Al Gore is toast
The public still doesn't like him. Democratic insiders have abandoned
him. And no one believes the tune he's singing now
BY SETH GITELL
Illustration by Danny Hellman
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Despite former vice-president Al Gore's recent spate of publicity, his fate
recalls the opening lines of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."
Substitute Gore's name for Jacob Marley's and you'll get a sense of where the
2000 Democratic nominee is politically. His heavily promoted new book,
Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family (Henry
Holt), which he co-wrote with his wife, Tipper, is ranked 3065 on Amazon.com.
Such titles as Who's Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy
(Dutton), a memoir by former The Sopranos actor Joe Pantoliano (1575 on
Amazon's list), is selling more copies, as is Steven Emerson's anti-terrorist
manifesto American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (Free Press),
which is at 1386. (In a painful irony, a book about George W. Bush, Bob
Woodward's Bush at War [Simon & Schuster], is second on Amazon's
list.) Meanwhile, a slew of Democratic insiders, such as speechwriter and
consultant Robert Shrum as well as Gore's former senior adviser Michael
Whouley, have given up on him. Even his old pal, fundraiser Steve Grossman, is
joining up with a political long shot, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. In
political terms, Gore is as dead as Marley.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, not for the politician who won the popular
vote against Bush in 2000 and likely would have won in the Electoral College
had not the justices of the US Supreme Court ruled against him. In the months
after Bush was inaugurated, Gore established himself as a de facto
government-in-exile -- first quietly and then more vocally issuing statements
critical of the Bush administration. By the time Gore was ready to enter the
active political arena, he was supposed to be welcomed back by Democrats
longing to regain what should have been theirs in 2000. But that hasn't
happened. The more media appearances Gore has made -- ostensibly flogging his
book, but make no mistake, it's a political dry run -- the worse he appears.
From appearances with David Letterman on CBS, Larry King on CNN, and Barbara
Walters on ABC to a spot on NBC's Today show with Katie Couric, Gore's
appeal seems to diminish. He scored a few points on Letterman by joking about
how 50.1 percent of the people feel that he screwed up and growing
intentionally stiff and silent when Letterman asked him whether the
events of 2000 made him angry -- a variation of an old Gore joke where he acts
robotic when asked to display personality. But he didn't fare as well on most
of the shows. He certainly didn't help himself by first showing up late for
Larry King Live, and then refusing to agree, when King pressed him, that
he probably should have let President Bill Clinton campaign for him. Chuck
Raasch, a political writer with the Gannett News Service, described the new
Gore as very much "the Old Gore: Scripted, carefully parsed, with newly evolved
imagery and positions on issues." The only praise he's managed to score has
come from an unwanted corner: public relations. PR Week's December 2
issue designated Gore's "charm offensive" the "PR Play of the Week."
It's no surprise, then, that perennial Gore critics, such as the Washington
Post's Michael Kelly and National Review Online's David Frum, have come in
for attack, especially in view of several recent speeches designed to retool
the old presidential candidate. Speaking to a Manhattan audience on November
13, for example, Gore announced that he had "reluctantly" concluded that the
nation needs a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system. (This from the
man who eviscerated former senator Bill Bradley during the 2000 Democratic
presidential primary for saying the same thing.) Kelly and Frum have panned
Gore during his book tour and faulted the former vice-president for his move to
the left.
More interesting is the poor reception Gore is getting from generally liberal
commentators. New York Times columnist Frank Rich faulted the would-be
president for his performance with Couric, who, Rich wrote, uncovered "the old
Al Gore lurking inside the latest model" in all of three minutes. Couric had a
hard time pinning Gore down on how he would handle Saddam Hussein; when he
finally answered her question, the best he could muster was a plan to call for
a unanimous United Nations Security Council vote.
Likewise, LA Weekly editor-at-large Marc Cooper skewers this latest
"progressive" version of Gore in the alternative paper's November 29 issue. "So
in this matchlessly dreary political moment, the least Al Gore can do to
marginally improve matters is to get his mug off the tube and dig back in to
wherever he lurks between his pop-up appearances," writes Cooper. "Go grow
another beard, Al. Or write another book. But please, please, don't run for
president again." Ouch.
Cooper's sentiments are not unique among Democrats. A Los Angeles Times
poll of Democratic National Committee members found that 48 percent opposed a
2004 presidential run by the former vice-president. Such a finding leads to one
conclusion: Gore's political prospects are dim at best. The poll, coupled with
his less-than-warm reception by opinion leaders and his insistence on being coy
about his intentions (he told Larry King, among others, that he'd make a
decision about 2004 "over the holidays") means one thing: Gore is toast, but he
doesn't know it. The poor guy is an apparition, much like Dickens's Marley. He
wanders the earth from television station to television station, as if his
political prospects were still alive.
Given Gore's name recognition, if he does throw his hat into the ring, he
instantly becomes the candidate to beat. A November poll by Quinnipiac
University showed Gore with the support of a little less than one-third of
American voters, followed by Hillary Rodham Clinton at 22 percent, Senate
minority leader Tom Daschle with 11 percent, and Connecticut senator Joe
Lieberman, Massachusetts senator John Kerry, and Missouri congressman Richard
Gephardt tied at eight percent. It sounds good until you consider that Gore was
the Democratic nominee in 2000, and the popular-vote winner at that; he should
be much higher than 32 percent. (A recent Washington Post poll of
Democratic voters that didn't include Hillary Clinton put Gore at 49 percent.
Even so, 54 percent of those respondents said they opposed recycling the
Gore-Lieberman ticket.) One thing is clear: other candidates aren't afraid of
him. On December 1, Kerry announced his intention to form an exploratory
committee, the precursor to a presidential run. Asked about Gore at a Boston
press conference on December 2, Kerry said, "If I were daunted, I wouldn't have
announced what I announced yesterday."
All of which raises a question: what went wrong?
IF YOU LISTEN to Gore, the media are a big part of what went wrong. He told
Josh Benson of the New York Observer that there's a "fifth column"
within the media that supports the extreme right wing. "Fox News Network, the
Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them, and some of
them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political
deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media," Gore said.
His refrain seems derivative of Hillary Clinton's claim in 1998 that there was
a "vast right-wing conspiracy" arrayed against her husband. Notwithstanding the
fact that her husband walked -- or rather unzipped -- his way into the trap the
right wing laid out for him, there was more than just a kernel of truth in her
words, as there is in Gore's. But so what?
Even with the abuse Gore receives almost daily on talk radio, administered on
such venues as Limbaugh's nationally aired program, he was still able to get
his message out in the "free media" during the month of November. Not that Gore
is blaming all his problems on the right wing. Speaking to Benson, he
acknowledged that he himself might be at the root of some of them. "Maybe I
bear the blame for some of it," he told the Observer. "I haven't been
very good about calling all of the insiders over the last two years."
Indeed. Much of Gore's disappointing return to the limelight, in fact, can be
linked to the vehicle he selected to mark his comeback, his and Tipper's
417-page tome on the American family. Joined at the Heart is an odd,
disjointed mix of anecdotes, policy, history, and bromides -- all of which
might have been fine if the book worked politically. But it doesn't.
For starters, the very topic of the book, the American family, isn't exactly
what's on the public's mind these days. The book might have worked as a
political vehicle in the mid 1990s, when the culture wars made their way into
national debates on welfare, gay rights, and working mothers, and the national
Democratic Party was finding a new voice on domestic policy. But to ask, as the
Gores do in the book's opening pages, "How do we deal with all the
extraordinary changes that American families have been going through in the
past few decades?" seems extraordinarily tone deaf in the wake of the September
11 attacks, which triggered urgent security concerns. Besides, similar terrain
was covered six years ago in Hillary Rodham Clinton's oft-ridiculed book, It
Takes A Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, published by
Simon & Schuster in 1996.
It's hard to say what the Gores' book brings to the general table of family and
childrearing that Clinton's didn't much earlier, more memorably, and with
greater attentiveness to policy development. And as easy as it is to make fun
of the phrase "it takes a village," it's one that resonates with a certain
block of voters. What's so frustrating about all this -- a frustration that
echoes critiques of Gore's 2000 run for president -- is that he's so clearly
capable of much more. Take his 1992 book Earth in Balance: Ecology and the
Human Spirit (Houghton Mifflin). Back then, Gore was one of the first
mainstream politicians to draw attention to the crisis in the environment. (His
environmental advocacy won him the moniker "Nature Boy" from the first
president Bush. No, it wasn't a compliment.) His book established the Tennessee
senator as an innovator and thinker who was ahead of his time on an important
issue. But with his and Tipper's book on the American family, Gore is
following, not leading.
Today, the public is worried about terrorism, and that's reflected in the fact
that roughly a third of the books on the New York Times' bestseller list
are either about the war on terror or inextricably linked to it:
Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani (Miramax); Let's Roll!, by Lisa
Beamer (Tyndale); Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over
Liberalism, by Sean Hannity (HarperCollins), and American: Beyond Our
Grandest Notions, by Chris Matthews (Free Press). All of which show
that even bad books can be important books if they strike a chord; Gore's
doesn't.
Making matters worse, the Gores seemed aware that the moment for a book on
"family" had passed -- yet they didn't adjust accordingly! They write: "[I]n
the months that have passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a lot of
people have told us that they have been thinking long and hard about what is
important to them in life -- and have concluded, as we have, that a big part of
the answer is family." That may be true, but surely just as big a part of the
answer is domestic security: airport safety, guarding our nuclear reactors from
attack, protecting the water supply, preventing another anthrax nightmare. It's
hard to say what Gore was thinking -- or if he was thinking at all -- when
he settled on the theme of his and Tipper's book. Regardless, it should
have been painfully obvious that a book on families wouldn't make the same
splash politically as it might have had the attacks never taken place.
One Gore-related project that might have survived the new post-September 11
realities would have been a straightforward memoir about his life. (Senator
John McCain of Arizona scored by writing not one, but two such books,
both of which are selling more copies than Joined at the Heart.)
An obvious failing of Gore's 2000 presidential bid was his inability to convey
an authentic personality to voters. One of the reasons Gore, the designated
successor to a popular president running in economically good times, failed to
defeat Bush decisively was that many voters found themselves asking the
question, who is Al Gore? -- even after he'd spent eight years in office as
vice-president. If Gore had written a readable memoir, he could have gotten his
personality and identity across without media interference. Such a book could
have revealed what it was like for Gore to grow up a senator's son, and related
stories about his service in Vietnam, his marriage to Tipper, and his tenure in
the House, Senate, and the White House.
In an autobiography, he also could have addressed one of the key failings of
his 2000 candidacy: his inability to sum up his contribution to the Clinton
administration. And it's something he continues to have trouble with, as his
November media blitz shows. Why he has this problem, given the historic nature
of his vice-presidency -- he was surely the most activist and involved
number-two man in the nation's history up to that point -- is a mystery.
Clinton delegated crucial duties to Gore: the environment, arms proliferation,
Russia. Gore even had his own adviser on the National Security Council. But he
has been reluctant to talk about how he influenced the president.
Interestingly, back in September, Gore's former legal counsel, Charles Burson,
addressed a small gathering in the Boston law offices of Mintz, Levin. Burson
told a fascinating story about how Gore -- over the opposition of the White
House's political team -- made the decision to attend the international meeting
on air pollution in Kyoto, Japan. Retelling that story in a book-length memoir
would have given Gore the opportunity to highlight his own views on the
environment and international affairs, and to do so in a way that compares
favorably with the views of both Clinton and Bush.
THERE IS a strategy behind Gore's recent public appearances: appeal to the
base. Gore opposes military action against Iraq -- in contrast to the position
he took in 1991, when he was just one of 10 Democratic senators who voted for
the original Gulf War. (Granted, Gore can argue that the first Gulf War was a
response to Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, whereas the current president's
proposed war would amount to an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein preemptively.)
He also has moved left on economic matters -- he wants to cancel the Bush tax
cut -- and has basically pirated the position of his 2000 primary rival, Bill
Bradley, on health care.
But none of this plays well. Throughout his career, Gore has been through more
changes than Windows. Gore 1.0 was a pro-life moderate Democrat. Gore 1.1 was a
pro-Israel hawk who ran against Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, and Jesse
Jackson from the right in the 1988 New York primary. Gore 2.0, which emerged
during the Clinton administration, was the point man on getting the North
American Free Trade Agreement passed. This sort of background makes it unlikely
that he could ever really win over the progressive wing of the Democratic Party
-- especially in primary battles with the likes of Al Sharpton flanking his
left.
The essence of the LA Weekly's anti-Gore rant by Cooper is that the
former vice-president is an untrustworthy agent of progressivism. "As recently
as during the 2000 primary, he relentlessly attacked rival Bill Bradley as some
sort of soft-brained leftist when the former senator presented his own rather
modest national health-care plan. . . . And now Gore is out
there sounding like some sort of Stockholm socialist?" Cooper asks, lambasting
the 1988 presidency seeker for being the first to attack candidate Michael
Dukakis with the "race-baiting Willie Horton strategy." No, a strategic move
leftward is not exactly enthralling the party faithful -- and is not likely to
do so in the future.
All that said, it's not impossible to wage a comeback in politics. No candidate
could have been further down than Richard Nixon after he lost the 1962
governor's race in California to Edmund "Pat" Brown, which came after he lost
the presidency in 1960 to John F. Kennedy. The defeat elicited Nixon's
oft-quoted line: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because,
gentlemen, this is my last press conference." How did Nixon come back? First
off, he waited an entire presidential-election cycle to try, sitting out the
election of 1964 (which Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, running as a candidate
of the far right, lost disastrously to Lyndon Johnson). Then, in 1968, Nixon
appeared on the NBC comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. "The Nixon
of 1968 was so different from the Nixon of 1960 that the whole personality
required re-exploration," wrote Theodore White in The Making of the
President, 1968. As that tumultuous year drew to a close, Nixon was elected
president of the United States.
You know things are tough when you have to look to a politician like Nixon for
inspiration. But Gore seems to be taking at least one page from Nixon's
playbook. He'll be on Saturday Night Live -- the modern equivalent of
Laugh-In -- on December 14. But if lightning fails to strike, it might
take the visit of three Christmas Eve apparitions to convince Gore of the
errors of his ways.
Seth Gitell can be reached sgitell[a]phx.com.
Issue Date: December 13 - 19, 2002
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