Gotten to the Gore: Albert Gore will say or do anything to get elected - and feel righteous doing it - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by Rich Lowry

IN 1991, with President George Bush still riding high, then-Sen. Al Gore announced he wouldn't make another bid for the Democratic presidential nomination -- partly because two years earlier his son had nearly died after being struck by a car. "My family -- my wife and four young children -- are more important than politics and personal ambition," he avowed. Half a year later Gore's manifesto on the ecological crisis, Earth in the Balance, appeared -- also a result, he writes in the introduction, of his son's accident. The experience made him uncomfortable with the compromises and tawdriness of practical politics, "increasingly impatient with the status quo, with conventional wisdom." By his own telling, Gore had been transformed into a politician of extraordinary virtue, willing to forsake ambition for his family, determined to embark on a quasi-spiritual crusade to save not just America or even democracy, but the planet.

Then, Bill Clinton called. Gore took the second spot on the ticket in 1992 and decided the wife and kids could wait while he spent his days disavowing the implications of Earth in the Balance in national debates and defending the compromises and tawdriness of the former Arkansas governor. Why the reversal? Well, it turns out, because his son had nearly died in a car accident. Accepting the vice-presidential nomination, Gore told the Democratic National Convention how immediately after the accident his son "was limp and still, without breath or pulse." Gore was running for national office because, like his son, "our democracy is lying there in the gutter, waiting for us to give it a second breath of life." His son's near-death, then, was now a kind of qualification for higher office. In fact, it seemed to be a justification for anything, a charm that Gore could rub whenever he needed an aura of virtue.

Gore's father raised him to be President, and everything around him becomes automatically subsumed in the lifelong Al Gore for President campaign. His son's near death becomes a nice metaphor, his sister's painful, losing struggle with cancer a useful rhetorical riff, pandering and playing loose with the truth a necessary expedient (except when renouncing the same is even more expedient). And none of this is calculating or low because it is in the service of a goal whose purity is beyond reproach -- elevating Al Gore. The Vice President's reputation as a stiff at once underestimates him and gives him too much credit. Gore is disciplined and smart, at least an even match for his presumptive opponent in 2000, Jack Kemp. He is also, along with Hillary Clinton, today's foremost practitioner of the odious political style of the enlightened Baby Boomer, who assumes his own righteousness and considers any expedient justified in trying to visit it upon the nation.

Gore, a self-styled "Son of the South," is really a Beltway baby. His father, Al Gore Sr., was a senator from Tennessee, and raised young Al in what is now the Ritz-Carlton hotel. He went to St. Albans, the exclusive prep school, and then on to Harvard, where, the joke goes, he studied Southern as a foreign language. His dad, meanwhile, got in trouble back home for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Al opposed the War, but volunteered to avoid embarrassing his father -- or, as the young Bill Clinton might have put it, to maintain his father's viability within the system. His dad lost anyway in 1970. Al supposedly soured on politics, but not enough to keep him from dropping his reporter job at a moment's notice six years later and running for an open congressional seat. He won the primary -- tantamount to election -- by 3,500 votes, the tightest race in his otherwise charmed political life.

In the House and then in the Senate -- he won a Senate seat in 1984 -- Gore compiled a moderately liberal voting record (his Americans for Demo- cratic Action rating hovered around 70). As a congressman, he had a knack for grabbing headlines by championing goo-goo causes like nutritional standards for baby formula. In the Senate, GOP staffers still drip with contempt for him as "a joke," who never matched his rhetoric with substance. He made his name on issues that, as Michael Kinsley has pointed out, were always "difficult" in the sense of being technical and dull, but not contentious. He became a student of the minutiae of arms control. He sponsored the Supercomputer Network Study Act. He, of course, talked about toxic waste. You can almost hear him thinking: "Just don't make mistakes." It's an understandable impulse -- steer a safe course and graduate from Harvard, succeed your daddy in the Senate, maybe even become President.

The attitude suffused Gore's 1988 presidential bid, an exercise in ham-handed and utterly predictable cynicism. Gore ran at the urging of a group of wealthy Democrats who thought he could fill the "moderate" niche in the campaign. But his candidacy never developed a rationale. One of his first acts was to fly to Los Angeles with Tipper to tell music executives his wife didn't really mean the nasty things she had said about rock lyrics. Then he tried on successive campaign themes. The one he settled on was that he was the super-hawk in a field of liberal wimps, despite the fact that it was at odds with his record (votes against the Contras, against SDI, etc.). He wrote off Iowa, declaring, "I will not barter my beliefs to win votes here or elsewhere," then went on to sell them wholesale anywhere he thought he might find a buyer.