July/August 2002
Weather tis Nobler in The Mind
Al Gore lost in 2000 by going soft on the environment.
He can win in 2004 by getting tough.
By Stephanie Mencimer
…. Gore is showing every indication that he plans to run again in 2004, and if current polls are any indication, he is likely to win the Democratic nomination--a prospect that fills many Democrats with dread. Like global warming, Gore's candidacy is huge, scary, and probably inevitable…...
Green Meanies
In downplaying the environment, both Gore and his advisers ignored Lyndon Johnson's famous rule of politics: It's better to have your adversaries inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Bush had learned this lesson the hard way, watching his father lose in 1992 to Bill Clinton after being assaulted from the right by fundamentalist Christians who thought he was ignoring their interests. When Bush entered the race, he made sure that he reined in the more unruly fringes of the GOP, cutting deals with Christian conservatives and bringing them into the tent with the unified goal of simply winning the election.
Gore and his camp may have factored in Jesse Jackson, but they made no such calculations when it came to environmentalists. As a result, they were completely unprepared when a lot of them began dampening his tent. Environmentalists had been mounting increasingly heated attacks on Gore during his last term in office for failing to do more on climate change. In 1997, the Sierra Club ran TV ads in early primary states urging Clinton and Gore to "stand up to the special interests" and push for stronger clean-air rules. Environmental groups sent a polemic to editorial writers deriding Gore's comments on global warming as "hot air." In 1998, Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, and others met with Gore and asked the administration to mount a fight in Congress to reduce emissions from electric utilities. The meeting broke down into a shouting match after Gore flatly refused, yelling "Show me one vote! Name me one senator who'll support me on this!"
As the campaign progressed, and Gore backburnered his green views, the environmentalists felt Gore was taking their votes for granted, which made it difficult for the environmental leaders who did sincerely support him to rally their troops. "The candidate wasn't helping us," says the League of Conservation Voters' Deb Callahan. "We could only take it so far. If he had done more, we could have done more whipping up people."
But former Gore campaign staffers and Clinton administration officials suggest that the environmentalists bear much of the blame for putting Bush in office. Carter Eskew, Gore's message man, says, "They weren't exactly unified behind Gore, rah-rah."
At the grassroots level, many activists showed little understanding of the compromises necessary to get one of their own elected. Some went on to protest Gore outside the 2000 Democratic Convention, and in some cases only grudgingly gave him their endorsement. (At least one major group endorsed Bill Bradley during the primary.) During the campaign, Republicans gleefully touted a 1999 email from Sierra Club board member Michael Dorsey, in which he accused Gore of holding natural resources "hostage to the highest bidder," adding: "With this legacy, no real environmentalist could ever endorse Al Gore."
The Sierra Club quickly reaffirmed its support for Gore, but the environmentalists' public unhappiness with Gore left the door open for a left-wing assault from Ralph Nader, who forced Gore to wage a real and expensive battle in places like Oregon, where Democratic presidential candidates had easily prevailed since 1988.
Activists in Oregon pushed Gore to come out in favor of removing dams from the upper Snake River to help restore the wild salmon population. But Gore was caught between an electoral rock and a hard place. The dams were actually in Washington, where the state leadership was adamantly opposed to removing them because of their role in providing electrical power, and Gore needed Washington as much as he needed Oregon. Gore insisted that he sincerely cared about the salmon and promised to convene a "salmon summit" as soon as he was elected, much the way Clinton did to broker a compromise over the spotted owl controversy in the early Œ90s. But as one Clinton official puts it, "Their expectations were just impossible."
Nader pounced on Gore's vagueness on the salmon issue as proof that there was very little difference between Gore and Bush on the environment--a perception Bush happily capitalized on. Gore advisers believe that the environmental groups allowed that impression to stand unchallenged until the very end of the campaign, when the race came down to razor-thin margins. But by then it was too late, and now, the current president flat-out opposes removing the dams and most other measures to revive the salmon habitat. As one Gore campaign consultant laments, "The environmentalists blew it giving Gore a hard time. It's a case study in how interest groups often don't know what's good for them."
Too Yellow to be Green?
Nowhere was the impact of environmental politics more apparent than in the hotly contested race for Florida. While much has been written about how Gore could have done things differently during the recount, largely overlooked was his dismal campaign performance in a state that is home to 325,000 members of major environmental groups, not to mention thousands of others sympathetic to the cause. Because of its importance to the tourism industry, the environment is so critical to Florida politics that even oil-dynasty Gov. Jeb Bush has opposed offshore drilling there. In a brazen move to shore up Jeb's reelection prospects, the president didn't think twice about spending several hundred million taxpayer dollars to buy out oil-drilling leases off Florida's Gulf Coast.
The League of Conservation Voters did a survey to see whether members of environmental groups voted more than the general public. In 1996, they did not, so the group orchestrated a "get out the vote" campaign to rally environmental voters to the polls. After the 2000 election, they went back to check to see how successful it had been. "In Florida, the number of environmental group members who voted dropped by 9 percent," says Callahan.
She suspects that one reason for the drop-off was Gore's failure to pick a side in the fight over the future of Homestead Air Force Base. The base had been severely damaged by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and was slated to be closed. Local politicos in Miami-Dade County, including Democratic mayor and Gore fundraiser Alex Penelas, quickly seized the moment to hand over the development rights to a group of investors who included the son of legendary Cuban leader Jorge Mas Canosa. The group intended to turn Homestead into a commercial airport. The problem, however, was that the base was situated right in the middle of the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, which environmentalists feared would be badly damaged by pollution and traffic.
The Clinton EPA and Interior Department both came out against the airport, as did Gore's rival in the Democratic primary, Bill Bradley. Polls also showed that two-thirds of Floridians opposed the airport. But once the campaign heated up, Gore inexplicably refused to take a position, infuriating many South Florida environmentalists who had watched him give a passionate speech at the Capitol announcing the administration's plan to spend $8 billion restoring the Everglades. "He spoke for 20 minutes without notes," says Alan Farago, who led the fight against the airport. "We were blown away by how much he knew."
Yet on campaign swings through South Florida, says Farago, Gore adamantly refused to even discuss Homestead. "Gore's silence made us doubt that he knew himself what his campaign stood for," says Farago.
In February 2000, Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen wrote a scathing editorial in The Miami Herald attacking Gore for his lack of position, writing, "Vice President Al Gore, who claims the greenest pro-environmental credentials of all the presidential candidates, is showing a flash of yellow . . . braced with South Florida's most controversial environmental issue, the environmental vice president has elected to wimp out and keep quiet . . . If he doesn't take a stand soon, we can assume that the self-proclaimed green candidate isn't referring to the green of the Everglades, but rather the green that Alex Penelas is stuffing into Democratic coffers."
Green voters' suspicions deepened further when they learned that the vice president's point man in Florida, land-use lawyer Mitchell Berger, had financial ties to one of the developers involved in the airport proposal. Environmentalists became so furious that they threatened to picket Gore's appearances, at one point forcing him to cancel a campaign stop. Disappointed with Gore, many environmental-minded voters supported Ralph Nader, who took a very public stand on Homestead and garnered more than 95,000 votes in Florida. National exit polls later suggested that about half of Nader's votes would have gone to Gore, which would have been more than enough to put Gore over the top.
"Gore lost Florida because of environmentalists," says Callahan. "If Al Gore had inspired environmental voters in Florida and not been ambiguous on some issues like on the Homestead development he would be president today."
Mercury Rising
Much has changed since Al Gore conceded the election in December 2000. If the environment wasn't a top-tier issue then, it will certainly be in 2004….
…. Should he run in 2004, Gore will not be able to nickel and dime his way to beating Bush….
Illustration by Fred Harper.
Stephanie Mencimer is an editor of The Washington Monthly.
