Monday, May 12, 2008
Suddenly, Gore seems to be pulling off the impossible: Running both for and against the presidency.
Aug 23, 2000 | On the third day of the Democratic National Convention last week, Hadassah Lieberman walked out to the Staples Center podium to a sustained, thunderous ovation. The Democrats, with more than twice as many delegates as the Republicans had in Philadelphia, give better ovations, the kind that literally vibrate inside of you. Spread in all directions beneath Hadassah, reaching literally to the rafters, was a waving sea of fresh blue placards sporting her name. It was a heady moment, a degree of personal affirmation that few of us will ever enjoy, and the slender, blond-haired wife of the Democrats' vice presidential nominee appeared appropriately stunned. She stepped back, and when the show of adulation eased slightly, disarmingly exclaimed, "Wow!"
One attends events like these in hopes of glimpsing spontaneity, a moment or two of unscripted reality outside the tidy TV frame. Real politics, the smoke-filled room days of yore, have long since been banished from these quadrennial spectacles, but the candidates, their families, toadies and advisors are all there on display, so there's always a chance you might stumble onto something revealing. Hadassah's "Wow" was a small thing, but it seemed genuine enough. Why wouldn't she recoil momentarily in amazement? It's a cinch that as the wife of Joseph Lieberman, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, she has stood before a goodly number of excited crowds, but nothing like this. This was political enthusiasm turned up a surprising notch ... except, from where I sat in the hall, about 150 feet behind and to her left, I could read the opening lines of Hadassah's prepared speech on the big teleprompter facing her across the crowded hall. The first word of her prepared remarks, printed right there in giant letters on the screen, was, "Wow!"
If an event is scripted, can it still be real? This one was no different than a scene in a movie, planned, written and (certainly in Hadassah's case) rehearsed. When Al Gore planted that earthy, open-mouthed kiss on Tipper as he stepped on stage the next evening, practically knocking her over backwards, we can only assume that was calculated, too. After all, we have charged poor Al with the Zen-like challenge of striving not to strive, of being clever enough not to appear too bright, of being morally upright enough to counter the scandalous libido of his former ticket mate without seeming too "stiff."
The kiss was clearly calculated, yet by all accounts they are an especially close, loving couple. No doubt Hadassah found the ovation stirring, just as she and her speechwriter anticipated it, so maybe "Wow!" would have slipped from her lips even if her speechwriter hadn't put it there for her. She did actually say "Wow!" twice, so maybe one of them was genuine. We will never know.
I suspect this degree of choreography is behind what most Americans find distasteful about politics. I'm willing to accept that the scripts at both conventions, the Republican show in Philadelphia and this one in Los Angeles, were designed to reveal the truth, or parts of it, but anything that manipulative hardly inspires trust. When there is no trace of anything genuine in a campaign, the public rightly grows wary. If the script called in advance for an expression of surprise or of supposedly spontaneous affection, even if there is something real behind it, how are we to know?
I have to report that the "realest" moment of the whole blatherfest for me was something I saw on screen. In a stroke of surprising originality (perhaps born of desperation) the Gore campaign invited film director Spike Jonze to make a short documentary film. Gore had evidently liked Jonze's delightfully bizarre "Being John Malkovich," and chose to offer him an opportunity to film the Gore family at their vacation home in North Carolina and various other places earlier this summer. It continued a tradition that began during the first Clinton/Gore campaign, when filmmakers trailed them for months making the fascinating documentary "The War Room." In Gore's case, the idea wasn't to capture the mechanics of the campaign, but the flesh-and-blood Al Gore. As Al noted in the film, the vice president is the cardboard cutout on stage behind the president at official functions, so what makes him think he's qualified to be president? In contrast to the slick, somewhat smarmy video shot at George W. Bush's ranch by an ad agency and shown at the GOP Convention (think of a standard 30-second TV commercial drawn out over 10 minutes), Jonze shot a stylistically raw slice of life. It did more in 10 minutes to break down Gore's famous "stiffness" than an army of campaign consultants have been able to do. We see the candidate at the dinner table being made fun of, lovingly, by his grown children, giving a tour of the family's photo gallery (which reflects Tipper's evident wit), playing with his baby grandson and, in one scene, displaying a marvelous deadpan as he jokingly complains about his wife's habit of going barefoot.
"It's ruining my image," he says, looking hilariously doleful.
"That's my job," says the chipper Tipper.
This was all by design, too, of course, but it worked. The warmth and normality of the Gore family at ease cannot have been faked, and the courage to allow an offbeat filmmaker like Jonze the freedom to record it shows a confidence surprising in a candidate trailing in the polls at the time and for whom one slip of the tongue between now and November could relegate him forever to footnote status, the gray land inhabited by vice presidents who never assume the highest office.
Gore took a big step at this convention and, looking back over the whole messy pageant, I'm impressed. He has closed the gap in the polls between himself and George W. Bush, and unveiled a new populist liberal image that both suits him and well positions him for the final months of the campaign. In the days since the convention ended, Fighting Al, whose campaign seemed moribund a week ago, now seems to be the candidate of purpose and energy. During the first three days of the convention, most pundits I heard and read were proclaiming it a disaster. Clinton won't get off the stage, they said, and what was that Kennedy day all about? But taken as a whole, the Gore convention managed to shoo the president gracefully off center stage while laying claim to the legacy of his very popular policies; it introduced Gore as a devoted father and sexually grounded husband (that's what that sloppy kiss was all about); and it reinvented him as a by-gosh fighting Tennessee populist more in the image of his father than Bill Clinton.
This was the smartest move of all. Somebody in the Gore camp realized that the moderate, centrist path charted so effectively by Clinton contributed to his image as a man who stood for nothing, who moved according to favorable political winds. Bush played on this at his convention, selling himself as the candidate of principle who didn't need polls to tell him the right thing to do. By returning to the Democrats' more liberal roots (that's what Kennedy day was all about), Gore contrasted his policy differences with W., while defining himself more clearly to voters. He lambasted the status quo like somebody who didn't have anything to do with it: The verb "to fight" appears 22 times in his speech.
But that was Al's challenge precisely. He is charged with running both for and against the Clinton presidency at the same time. And damned if he hasn't pulled it off.
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