Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Because Al Gore, flawed but the best man for the job, is stuck with a fractured liberal base that won't forgive him for not being Bill Clinton.
Nov 6, 2000 | Even with the news that George W. Bush was arrested for drunken driving 24 years ago and lied to cover it up, Al Gore continues to trail Bush in every national poll. Like the prizefighter he isn't, Bush seemed dazed Sunday but still stumbling confidently toward Tuesday, as undaunted by his superior opponent as ever.
Consider me an undecided voter, because for weeks I haven't been able to decide which of two contradictory assessments of Gore's campaign is true.
Analysis A goes something like: This race was Al Gore's to lose, and he's done his best to lose it, running an abominable campaign that was probably doomed from the start by his calculating political chameleon act and personal charmlessness. He's riding the longest economic boom in American history, in a decade when welfare and crime are way down; he's served with a two-term president who, though tainted by scandal, remains a popular leader, and in most opinion polls voters support his positions on abortion, Social Security, healthcare and spending the budget surplus. According to the Dow Jones industrial average (when it's up from July to October, the incumbent party wins the White House, and when it's down the insurgents triumph, in all but three elections since 1897), Gore should be scheduling guests in the Lincoln Bedroom already. Instead, thanks to his own fatal personal and political flaws, he's trailing in almost every poll and may well lose to a bumbling, drunken-driving frat boy who will inflict another mediocre Bush presidency on a country that deserves -- and would have voted for -- better, if only they'd been offered it.
Analysis B says: Gore never had a prayer, and the fact that he's still within shouting distance of Bush in the polls is astonishing. Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, impeachment, Buddhist Templegate and all the other campaign finance flaps -- whether you blame it on the left-wing chicanery of the Clinton-Gore administration or the vast right-wing conspiracy against them, it's been eight years of one scandal after another, and no one could survive it. Even the nation's prosperity works against Gore: With the economy apparently cruising on autopilot, why not vote for the sunny (pseudo) outsider, the masterful triangulator from Texas, the one who hides his unpopular positions on issues like abortion and gun control and HMOs and doesn't seem to want to do much of anything except let you keep more of your own money? Throw in a feisty third-party challenger on the left in Ralph Nader (whereas Clinton had the benefit of Ross Perot on his right), and it's a tribute to Gore's political tenacity that he even made this race interesting. It should have been a Bush blowout.
As the closest presidential race in modern political history approaches its dramatic ending, smart postmortems will be impossible until somebody's campaign is dead. What's most remarkable is the election's volatility, the unprecedented number of swing states -- 12 going into the last two days -- with their geo-targeted blocs of swing voters, their psychometrically tested microissues. There are so many ways for both Gore and Bush to win or lose -- which means there are likely to be an infinite number of reasonable explanations for why they did.
But the suspicion still persists that it's Gore's fault the race is this close, that he's trailing Bush in the final days. It's something about Al, his critics say, it's gotta be: his smarmy know-it-allness, the serial exaggerations, his hydra-headed campaign, those doomed efforts to be an earth-toned "alpha male," his unforgiveable failure to be President Clinton.
Lately that line is coming the loudest from Nader supporters, who reject the claim of liberal Gore backers that their third-party truculence could elect another President Bush. As Naderite Michael Moore puts it in an open letter to Gore: "Look, Al, you have screwed up -- big time. By now, you should have sent that smirking idiot back to Texas with a copy of 'Hooked on Phonics' in his hands. You should have wiped the floor with him during the three debates.
"But you didn't. And now your people are calling ME, asking ME to do the job YOU'VE failed to do! Jeez, I've got enough on my plate these days, between work and the holidays coming up and the leaves I should be raking -- and now I'm supposed to save YOU? Unbelievable!" Moore, of course, blames Gore's troubles on the vice president's neglecting left-wing voters and opening the door to a Nader challenge.
On Gore's right, though, a comparable blame-Al analysis comes from Andrew Sullivan, now writing TRB for the New Republic. "In this economy, with President Clinton's approval ratings still celestial and a rookie as an opponent, Gore should be a shoo-in. Instead the vice president is in his home state, grasping at tiny blips upwards in the polls." Sullivan's explanation, however, is very different from Moore's: "Gore's candidacy is simply too liberal for the country."
It's enough to make you feel sorry for Gore, and think more about Analysis B. In fact, Gore has always been the underdog in this race, for reasons that have far more to do with the fractured state of American politics in this new millennium than with the vice president's political or personal failings.
Get Salon in your mailbox!