Al in the mind

Spectator, The, Jul 8, 2000 by Steyn, Mark

Mark Steyn says the vice president's trick of fooling all of the people all of the time may win him the White House

New Hampshire

LAST week Bill Clinton did his best to boost Al Gore's confidence: `It's still more likely than not that he will win,' said the President. Hmm. Stand by for next week's ringing endorsement of Al: it's still not impossible that he might yet fail to lose.

And Mr Clinton's right, of course. The Gore camp remains upbeat, and there's plenty of silver linings out there if you know where to look. Take that recent poll showing that George Dubya Bush had pulled even with Al in California. That's great news for our boy, say the Gore guys. It'll lure Dubya into wasting valuable time and money campaigning in La-La Land and distract him from campaigning in states he might actually win. That's true. Likewise, a Bush landslide in November would be good news for Gore: it would lure Dubya into wasting valuable time governing the country while freeing up Al to concentrate on the 2004 election.

Meanwhile, the Gore campaign has switched theme songs, from Shania Twain's `Rock the Country' to `You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet', as in the 1974 number-one hit for Bachman-Turner Overdrive - `B-B-BBaby, you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet. . . . ' Its symbolic value as the first presidential campaign song to celebrate the Stammering-American community is only partly undermined by the fact that, like Shania's record, it's Canadian. For a US presidential candidate to choose one Canadian campaign song may be regarded as careless; to choose two is a little freakish, if only in terms of its statistical unlikeliness. If he's looking for a third song, my suggestion is Celine Dion and the theme from Titanic. Anyway, the vice-president's PA system unveiled the new number at the start of his `Progress & Prosperity' tour. Gore came out and gave a dull speech and then the sound system blared out `You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet'. And, in one sense, they were right: if you were a lifelong Democrat expecting a rousing stemwinder, then you had, indeed, not seen nothin'.

But, in another sense, most Americans have already seen plenty: in recent months, aside from changing his campaign song, AI has changed his campaign style, his campaign manager, his campaign policies, his campaign wardrobe, his campaign physique, his campaign style (again) and his campaign accent. They've gotten, respectively, more mean, clean, in-between, green, lean, serene and Tennessee'n. The only thing he hasn't changed is his tenants' leaky toilet back on the family farm in Carthage, which makes the place, as Al's hapless renter puts it, `smell like shee-ut'. If it's any consolation, up at the big house, all Gore's changes haven't exactly left him smelling like roses. He's beginning to resemble one of those shows that runs into trouble out of town and gets so over-fixed that by the time it opens on Broadway nothing quite makes sense any more.

So, for example, Gore never makes an appearance these days without a Palm Pilot. If you don't know what a Palm Pilot is, it's not, as you might think, a synonym for masturbation, but some sort of small computer. Whenever Al appears in public now, his Palm is always to hand - clipped to his belt and, since the vice-president began campaigning sans jacket, highly visible. It's supposed to say: this is a thrusting, go-ahead leader for the cyber-generation fully at ease with technological advance. But instead, like Michael Jackson and his surgical mask, it just says weird and obsessive. No doubt when you're out on the campaign trail it's useful to be able to download your latest disastrous poll numbers even before you've finished making the speech that's causing them. But Al's techno-geek image is no longer what it was: having famously claimed that `I took the lead in creating the Internet', he's since told justice department investigators that the reason he's managed to lose a year's worth of incriminating campaign-finance emails is because he's not really an expert in computers.

On the other hand, if Gore didn't invent the Internet, he certainly knows how to use it. Recently, addressing the Anti-Defamation League, he regaled them with some of his favourite Jewish country 'n' western songs - `The Second Time She Said Shalom, I Knew She Meant Goodbye', `I Was One of the Chosen People Until She Chose Somebody Else'. Unfortunately, it transpired that the Father of the Internet had lifted his gags en masse from a copyrighted website. To prevent him using his Palm Pilot to access any other ribald Jewish websites to plagiarise, I believe his aides have now had a gefilte installed.

Personally, I suspect the little clip-on device is not a Palm Pilot at all but the means by which the boffins at master control hastily reprogramme the first AndroidAmerican candidate when he starts going all wonky. They've tried various different models now. There was Al Bore, with his repertoire of painfully wooden jokes about how wooden he was, all supplied by canny writers with an eye on the zeitgeist du jour. The current hit show on American TV is Survivor, and I was looking forward to the lumbering cracks about lumber: `They were going. To vote me. Off the island. But then they realised. I was a good source. Of firewood.'