Regards, Ivan
Posted on 12/14/2002 3:39:53 PM PST by MadIvan
If there’s one thing that stands out about Al Gore it’s his appetite for power. For several decades now he has groomed himself — and been groomed — for political office.
For the past four presidential election cycles (including primaries), he has either run for president or vice-president of the United States. Despite setbacks and crushing mistakes he keeps on going, dragging the country to the brink of constitutional crisis two years ago because he refused to believe what every single election count showed: that he had very narrowly lost the state of Florida.
So it’s a mug’s game predicting his imminent demise or withdrawal from the scene. But last week, as the media focused on other doomed characters — the Senate majority leader Trent Lott, for remarks seeming to regret desegregation, and Cardinal Law, who subsequently resigned, for protecting paedophile priests — a smoke signal definitely went up.
Friends of Gore — his inner circle — told The New York Times that they no longer thought he would run in the next election cycle. He was increasingly energised by his private life; he’d made none of the necessary calls to contributors and allies to begin raising money for the rematch against Bush; above all he realised that the media — even its most vocal liberal elements — loathed him.
After a while, even the most insulated, cocooned politician can tell if almost nobody wants him to run. The latest opinion polls showed that Gore had a 19% favourability rating — in the Nixon-resignation basement.
In any polled match-up, Gore would lose to Bush in a landslide. Of course, Bush is still buoyed by wartime ratings but his persistently high showing suggests something deeper: that the American public have bonded with this president, like him, trust him and feel immensely relieved that he won the presidency two years ago.
On a very basic level, Americans know now what they think of Gore and Bush. And it would take something truly epochal to shift their views. The proof of that has come in the past month. Gore carefully re-emerged from his relative seclusion to engage on a massive public relations exercise.
There have been interviews with every talk show host in America, a book tour touting the virtues of family life, sharply worded attacks on President Bush’s handling of the war and a further shift to the left in his sudden embrace of universal, government-guaranteed healthcare. Nothing has worked.
The highest-ranked of his two recently published books — both co-authored with his wife Tipper — is at 1,353 on the Amazon website, despite massive nationwide publicity. Democrats knife him anonymously in the media.
Donna Brazile, his former campaign manager, commented acidly to The New York Times: “I haven’t reached out to talk to him, because my number is listed. I haven’t heard from him. In the long run, he will have to fight for the nomination. It’s not a done deal. The party is hungry for new faces.” Ouch.
Brazile was single-handedly responsible for the huge black turnout in 2000 that almost gave Gore the presidency. Other Democrats, off the record, even suggested they’d like Gore to run but only because he’d be a great person to beat in the early primaries in order to give their own campaigns a lift.
This has got to hurt. For a month of campaigning and touring, it was as if Gore kept pulling every lever for political liftoff while staying firmly, fixedly on the ground.
At this point, though, it’s hard even to pity him. I used to admire and like Al Gore. That was in the 1980s and early 1990s when he seemed to represent a new, centrist Democratic party. But now it’s clear that these erstwhile policies did not spring from any deep conviction but were mere tools to get him to higher office. How else to explain his new positions, resonant with the far left of the party?
A classic example is his new-found attachment to a Canadian-style national health service. In the 2000 campaign he had derided his Democrat rival Bill Bradley for favouring similar (but not identical) plans for healthcare.
So what’s different now? The number of people without health insurance has gone up but most of the problems today were perfectly visible 2½ years ago.
The most plausible answer is that Gore thought it would be politically expedient to play the fiscal conservative back in 2000 against a liberal rival in the primaries. Now it’s politically expedient for him to move left to win over the party base. But moving left hasn’t helped much either.
Gore has deeply alienated his former friends in the centrist wing of the Democrats, and the left doesn’t quite trust him. Nor should they. He has combined some of the most pathetic gambits of the far left while having none of their conviction.
A classic recent example was his claim that the Bush administration’s emphasis on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was merely an electoral ploy rather than a genuine issue of national security.
But Gore had always been a hawk on Saddam. The public record shows him to have been one of those in American politics most concerned with the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator. Why the sudden change of heart and mind? Again, it’s hard not to think of it as naked, if stupidly short-term, politicking.
It’s this reverse Midas touch that has the Democrats deeply leery of a new campaign. Maybe Gore has finally got the message. His friends say he blames the media — and the Washington press corps has indeed come to loathe him, especially for his serial and sad self-reinventions.
It’s hard for him to recover from Camille Paglia’s description of him in the first televised debate with Bush as a man looking like Norman Bates in the last scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, dressed as his mother. But the media are simply reflecting the truth of Gore’s hapless political persona.
Maybe he has taken a look at Jimmy Carter’s career and realised that it’s no massive failure to acknowledge that you’re a better person out of office than in it. It’s called self-knowledge. Here’s hoping that Al Gore has finally acquired some.
Regards, Ivan
He tells me that pollsters sometimes like to poll people months after an election to ask them who they voted for - it often indicates a change in sentiment more measurable than "how did you feel about X then, how do you feel about X now". According to him, 60% of people polled now regularly claim they voted for W in 2000.
11% of the electorate is now embarrassed to admit to a complete stranger that they voted for Gore.
Fortunately for everyone else, he's never had power. He has been one of 435 Congressmen, or one of 100 Senators, or Vice President (with only the trappings of power). He has never been an executive, the sole person having to make the decision, other than when running his own campaigns. He's like the dog who chases a car but wouldn't know what to do with it if he caught it.
As well they should be.
But that still leaves about 37% of the electorate either in denial or in the throes of terminal brainlock.
Regards, Ivan
Regards, Ivan
Regards, Ivan
Maybe not, eh? Maybe there was just that much vote fraud in 2000.
Not that it matters anymore, but I am just never going to believe that Gore really won the "popular vote". Not if I live to be 95...
But yes, if I had voted for Gore I'd be lying now too.
BTW, for any masochists out there, bore in on SNL tonight. Musical guest Phish.
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