End of the Line?: The meaning of Al Gore's life

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by Noemie Emery

Flailing in postelection frenzy, Albert Gore Jr. may be exiting politics much as he lived it: in a slash-and-burn rage at a threat to his destiny-and his goal of winning his dead father's praise. Raised to be president-told that he must be president-and believing that to be less would make his life worthless, he is now in a terminal tantrum at being denied what is "his." The crisis has come down to this.

The Bush-Gore election was billed as a battle of equals, two dynastic heirs of political families, both groomed for power and prominence. The reality, however, is something quite different. Bush was raised around power, but not wholly in it, with a political life posed as but one of the options. Gore was raised in a family driven by politics, with power and office the unique goal. The prized only son (Bush has three brothers), Gore became the sole focus of parental exertions toward power. In the past century, two hungry men failed in their final ambitions, and brought up their sons to surpass them. The first was Joseph P. Kennedy, who raised his four sons as a corps of avengers. The second was Albert Gore Sr.

No dynastic son, not even Joe Kennedy Jr., was aimed at the White House with such intense pressure as the younger Al Gore. Gore Sr. fought his way up from direst poverty, with political gifts and a burning ambition. His failure to win national office wounded him deeply. "He had a naked, desperate desire to see his boy be president," said a 1988 campaign aide to Gore Jr., quoted by biographer Bill Turque. Adds Turque: "There was a lot of thwarted ambition that washed off onto the son."

Al's birth in 1948 was announced on page one of the Nashville Tennessean. At age six, he was touted in the Knoxville News-Sentinel as a rising political star. Both in and out of the best schools in the country, he was groomed to be a political leader, his activities chosen for breadth of experience. A wall in his parents' house that displayed family photos was set aside for his record as president. He was sent to clear fields, so that he could be president. Friends at college thought he went to poker games to get a measure of the common touch. His fitful attempts to explore other careers were not taken seriously by others, and perhaps not even by himself. Said reporter David Maraniss of Gore's stint as a journalist: "Six of his newsroom friends . . . spent one night drafting a plan for Gore to be president, replete with timetables of when he had to run for the House and the Senate. They had him in the Oval Office in 2008."

In 1976, at age 28, he ran for and won his father's old House seat; eight years later, he was elected to the Senate. At his father's behest, he ran for president in 1988. A Gore campaign memo linked him to a string of historical figures: "A 28-year cycle . . . TR 04-FDR 32- JFK 60-AGJ 88 . . . Great presidents . . . Harvard grads . . . prep schools . . . political families . . . young." "He really believes he is an historical figure," New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier told The New Yorker's Peter Boyer. "He really does believe that he was born to lead." With the failed 1988 race as the sole flaw in his otherwise charmed resume, he more than ever believed in his destiny, ready and willing when Bill Clinton, in 1992, came shopping for ballast and gravitas, and picked the two-term senator as his vice president and political heir.

All seemed ideal, but for one minor matter: Gore's political instincts were nil. The elder Gore was a born politician, with a silver voice and a rampaging hunger for public approval: happy when performing in front of an audience. Young Al was different: happy alone, with abstractions or theories. He threw up before his first public campaign announcement. His speeches were "pitiful," Maraniss tells us. "His body language, the message, the cadence of his speech, all wrong." They did not get better. His mind was capacious and retentive, but rigid and cumbersome. His favorite issues, which he selected, picked apart, and committed to memory, concerned science and theories, not people. His temperament also was antipolitical: confrontational, yet aloof. Presidential scholar Fred Greenstein attributed much of Ronald Reagan's success to the negotiating skills he had learned as a trade-union president. Gore has no such skills. He takes advice from a small group, mainly his family. He dislikes criticism, and makes sure he gets little. In meetings, says Maraniss, "Gore held an unyielding position from which he hectored his opponents . . . his oldest friends often lament in private that he seems not to want to listen to them if he knows they are going to disagree." When challenged, he flashes the "Gore glare."

Gore's public style may occasionally evoke John F. Kennedy, but it's usually closer to that of Richard Nixon, another loner who wore dark suits on the beach. Nor does he have talent in running campaigns: He might coast with Bill Clinton, or as the son of his father, but tends to tank on his own. His campaigns were top-heavy with high-paid consultants, who fought with each other. He could not pick a message, or stick to a theme. He could not delegate, wasting time on minutiae. Said an aide in the 1988 effort, "He spent an enormous amount of time handling crap." In public, he had no sense of how to present himself, and no knowledge of how he appeared. After the embarrassing news conference in which he immortalized the phrase "no controlling legal authority" (which Gore thought that he had handled beautifully), the Washington Post's John F. Harris wrote that Gore's miscues suggest "a politician still struggling with how to project images and invoke symbols with the mastery that modern politics demands." Even Bill Clinton wondered aloud "how you could get so far in politics" while being as tone-deaf as Gore seemed to be.