Gore seems unhurt by Elian issue outside Florida

The Miami Herald
May 4, 2000

Gore seems unhurt by Elian issue outside Florida

BY MARK SILVA

The Clinton administration's handling of Elian Gonzalez could cost Vice President Al Gore Cuban-American votes he needs to claim Florida in November's presidential election, but may have little impact elsewhere -- even among voters upset with Gore over Elian.

In New York, a poll released Tuesday shows that likely voters disapprove of Gore's own handling of the Elian custody case by a margin of 2-1. Yet Gore's 52-36 percent advantage over Texas Gov. George W. Bush in that state is unshaken after the raid that removed Elian from his Miami relatives' home, the poll shows.

Gore ``looked wimpy or wishy-washy to a lot of people,'' Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac College Polling Institute, which ran the survey, said this week. ``But New York is not Florida. This is a case where they don't approve of him [on the Elian issue], but it's not an all-encompassing issue.''

Nationally, a new CNN/USA Today poll suggests the Elian saga has had no measurable impact on the election: Bush and Gore are in a virtual tie among likely voters nationwide. In the poll released Monday, Bush claimed 49 percent and Gore 44 percent, with a five-percentage-point margin of error.

However, some say, Gore's jockeying for a position on Elian apart from the administration's could prove harmful in ways more difficult to detect. The issue that could concern some voters, they say, is the appearance of Gore posturing for votes in Florida.

But in 187 days, when Americans choose a president, the five-month standoff over the 6-year-old Cuban boy rescued at sea by fishermen and removed from a Miami home by armed federal agents will be far from the minds of most voters -- except in Miami's Little Havana and other Cuban-American strongholds where 40 years of exile weigh heavily on hearts.

``It will matter to very few people, except for Cuban Americans, who will remember it vividly, as if it were yesterday,'' said Al Cardenas, Havana-born chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. ``No one will vote based on Elian except for Cuban Americans.''

The Elian vote in Florida could be enough to decide the election in a state holding nearly one-tenth of the electoral votes needed to name a president.

The race between Gore and Bush in Florida is close, with Bush holding a lead of only four to five percentage points in polls. An estimated 400,000 Cuban Americans -- two-thirds of those registered -- will vote. That is nearly 8 percent of the 5.3 million Floridians who voted in the last presidential election.

However, in the end, some observers say, none of this will matter. Bob Butterworth, attorney general and chairman of Gore's campaign in Florida, dismisses the impact of Elian even on Florida's vote: ``Both presidential candidates -- their positions have been the same on it.''

Gore, like Bush, has said since early December that a court should decide Elian's fate. Bush was first to go further, backing U.S. citizenship for Elian. In late March, Gore spoke out for permanent residency for Elian, a dramatic break from Clinton.