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The best thing about a possible presidency of Albert Gore Jr. is that
after eight years of Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore as First Lady would be
a relief. But this about exhausts the upside of a Gore win, for along
with Tipper comes Al. And while Tipper would be a relief after Hillary,
he would not be a relief after Bill. In fact, he would make Clinton look
better. Though volunteers and interns would be safe from presidential groping, the country at large would suffer. Below are five reasons why.
Gore as utopian and dogmatist. Clinton at heart believes in little beyond his self-interest, which, if a flaw, at least centers him. Thus his approach to government—after his drubbing in the '94 mid-term
elections—tended to small, incremental, symbolic measures; too small, or too empty, to do too much damage. Gore, on the other hand, has large, sweeping theories. He shows every sign of utopian thinking, of the belief in vast, comprehensive, and definitive solutions in which, with the right words on the right kind of paper, the vagaries of life, law, and human nature can be ironed out, once and for all. So, while Gore may appear moderate on some issues—defense, entitlements—his approach to issues is anything but. As his biographer Bill Turque writes, "Earth in the Balance [Gore's 1992 environmentalist tome] is the essential Gore: thoughtful, earnest, ambitious, crammed with facts, and breathtakingly grandiose." It is "charged with the evangelistic fervor of a man who believes he can save the world."
More of a conviction interventionist than is Bill Clinton (even more so
than was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was really an improviser, trying to maneuver his way through a national crisis), Gore seems to favor
Draconian measures to force the shape of life in his country and planet into the conditions he sees as ideal. He is a believer in government mandates to create the "right" mix of races and genders in all possible settings; to redirect funds to his favored technologies; and to remake modern life around his favorite project—the elimination of cars. Few things would escape Gore's federal bossiness: He would like to see Washington involved in laying sidewalks for suburbs and untangling traffic jams. And these ends would be pressed in an overwrought climate of crisis and urgency.
Doubtless, Gore believes that all this would lead to a brighter world—think of a population that "looks like America" bicycling everywhere—but the trouble with most kinds of utopian thinking is not the end in mind, but the result. As history has shown, time and time over, the result tends to be the opposite of the desired goal. Utopian schemes double back on their founders. And who knows how far Gore might go?
A politician? A born politician, Bill Clinton accepts the din of the process and even enjoys it. Gore, an unnatural politician, pushed into
the field by his ambitious parents, shows no feel for the process at all. Discussion and dissent are treated as treason. Opponents are seen, not as citizens to be won over, but as blood enemies to be destroyed. Dealing with others has not been Gore's forte. In Congress, he seldom wrote laws with others, but held hearings to showcase himself. In the Clinton administration, the difference was obvious. Clinton, says Bill Turque, "took dispute and debate in stride, but Gore, once dug in, often became defensive and dismissive, flashing his `Gore glare' across the table at those who displeased him." One who displeased him was Ward Connerly, who recalls in his book Creating Equal a meeting that he and his anti-quota allies had with Gore and Clinton in 1998. Clinton was cordial, perhaps insincerely, while Gore "sat stiff as his stereotype, his mouth compressed into a disapproving slit, and his eyes boring holes into those of us whose ideas he found most distasteful."
Another Gore biographer, Bob Zelnick, relates that the hearings Gore held as a senator on global warming were known as "The Inquisition." Skeptical scientists, always outnumbered, were badgered by hostile questions from the chair. Said one participant, Arizona State University scientist Robert Balling, "What Gore could not disprove, he sought to discredit." Ted Koppel of ABC was astonished when Gore, as vice president, urged him to look into a supposed connection between the coal industry and scientists who took issue with Gore on the "greenhouse effect." Koppel found it odd that Gore, whom he considers "scientifically literate," should try to dispose of an opposing argument with strong-arm political tactics. When a Gore mentor coauthored an article that disputed Gore's claims, and then died shortly after, Gore launched an assault on the other coauthors, accusing them of duping and using a dying and addled old codger. (A lawsuit resulted, which the coauthors won.) "Part of Al Gore's makeup is a moralistic streak that makes it hard to have a diversity of viewpoints," says James Blumstein, one of Gore's old law professors.
Gore appears uneasy with the process of politics, and may not really like democracy. We often say that we don't care for presidents who are "political." We may get one who isn't. How will we like it then?
The racemonger. From time to time, Bill Clinton has done his sly best to disturb race relations, with talk of imagined church-burnings and
comments such as, "I don't know why some people think it's a good idea to resegregate our universities"—a reference to equality advocates like Ward Connerly. The reason for this is quite simple: Clinton wants non-whites to think they are menaced by right-wing white racists and therefore need him (and Al Gore) to protect them. But where Clinton is sly, and may not believe it, Gore is outspoken, and does. In the past several years, Gore has made a number of frightening statements, guaranteed to assure that Americans will view one another with heightened suspicion and that the happy day of color-blindness will not arrive too soon. He is at home with the kind of talk that compares conservatives to Klan members, and quota
opponents to James Earl Ray. He has suggested that foes of preferences were indifferent to the hideous dragging death of a black man in Texas two years ago. And he repeatedly asserts that "color-blind" is, in fact, a code word for "racist," behind which lurk the worst bigots.
Not surprisingly, Gore was the point man in the administration's battle for quotas, touring the country to slander his opponents. Ward Connerly met him again in Washington State two years ago, where Connerly was urging an anti-preferences initiative (which won). Gore once more put his opponents in pointy white hoods. He "was very much the figure I remembered from our White House meeting . . . hard-edged and humorless, a hatchet-faced true-believer. He railed against us as if we were church-burners," writes Connerly. Ranted Gore, "The winds of hate are blowing in Washington"; but any hate in the air was coming largely from himself.
Clinton's failures on race have been largely ones of omission. A southern liberal with an empathetic persona, he was perfectly poised to talk the civil-rights establishment out of the identity politics it had embraced and to lead the whole country to a post-racial era, with "affirmative action" based on outreach and training. Instead, he clung to divisive issues like quotas, mainly to shore up the base of his party, with a little paranoia-rousing as a bonus. With a President Gore, there would be nothing subtle at all; his approach would be nakedly and unrelentingly divisive. The likely result of a Gore regime would be to set race relations back, with blacks angry at whites for trying (as Gore claims) to suppress them, and whites livid at Gore for calling them racists.
A single, nasty dimension. Bill Clinton features two different personas. On normal occasions, he exudes bonhomie; when he is threatened, he bares an underside of attack, smear, and slander. Usually, this underside is managed by staff or comes out only in flashes. "You know what they say about her in Richmond," Clinton gallantly said about Kathleen Willey. This remark and similar things—the petulant spite of the post-dress non-confession—have given us a glimpse of the prince Clinton is. With Gore, however, there are no different aspects. He cannot inspire—he doesn't know how to—and he cannot use wit to disable a rival. His one campaign tactic is to scare people about others' motives; and his one public mode is attack. Throughout his career, he has used the most extreme forms of expression: calling those who differ with him on race-related questions bigots or sympathizers with murderers; those who differ with him on foreign policy quislings or traitors; those who differ with him on social policy willing killers of the poor. To this, his stiff public guise has acted as decoy. "His rhetoric is like Bob Dornan's, but nobody notices," Tucker Carlson has quoted someone who has.
Another person who has noticed is Michael Barone, ranking political expert on everything. Gore enjoys "sinking his political fangs into the flesh of the other side and ripping it," he says. And one who can certainly vouch for this is Connerly, who has the following memory of the White House meeting between quota opponents and Clinton-Gore. As they filed out, Clinton shook their hands warmly. Gore, by contrast, crushed Connerly's hand in his own so hard that Connerly, a beefy six-footer, almost cried out in pain. With Clinton, one had at least bogus civility. Bad trade.
Lies, lies, always. And then, of course, there are lies. Franklin
Roosevelt and John Kennedy had their faults, but when they said things like, "The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor," or, "The Soviets have placed missiles ninety miles from Florida," one could be reasonably certain that these things had happened. With Gore, one could never be sure. He could mean that the Japanese had bombed Cuba or that the Cubans had invaded Hawaii. Or he could mean that nothing at all had happened. Gore lies more than other presidents did; more even than Clinton. He certainly lies more oddly than anyone else in public life. Clinton lied when attacked, Gore lies for no reason; Clinton lied to cover up embarrassing incidents, Gore lies when he has done nothing shameful; Clinton lied when big things were at issue, Gore lies to no purpose at all. Clinton's lies were ingenious, leaving room for maneuver: It depends on what "is" means; sex is not sex, in some parts of the Bible; the governor did not rape Mrs. Broaddrick, when it is obvious that the governor was the state attorney general at the time and Mrs. Broaddrick was known by another name. Gore is incapable of this kind of finesse. Clinton lies when he thinks no one can catch him: How was he to know about Monica's garment? Gore lies when the damning proof is self-evident: when the pro-life votes are a matter of record; when he is on tape urging the joys of tobacco, years after his sister died. Weirdly, Gore lies when the truth will not hurt him, and where any advantage is outweighed by the flap that occurs when he is found out. There is nothing shameful in changing one's mind on big issues like abortion. There was nothing shameful about Gore's Vietnam war service—he spent five months overseas as a military journalist—but he implied that he had spent years in the infantry. There was nothing wrong with his work as a journalist in Nashville—he wrote an exposé that got several people indicted—but he claimed that he had sent many people to jail. The embellishments proceed ever onward and upward. He was a war hero. He was a heroic and crusading journalist. He was a romantic hero, the model for Love Story. He wrote speeches in 1968 for Hubert Humphrey. He invented the Internet. He
"found" Love Canal.
All presidents lie, at some time, for some purpose, but when one of them crosses the line into chronic mendacity, we are in new and dangerous territory. In recent years, we have had three such presidents—Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton—and each convulsed the political system. Two faced impeachment proceedings, and two were forced into early retirement. A strained relation to the reality principle is a positive marker for a turbulent tenure.
CLEARLY THE WRONG MAN
Gore, of course, does have his assets, and everyone knows what they are. He is a ferocious hard worker, with high intelligence and ample experience. No one denies that he has one kind of intelligence—the kind that allows a person to master an issue—but whether this is the kind that makes a good president is a question that hasn't been asked often enough. We have an idea of what makes a good leader, and the qualities seem to be these: balance, proportion, judgment, the flexibility to respond to a new kind of crisis, the ability to lead one's own party and still rise above it, the ability to use or to lead other people, and a sense of the shape of the field. From everything we know, these traits do not describe Gore. Rather, he is rigid, dogmatic, partisan, lacking in proportion and balance, and hostile to give-and-take.
It is significant that the presidentially helpful traits have to do as
much with character as they do intelligence. They bring to mind the
famous remark of Justice Holmes about FDR: "a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament." This is the combination that seems to mark leaders of men. Politics is an art, not a science, and rests more on talent than brains. It tends to involve feel, rather than intellect: a feel for what is possible at each given moment (and how to expand the possible's limits); above all, a feeling for when and how to use pressure, and then when and how to let go.
Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt are possibly the only good presidents to be in the first rank of intellect, and they owed most of their success to their character. With second-class intellects and first-class temperaments, you tend to get good and great presidents. With first-rate intellects and lesser temperaments, you don't. In the former group are Washington, Jackson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Kennedy. In the latter are John Adams, Madison, Wilson, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton. With a first-class intellect and a second-class temperament, you get Hoover and Carter, who did not measure up to the crises they faced. With a first-class intellect and a quite bad temperament, you get Johnson and Nixon, who, for all of their gifts and achievements, left the national fabric in tatters.
Peggy Noonan, in her self-described screed against Hillary Clinton, has charted the sorrow and pity of the Clinton years: the lost promise, the vanished opportunities, the expense of talent and effort on mere political survival. If Clinton has been clever enough not to derail the economy, and so has left people pleased with their material circumstances, he is also leaving behind a surliness about public life, a residue of fatigue and bad feeling. We are richer as stockholders, but poorer as citizens, an odd and an ironic legacy for a man who saw himself as the heir to FDR and Kennedy. Gore's personal failings are different from Clinton's—there is less lust, more hypocrisy, more fanaticism, more ill-disguised meanness—but they are more important, and more threatening, to the country's well-being. In Albert Gore Jr., we would get, in one, neat, earth-toned package, the pettiness of Adams and Carter, the inflexibility of Wilson and Hoover, the grandiosity of Wilson and Johnson, the slash-and-burn tactics of Nixon, and the veracity of Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton. Thus could we look back on the days of William J. Clinton and sigh.
Noemie Emery writes frequently for the Weekly Standard and the National Review. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
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