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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
The former vice president tries to reconnect with the home state that deserted him, amid criticisms he's "still caviar, not catfish."
May 21, 2002 | When Al Gore left the national stage in December 2000, he told the country he was going back to Tennessee to "mend some fences, literally and figuratively." The figurative part alluded to his home state's abandonment of him on Election Day, where Gore became the first presidential nominee to lose his home state in 28 years, losing all 11 of its electoral votes, and with it, the presidency.
The literal part might have been a reference to an embarrassing story that broke during June 2000, when the Weekly Standard visited Tracy and Charles Mayberry, tenants on Gore's rental property at the Gore family farm in Carthage, Tenn. Writer Matt Labash described a grim picture: "The plaster was coming off the walls, the linoleum was peeling off the kitchen floor, the basin of the bathroom sink was a constipated sludge puddle, the guts of one toilet tank had to be held together with Sunbeam bread bag twisties, and both bathroom toilets overflowed -- when they flushed at all."
Labash tagged Gore a "sanctimonious slumlord." Tracy Mayberry said Gore could "kiss my ass." And a key bit of GOP spin of Gore as an out-of-touch elitist was fortified in his home state.
Now, Gore splits his time between a home in Virginia and his home in Carthage, and the Mayberrys are long gone. The new tenants, David and Amy McKissick, moved in the spring of 2001, and while they say the house needed work, they agreed to do it themselves, and Gore paid them to put in hardwood floors, a new heating and air-conditioning system, new plumbing and a new roof. Unaware of the previous scandal, they seem genuinely indifferent to their landlord's politics. "We're not involved politically with either party. We don't vote," Amy McKissick said. "Politically we're not interested in anything." But they say Gore's been "just fine."
They may never vote for him, but you can still consider the McKissicks a sort of victory for Gore here. That fence is officially mended. Reconnecting with the people of Tennessee, though, may be a tougher job as he decides whether to run for president in 2004. No candidate has ever won the presidency without also winning his home state. Yet it's a real question whether Gore's campaign messages will resonate to a majority of Tennessee voters, because his problem in Tennessee is much the same as the Democrats' problem in the South, and the much-ballyhooed "red states."
Take, for instance, Gore's newfound role as a sort of president-in-exile, criticizing Bush. Beginning with a full-on partisan stump speech at the Florida Democratic convention in April, to last week, when Gore was among the first to voice outrage at the Republicans for shilling as a fundraiser a photograph of the president on the phone aboard Air Force One on Sept. 11, Gore has all but become Bush's official nemesis. So much so that last week, after reports of various pre-Sept. 11 terrorist warnings to the Bush administration, it was notable that he chose to say nothing.
That might play well with Democrats on both coasts, but most Tennessee voters are already predisposed to dislike Gore's positions -- and surely any criticism of Bush. This was a state that had became such a lost cause, in fact, that late in the 2000 race, senior aides told Salon that Gore deliberately turned his attention away from Tennessee and toward Florida, knowing it would likely mean losing his home state. And as he indefatigably crisscrosses the state, shaking hands with anyone and everybody, he still doesn't appear to have figured out a way to bring those Southern swing voters who fell for Bush back into the fold.
