do that. I think in the last ten years there's been a great effort to use particularly television commercials to define an opponent in a negative way. The gold standard for this was George Bush's campaign I think against Michael Dukakis in 1988, which established Dukakis as sort of an alien figure who liked to send prisoners on furlough, where they committed murder, and also someone who was a card-carrying member, as it was said, of the ACLU, someone who was somewhat outside the American mainstream. That, I think, has caused every candidate in recent times to race to define the opponent in a negative way. Commercials do that; speeches probably do that less.

MS. FARNSWORTH: But, Doris, there was lots of negative campaigning in the past too, wasn't there?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Right. I think we've almost come full circle, or maybe I'm hoping we've come full circle, which is that in the old days the negative campaigning took the form of circulars or handbills, or songs or slogans even. I mean, for example, it was said that Jackson had a whole bill of sins that he had to answer for in a circular that he was a gambler, he was a murderer, he was a thief. They said his mother was a prostitute who had married a mulatto and had him as a child. They said his wife, Rachel Jackson, was an adulteress. Indeed, he said, when the campaign was over--she died a month later--that they had murdered his wife by the negative tone of the campaign. But it was always a partisan source. You knew where it was coming from. Each paper was an opposition paper or a party paper, so you knew where it was all coming from. And you didn't have to think it was some objective thing. They used to have these great songs about Van Buren--[singing]--"He would for gold his country sell,/Deserves the slowest place in hell--Van Buren." So it's not like it was gentile totally, but as Michael suggested, it wasn't the candidates doing it themselves; it was the parties, and you knew where it was happening. Once television came into this fray, probably beginning with 1964, with Goldwater in that little ad against Goldwater on Johnson's side, where the little girl picked the petals on the daisy and the nuclear countdown occurred, then it was coming in your living room, in your kitchen, and you felt it was almost real, real, because it was on the television screen. But now we've come full circle where we know it's the other guys doing this, the other party, as was said at the beginning, the coin of it has become so debased because it's so prevalent that now we see the source and we tend to discount it again. I think that's a very healthy thing if that's happening.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Do you agree that it's being discounted now?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist Author: Yes, I do, and it's fascinating, just listening to my friends here, and what Suzanne began talking about, there is a paradox to this campaign. It's not nearly as negative, but the fear of it being, we kept talking about it--

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. Let me just stop you one minute. So you don't it is as negative as many other campaigns?

HAYNES JOHNSON: No, no, I don't at all. I agree, and I think what Doris was just saying about if you go back and read those early circulars, go back to the first one, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, it's incredible. I mean, but they were people who were anonymously writing under Greek names and so forth, publicists, and all this- -vicious attacks, but they were--they were done by the party, and Doris is right about that. It's also what Michael was saying, the age of television now. We see these commercials, and, and because of that, because of opposition research and because of the Dukakis campaign with Willie Horton becomes an image, scary, sinister, there he is, the revolving door, he's in your face, and bang, he's going to get you, that's dirty campaigning because it linked it with--but this, this campaign has been feared that it was going to be dirty but, in truth, it's not. You can see it in Mr. Dole's frustration. You could see it today in what he said down there. He wants people to say, wait a minute, this is really bad, but it's not connecting.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. So why is that happening?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I think for the reasons we've suggested here, that the--

MS. FARNSWORTH: Or is that tolerance has changed?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I think the public is saturated with the notion of dirty tricks and, and cynical about the manipulation you see on the screen, and we have also come in a backdrop of the last four years of intensive examination of the Clinton presidency and Whitewater and Hillary and Paula Jones and X and Y and Z, and people kept saying this was going to define the campaign, and it hasn't.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What do you think about that, Suzanne? Is it--is it partly that people are tired of the way "negative campaigning" is being done, is that the problem?

SUZANNE GARMENT: It would have to be part of it. I don't think there are many people who can put up with unrelieved partisanship, apart from those of us in, in the chattering classes, as Gore Vidal would say. No, people don't want their lives to be lived in those categories, and they've seen so much of it, and for such partisan motives that they're only rational to discount heavily.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Doris, Sen. Dole said today--and he said yesterday that the Clinton administration has not gotten enough press scrutiny, that the press is not paying enough attention to the ethical lapses in the Clinton administration. Do you think the press has changed in the way it looks at these issues?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: No. I think what's happened in the Clinton situation is that there's an immunity I think both on the part of the public and even the press because he has been so talked about all four years of his term in terms of various scandals, nothing is new. If we had never heard about Paula Jones or Gennifer Flowers or Whitewater and Dole had been able to bring them out in the course of this campaign, he'd probably be the next President because it would suddenly be a shock. But the fact is we know Clinton. He's a familiar figure. He's been around with his flaws, with his scandals, so for the press to find one of these new things--and they're not going to win a Pulitzer Prize by saying the same thing that happened and has been talked about for the last four years, I think there's still a desire on the press to discover something new, and I'm sure there's people out there looking for that, and so far, what Dole has been talking about are reruns of the past. And that doesn't have the sexiness really in a certain sense that everything else did before.

SUZANNE GARMENT: The dynamic of this is somewhat different from what it's been in the past. During Watergate, which, which involved some sins, of course, that are much larger than the ones we're talking about now, Woodward & Bernstein kept the story alive in the "Post" even when everyone else was saying this is nothing new, there is nothing here. Uh, the pattern here has been that a story is floated, there is not much initial interest expressed, and then the story recedes. So, so the instinct for the jugular is, I think, like everything else, getting tired.

MS. FARNSWORTH: That's a very interesting point, but does that indicate that the public--had the public tolerance been then the way it is now, we wouldn't have gotten all those stories about Watergate.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think that's true, and you got this sort of very difficult balance, because on one side it is very important for us to have as much information about the Clinton presidency as possible because if it then comes into public view next year, many people will feel that they had voted for him under false pretenses, just as many people in 1972, who voted for Richard Nixon, felt that within a year, once they had learned everything about Watergate, they would never have cast the vote that way, so that would argue in favor of the press being as intrusive, investigative as possible, and also for people to give as much attention to at least the possibility of these things as could be.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Is anything else going on here with both sides not wanting to bring out private lapses?

HAYNES JOHNSON: Yes, absolutely, because everyone knows now that we have things called opposition research, huge amount of moneys invested in all political campaigns, and they all do it looking into scandal and see if they can get the other guy, and you can do it through leaks, you can do it through innuendo, you can do it through whispering campaigns, and, and we're all human beings, and our politicians are, like us, human beings, fallible, make sins, make mistakes. They have things in their past that can be embarrassing, and there is the sense that--and we do have a sort of voracious appetite for it, no matter what we may say here, and you see scandal sort of dominating the airwaves in many ways, not just political scandal. Tanya Harding all of a sudden--O.J. Simpson--we like it, and yet, at the same time, we say we hate it, but the political people know that they also may be guilty. And I think, if I could add one thing, the money, the latest thing on the money--I think the reason it hasn't taken is the deep cynicism that "they all do it." And so it's hard to make the case that this case- -I'm talking about the money--Indonesian money, foreign money--Dole is now making this case very hard. The fact is most people, I suspect, say, yeah, I suspect that's true, but what about them? And we are immunized in a way, as Doris said.

SUZANNE GARMENT: And how do you--oh, I'm sorry.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I was just going to say opposition research also has an historical precedent. One of them is 1940, Franklin Roosevelt wanted to float the news that Wendell Wilkie had a mistress in New York, and actually we have on tape Roosevelt telling his aides to circulate this, and it turned out that that was thwarted by the fact that the Republicans discovered that Roosevelt's vice-presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, sent letters to a guru referring to FDR as "the flaming one." This was not going to generate very much confidence in Wallace as vice president, and it's been suggested that there was a little bit of a tacit exchange that each would not reveal the bad information about the other, and that is something I think that probably has been the case in more recent campaigns as well.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: You know, Lincoln once said, "Show me a man without vices, and I'll show you a man without virtues." I think to the extent that all these characters are honest about their own flaws mixing with their strengths, maybe they'll be a little more hesitant about taking the other guy on, because it's going to come right back to haunt them.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Suzanne, you were--

SUZANNE GARMENT: Mutual assured destruction.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Yes, exactly.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That's right.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So as "Time Magazine" put it, Bob Dole finally plays the character card and here's why it isn't cutting President Clinton: So to summarize, the reason it isn't cutting President Clinton is--

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Is because he's an incumbent president about whom we know a lot and also in this climate, it has to be done extremely deftly. You have to make points that sort of challenge the idea that this president can really serve as an effective leader, while not causing people to be disgusted with you for saying these things, and of all Bob Dole's virtues, one of them is not that kind of dexterity.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And it is somewhat new, the way the public is looking at these issues, isn't it?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I think we're saturated with scandal, don't like it. We like to think that we can have people on whom we put trust and admire, words we hear a lot in coinage, and we don't want to be down in the mud. There's a side of us that we all like the scandal and juice, but the truth is I think we don't like it, and you can see a reaction to it in this very campaign.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. Thank you all very much.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: You're welcome.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, Kerry and Weld, Shields & Gigot. UPDATE - BRAHMIN BATTLE

MR. LEHRER: Now a final update of that U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts we have been covering for the last few months. Margaret Warner again has our report.

MS. WARNER: With 10 days to go before the election, the race between Democratic Senator John Kerry and his Republican challenger, Governor William Weld, remains too close to call. But the dynamic of the campaign has shifted a bit since we last looked in on the race five weeks ago. Republican Bill Weld began the final autumn stretch of this campaign ahead in the polls and still happily poaching on Democratic turf. On Monday, he was in Boston's North end, courting Italian-American Democrats.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: [serving pizza to group] The tip is a vote.

MS. WARNER: And when the patrician governor was endorsed by the local hotel workers union last month, he boasted of being a dues- paying member, though he admitted he'd never changed a hotel bed.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: Culturally more like an urban Democrat than a suburban Republican.

MS. WARNER: That's been the secret of Weld's success in Massachusetts, where Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents vastly outnumber Republicans. Weld's affable style and his relentless focus on the issues of crime, welfare, and taxes appeal to blue-collar Reagan Democrats like the patrons of J.J. Foley's bar in Boston's South end. Weld's personal popularity remains high, and he has continued to push those core themes throughout this campaign.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: See you, everybody. Hey, thanks for comin' out, you Kerry folks too.

MS. WARNER: He made a ceremony last month out of signing a plan imposing time limits on welfare recipients, and later that same week on the theory that no tax cut is too small in an election year, he proudly presided over the demolition of a toll booth on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Some local columnists have suggested Weld needs to expand his message beyond crime, welfare, and taxes. But Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist at the "Boston Globe," disagrees.

JEFF JACOBY, Boston Globe Columnist: The fact that Bill Weld, a Republican, is this competitive, this close to an election for the U.S. Senate, the first time in 24 years that a Republican has been in that good a position, shows that he's doing something right.

MS. WARNER: John Kerry has finally responded to Weld's surge with an all-out effort to remind the state's liberal establishment that he is the real Democrat in this race.

CROWD: [chanting] Kerry! Kerry!

MS. WARNER: Kerry warns the state's liberal activists like the people attending an environmental rally last Saturday that though they found Weld sympathetic as governor, he would not be their friend in Washington.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: And I say to you that nothing is more important than not giving more power to Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Al D'Amato, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch. [applause]

MS. WARNER: A new media firm brought changes to Kerry's advertising strategy too. Old ads have touted Kerry's foreign policy achievements.

AD SPOKESMAN: He's taken on North and Noriega.

MS. WARNER: The new ones play on old-time Democratic themes.

AD SPOKESMAN: He fought the cuts in Medicare and helped lead and win the battle to defeat the cuts in education.

MS. WARNER: New ads remind voters of things Weld has done that weren't exactly friendly to the middle and working classes.

AD SPOKESMAN: As governor, Weld vetoed funding for higher education, Weld crossed the picket line to get a COMGAS PAC check. John Kerry sided with the workers--Kerry, fighting for us.

MS. WARNER: The state's liberal warhorse senior Senator Ted Kennedy has weighed in too with a radio ad.

SEN. TED KENNEDY: [radio ad] This is Ted Kennedy. You know where I stand. I'm asking you not to cancel my vote. You need John Kerry in the Senate on the side of working families.

MS. WARNER: This is a decidedly new tack for Kerry, who prides himself on being a different kind of Democrat.

MIKE BARNICLE, Boston Globe Columnist: John Kerry has always been in sort of a Democratic shadow world. He's not Ted Kennedy.

MS. WARNER: Mike Barnicle is a liberal columnist for the "Boston Globe," who has known Kerry for years.

MIKE BARNICLE: He's sort of a Democrat, but he's not really been aligned with the Democratic Party, big labor, big unions. He's got to go back to that base and say, hey, I've got a little bit of difficulty here, remember me, big "D" after my name, John Kerry.

MS. WARNER: The White House too responded to Kerry's plea. President Clinton, who is running some 30 points ahead of Bob Dole in Massachusetts, spent an entire day campaigning with Kerry.

CROSBY, STILLS & NASH SINGING: I've been saving all my money just to take you there.

MS. WARNER: The day ended with a Boston concert that featured bay boomer icons like Crosby, Stills, & Nash.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Whoever said he didn't have a sense of humor? Do you believe that Gov. Weld had the guts to stand up here and say he couldn't believe that we had all those people from the 60's playin' and everybody kept their clothes on? [laughter among audience] Next thing you know John Kerry will be doin' the Macarena with Al Gore.

MS. WARNER: At least one 90's star thought Kerry has plenty of pizzaz.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: You're cute, you know. And I, for one, am really glad to see some good lookin' people in office. Woo! You know--I don't know what's happening, but the other party seems to have taken ugly pills. [laughter among audience]

MS. WARNER: Kerry's bid for the state's Democratic base is beginning to pay off. He's been endorsed in recent weeks by many progressive groups, alarmed by the Republican leadership in Congress. Some of them had endorsed Weld for governor in the past. They include leading environmental organizations and many major unions. Even the Boston Police Patrolman's Association, which defected to Republican George Bush in the '88 presidential race, returned to the Democratic fold last month, and endorsed Kerry. Weld was disappointed. GOV. WILLIAM WELD: I think it does help Sen. Kerry somewhat because it's a man bites dog story from where I sit because I think the Senator has a weak record on, on crime issues.

MS. WARNER: The two men have also competed for gay voters like those who gathered for the annual black tie human rights campaign dinner in Boston Saturday night.

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: I'm here again. The skies above are clear again--

MS. WARNER: Bill Weld has championed their cause as governor, yet many leading gay organizations have now endorsed Kerry. Kerry came to thank them, accompanied by his new wife of one year, ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: There are many states in the country that could boast two candidates for the United States Senate, both of whom have done things that are positive with respect to your community, and I want acknowledge that, and I appreciate and I respect those among you who have either worked with or for my opponent.

ELLEN SCHWARTZ: Endorsements don't necessarily mean votes, but polls show ordinary voters too are responding. Kerry has stopped his slide of the summer and edged narrowly ahead of his rival in the polls. The bottom line is that Kerry may not be Kennedy, but many liberal voters are coming home to him, says the Globe's Barnicle, because they see him as a more reliable ally in Washington than Weld.

MIKE BARNICLE: Kerry's not a populist. I mean, you know, Kerry's not going to show up with a sump pump to pump the water out of your basement like the guy next door, but he does have the issues, far more than Weld does, and he does have the label that you need in this state to convince people that you care about those issues, and that label is D, Democrat, you know, we're the guys, we're the guys you call, we're the 911 of the politics.

MS. WARNER: Weld, by contrast, is trying to distance himself from the national Republican ticket. When his old friend, vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp came to town, the governor was busy elsewhere.

REPORTER: What does it mean that the governor isn't here to greet you?

JACK KEMP: I--look, the governor's running for Senate, and he's going to win. He's got to do what he has to do.

MS. WARNER: One thing Weld is doing is publicly declaring his independence from the congressional Republican leadership. Monday night at a dinner for new Americans, he promised to address their concerns about the way immigrants are treated in the new welfare reform law.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: There are a lot of things that need to change in Washington, D.C., but one of the most important is the federal government's treatment of legal immigrants.

MS. WARNER: And earlier Monday, when a senior citizens group asked him about Medicare, the governor sounded more like the Democrat.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: Well, I have signed on to President Clinton's plan for Medicare, which is a 7.8 percent increase each of the next six years.

MS. WARNER: Weld's TV ads too continue to tout the governor's independence.

AD SPOKESMAN: For six years, Bill Weld has proven he has got some independence to bring Democrats, Republicans, and independents together.

MS. WARNER: But Weld has problems with his Republican base. His libertarian views on such issues as abortion and gay rights have angered the party's social conservatives.

SUSAN GALLAGHER: I'm running against Weld and Kerry.

OLDER GENTLEMAN: Yeah, good. I'm going to vote for you.

SUSAN GALLAGHER: Thank you very much.

OLDER GENTLEMAN: I'm going to vote for you. Them two bums.

MS. WARNER: A pro-life conservative, Susan Gallagher, is also running, and though she only gets 2 to 5 percent in recent surveys, pollsters say she's drawing most of that support from Weld. Late last month, Weld tried to mend fences by inviting social and religious conservatives to a meeting in his office.

JEFF JACOBY, Boston Globe Columnist: The meeting ended in disaster. None of the conservatives was won over by Weld. He, more or less, told them that he wasn't planning on changing any of his positions to accommodate their views. If anything, it only exacerbated the rift between Weld and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which is small in Massachusetts but which is, nevertheless, the starting point for most Republican candidates.

MS. WARNER: Weld made the rift even wider that evening during this televised exchange with a voter.

ELLEN SCHWARTZ: [September 30th] Does this support of abortion extend to the partial birth abortion procedure?

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: No, really, that's a terrible, it's a terrible procedure, and I wish it would never happen, but I would have voted the same way Kerry did on that.

MS. WARNER: Weld is also being hurt by his popularity as governor. A recent "Boston Globe" poll found more than 50 percent of the voters now say they want to keep him in the job. An undecided voter in last week's debate raised the issue, much to Kerry's delight.

JIM HUGHES: [October 15th] Why should I vote to send Bill Weld to Washington, thereby losing an effective governor? Can you answer that?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: I don't know if I can answer that. You stumped me.

MS. WARNER: This race began like a Civics textbook's model. The two rivals agreed to seven debates. They've held eight so far, and the debates are still revealing. Kerry of late has been trying to tie Bob Dole's $500 billion tax cut plan around tax cutter Weld's neck.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: They don't want to defend their tax cut of $550 billion, and they don't want to tell people the truth about what will happen to Medicare, which Al D'Amato said would be cut if their tax cut passes. That's why he wants to talk about everything else in this race, because he can't defend going to Washington, helping the rich and the wealthy and the corporations over the working people of this country.

SPOKESMAN: Governor Weld, a minute.

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: Dan, there are two names on the ballot in this here Senate race, Bill Weld and John Kerry. And the reason that John Kerry wants to talk about anything else except those two names is because he can't defend his lousy record! The citizens of the commonwealth can perfectly well make up their minds on this Senate race on the basis of who's done more for them the last six years!

MS. WARNER: They also agreed to limit their spending, but the money deal is now unraveling, and their salvos have turned nasty. Some of Weld's ads paint Kerry as soft on gangs and drugs. Kerry's ad suggests Weld is heartless. More recently, Weld's ads question Kerry's ethics, and last weekend, Weld jumped on reports that Kerry received cut-rate housing from wealthy businessmen when he was newly separated from his first wife a decade ago.

SPOKESMAN: Governor, do you really think John Kerry is a sleaze?

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: Well, I wouldn't use words of characterization. I mean, we're finding out that he did accept a free primary residence for a number of months.

SPOKESMAN: So you have doubts about his ethics?

GOV. WILLIAM WELD: Well, I have doubts about--if he gets everything for free, I don't know what he was spending the $130,000 a year salary on.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: That's not just a true statement by the governor. And the governor has clearly chosen in the latter days of this campaign to take the mask off of his face and display that he is a Republican a la Bob Dole. They want to attack personality. They want to make the campaigns as mucky as they can.

JEFF JACOBY: There's something a little tawdry about the fact that two guys as smart as these two are, with the long careers that both of them have, with the deep education they've gotten, the ability to articulate strong ideas that they have, have really fought the race down at this level, instead of bringing it up here and letting Massachusetts have a serious clash of ideology and philosophy and ideas.

MS. WARNER: But Jacoby's colleague, Mike Barnicle, wrote a column last month urging the two rivals to "get in the gutter." You were saying they're beingtoo polite; they were kind of dancing around each other. So now they're in the gutter, you don't like it?

MIKE BARNICLE: No. I didn't say that. They're not quite in the gutter. They're both--they're teetering on the curb. You know, another week, the weekend before election, they'll be right down there in the gutter. You know, that's the fun part. I mean, people expect that. Life is like dealing with adversity. Life is about coping with slurs and innuendos and envy and the petty jealousies that, you know, push us all through our days, and so let's see how these two guys handle it.

MS. WARNER: A new "Boston Herald" poll released today had Kerry at 44 and Weld at 40, a statistical dead heat. The two rivals will meet in a final face-off Monday night, a debate televised nationally on C-Span from Boston's historic Fanueil Hall. FOCUS - SHIELDS & GIGOT

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, political analysis by Shields & Gigot, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. First, on Kerry-Weld, Mark, you are a native of Massachusetts.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: I am.

MR. LEHRER: And Mike Barnicle--you said that with great pride.

MR. SHIELDS: I am.

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: It explains a lot, by the way.

MR. LEHRER: Yes, it does. Never mind. But, uh, Mike Barnicle used the word to Margaret, "fun." Is that race as much fun as it appears many hundreds of miles away?

MR. SHIELDS: It's a good race. It really is. I mean, there are probably very few Senate races in the country that will end with both candidates having favorable ratings from the voters on election day, and I think this is one. I mean, both John Kerry has a more than positive rating and the services, Senator. Bill Weld has a high rating, his service as governor. I thought the Jim Hughes question in Margaret's piece about why should I vote for Bill Weld to, to send him to Washington when he's a governor whom I like, uh, and somebody said to me, and when I asked about the race, they said that the only way you could keep both of them there, if you like both of them, is to vote for Kerry, because that keeps Weld as governor and Kerry in the Senate. Do you want to replace him? But it is a fascinating race. They're both quick; they're agile; they're articulate.

MR. LEHRER: Does it have any meaning beyond Massachusetts, Paul, do you think?

MR. GIGOT: Well, uh, it would if Bill Weld got down here, I think, to Washington, he would, uh, because of his ideological profile on the cultural issues, you know, there are a lot of--

MR. LEHRER: You mean pro-choice.

MR. GIGOT: Pro-choice and pro gay rights and--

MR. LEHRER: Yeah.

MR. GIGOT: --he would--

MR. SHIELDS: He would carry him.

MR. LEHRER: He might have to--somebody said he might have to sit outside the room of the--of the Republican Caucus in some issue.

MR. GIGOT: You can almost say the Democratic voters can't lose, because if Kerry wins, they get the vote, and if Weld goes, they get a thorn in the side of the Republican Caucus in the Senate. I think there are a couple of interesting things about the race. I went up there and covered it. One is the power of personality, which is something that Republicans and Newt Gingrich forgot this year. It's very important in politics, uh, and Weld has it. He's got some life. He seems to be enjoying it--doesn't take himself too seriously, he shouldn't be in the race, given the Democratic profile in this state. I think registration is like three times more Democrats than Republicans. And the other thing that's interesting to me is that taxes are working for Weld, and I think they don't seem to be working for Bob Dole as an issue.

MR. LEHRER: You mean as an issue.

MR. GIGOT: The tax cut issue. But I think that one of the reasons is because Weld has credibility on the issue. His time in the Executive Branch he's never violated his no new taxes pledge, and he's cut taxes, and--

MR. LEHRER: So you believe him?

MR. GIGOT: Yeah. Okay. When you support the Dole--he makes the case for the Dole tax cut better than Dole does.

MR. LEHRER: All right. To the national thing, Mark, what do you make of Bob Dole's approach through his campaign manager to Ross Perot, why don't you bow out and endorse me?

MR. SHIELDS: I think, Jim, when you're in a trailing campaign, and Bob Dole's in a trailing campaign, and time's running out, there is a bias in favor of action. There's a bias in favor of doing something. The--you're like this. You're going to lose. Time's running out on you. So someone comes in with an idea. Uh, and--

MR. LEHRER: Why not try this?

MR. SHIELDS: Why not try this? And so the other side--what's the rebuttal? It's going to cost us Illinois, you know, we're 22 points behind in Illinois. It's going to cost us Wisconsin. We just pulled our television out of Wisconsin. So I, I think, I think, in a strange way I think it's going to work for Bob Dole because it gave Ross Perot what he hadn't had, which is oxygen, I mean, the microphone and the spotlight, and Ross Perot makes the case better on campaign finance and the excesses and wrongdoing of the White House, and the Democratic campaign of 1996 far better than Bob Dole can because Bob Dole's up to his elbows.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Well, we ran last night on this program a long hunk of Perot's speech at the National Press Club. It was right, right on against Clinton.

MR. GIGOT: He torched him. I mean, he explained the Indonesian connection which Bob Dole made one of his flip whatever references during the debate that I'm sure, you know, maybe 1 percent of the public even knew where Indonesia was, much less what this whole issue is about. And Perot might do that. I disagree with Mark about whether this was, this was a smart move. I don't know that you want to elevate somebody who's 5 percent in the polls at this juncture. The argument in the Dole campaign was well, look, Perot might want to avoid humiliation because he got 19 percent last time. If we go to him, maybe he'll withdraw. I'm not so sure he wouldn't have withdrawn even without any coaxing because what they did was they gave him the microphone, they gave him the megaphone again, and now he's back--

MR. LEHRER: That oxygen kept him alive you mean.

MR. GIGOT: Yeah.

MR. LEHRER: So you think it was possible that he might actually withdraw.

MR. GIGOT: I think--look, he's impossible to predict. If you're talking about where he was in the poll now at 5 percent, had been at 5 percent versus 19, if he gets 5 percent on election day, it's going to be seen as a humiliation, I think.

MR. SHIELDS: 1992, Jim, Ross Perot pulled out on the eve of the Democrat convention, and his life from that point forward, once it settled in, instead of being known as billionaire entrepreneur, patriot, POW, MIA, save Texas public schools, it was Ross Perot quitter, was to repeal that. That's what got him back in the race. He was not going to pull out of this race, in my judgment, and face that same--that humiliation of being a quitter again. I think what, what Ross Perot in a strange way, not to change the race, could be the vice presidential candidate that BobDole never had. You know, what Bob Dole in the final analysis really wanted on the ticket with him was another Bob Dole, a young, tough, mean Bob Dole. I mean, Jack Kemp--Jack Kemp is not that. All right. Remember what Perot did in '92? He made the case for change against George Bush. I mean, the status quo was unacceptable in 1992. You--the only way you're going to vote against Bill Clinton in 1992 after you heard Perot's argument was that somehow his character was so defective or so unacceptable to you, I mean, because there was no reason after Perot had finished with him to vote for George Bush, so I think--I think in that sense he--you know, why not--why not roll the dice?

MR. LEHRER: Why not roll the dice? Paul, what about the other thing that, that they talked about it earlier with, with Elizabeth, the earlier group did, but this new thing of Dole's this week, where's the outrage in America? I mean, he said it today several times, he said it again yesterday. Is that going to work?

MR. GIGOT: Well, nothing seems to work. I tend to think that the Dole campaign has made a fundamental misjudgment right from the start and that they have tried to outmaneuver tactically the greatest tactical politician that I've ever seen, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is all about tactics. He's all about maneuvering and slicing and making distinctions and finessing things. Dole is trying to do--so it's one week it's taxes--well, that doesn't seem to be working, let's get on--the next week it's drugs. Then they'll try character, but that doesn't seem to be working. Then we'll go after the media. Then we'll try something else, maybe we'll see if Perot will--well, you can't beat Bill Clinton that way. If you're going to beat Bill Clinton, you have a strategy, you have to go right at it, you have keep pounding away and pounding away and pounding away at some themes that people actually begin to say, yeah, he means it.

MR. LEHRER: Mm-hmm.

MR. GIGOT: And they resonate, and Clinton's the guy who begins to look a little bit too cute. Instead, the Dole campaign seems to try to beat Clinton at his own game, and it hasn't been working.

MR. LEHRER: Does it make sense to you?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, it makes sense. I mean, the Dole campaign has made a couple of serious mistakes. One is they agonize in public about what their tactics are going to be. I mean, people are not interested in tactics. I mean, you know, maybe Paul and I are, but I mean, we are in a very strange weird group of Americans. I mean, most Americans don't care about campaign tactics.

MR. LEHRER: What is it Susan Garment quoted Gore Vidal "the chattering class," we're part of the chattering class.

MR. SHIELDS: Yeah. I mean--go here, he's gone there.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah.

MR. SHIELDS: Is he spending too much time in the Sunbelt, you know--I think what--if you look at the Dole campaign, Jim, the problem is that the central idea campaign, the tax cut, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, was more unpopular in August than it is in October. I mean, it's just never caught. I mean, it's--it has had all the appeal to the American electorate of flossing after meals.

MR. LEHRER: Mm-hmm.

MR. SHIELDS: I mean, it just has not--it has not engaged.

MR. LEHRER: But what if he'd stayed on that, Paul?

MR. GIGOT: That's my point.

MR. LEHRER: Every day and never talked about anything else except that.

MR. GIGOT: He's put no muscle--zero in terms of positive ads behind it. They have dropped it. There has never been a consistent two- or three-week period, other than the convention, wherethey did do it, when they were popular. And Bob Shrum, a Democratic pollster--excuse me, consultant not pollster--has observed that that's when Bob Dole had his most--when he was closest to Bill Clinton. If you keep driving that and driving that-- and that's when I talked to the Dole strategists at the convention, that's what they said they were going to drive, they were going to do a Christie Whitman campaign in New Jersey, when she drove the tax cut. It wasn't popular. It wasn't popular. It wasn't popular. At the end people finally said, maybe she means it, and then it cuts for you. Instead, they'd gotten off it, and I think that people had just doubted his credibility on it.

MR. SHIELDS: He got off it because it's not working, and it's not working because he got off it. I mean, I, I honestly don't think- -I don't think it was for Bob Dole in 1996, it was not a message that was plausible or compelling. There, there is a certain I think poetic justice in the fact that we're concentrating the central subject of our campaign in the last couple of weeks is money because money has been central to the politics of 1996 all the way through, whether you're talking about Steve Forbes coming in with his unlimited bank roll and really attacking Bob Dole and Bob Dole never really recovering from the negatives that were inflicted then of Bob Dole running out of money, or Bill Clinton spending his own money, uh, you know, to, to advertise--the--

MR. LEHRER: Spent his own money but spending his campaign money, right?

MR. SHIELDS: His campaign money. I mean, his campaign money because he wasn't challenged because Bill Clinton wasn't challenged was because he raised all the money early, and the price of poker just went up so high that no challenger got in to challenge him in the Democratic primaries. The AFL-CIO's money to--efforts to, to win the Congress--and so money has been the key to this election.

MR. LEHRER: And the Indonesia story that you mentioned earlier, it's, it's still there, and, and Dole complained again today about the fact that the press isn't covering it, but everybody's talking about it, but there's no traction there yet, is there?

MR. GIGOT: Well, I think that the problem is that Dole frankly I think made a blunder when he decided that he was going to make it campaign finance issue, because it's not a campaign finance issue if it's going to work for Dole. Then it's everybody's problem. He came out for this campaign finance reform. He should have said this is a question of ethics; this is a question of the President's people--

MR. LEHRER: Mm-hmm.

MR. GIGOT: --breaking the law.

MR. LEHRER: Well, he's begun to do that the last couple of days.

MR. GIGOT: Yeah. He turned what could have been an advantage to him into a--sort of a good government issue that everybody does. I mean, you know, they--they have been able to track down this fund-raiser who's--

MR. LEHRER: John Wang.

MR. GIGOT: John Wang, yes.

MR. LEHRER: Well, speaking of good government, good night, gentlemen. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, St. Petersburg, Florida, was quiet, following last night's riot after the shooting of a black teenager by a white policeman. A federal judge in Denver ordered separate trials for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the defendants in the Oklahoma City bombing, and in the presidential campaign, as we've just been talking about, Bob Dole blamed the news media for fostering voter apathy. President Clinton urged young people in Georgia to get out and vote. We'll see you online and again here Monday evening. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.