Howard Fineman: Those Divided Democrats
One party, split on strategy, philosophy—and Al Gore
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Sept. 26 — Let’s call him a “USD”—an unnamed Senate Democrat. I was talking to him at a political reception the other night about Al Gore, whose incendiary attack on President Bush’s Iraq policy had just made headlines—and just made life even more complicated for Democrats on the Hill. Why did Gore do it? I asked.
THIS NORMALLY MILD and generous senator-who knows Gore well, and who used to consider him a friend-smirked. “He has a book coming out. It was just his way of hyping his book tour.”
Even by the cynical standards of Washington cocktail parties, that was nasty—and unfair. The wellsprings of Gore’s speech were more complex than that, involving not only his personal ambitions and resentments, but, I think, a principled disdain for Bush the Younger’s alpha-male approach to diplomacy.
But my USD was reflecting something important about politics as we enter the stretch of the midterm campaign. The Republican Party is pretty much of a piece, fairly unified for now under a “war commander” president and run from the top down by Bush and his COO for politics, Karl Rove. The Democrats, by contrast, are two parties, divided on strategy, philosophy and outlook—and on whether to give their former standard-bearer another chance.
One Democratic Party is based inside the Beltway and in the moneyed salons of New York City. It is generally either hawkish or acquiescent on Iraq, eager to get the debate on Saddam Hussein over with, and afraid of being labeled “liberal” by the relentless spin doctors of the right. And even before his speech, this Beltway/Broadway clan had no further use for Gore, whom they know (or used to know) all too intimately and whom they now regard as an annoying and ungracious bore who should have the decency to get lost.
The other Democratic Party is based in places such as San Francisco, where the former vice president spoke; in academic and “brainworker” centers from coast to coast (Seattle, Cambridge, Ann Arbor); and in the old haunts of what’s left of union-dominated, blue-collar America. In these places, there is deep suspicion of Bush’s Iraq policy, fed by a traditional guns-versus-butter view of the issues. And among this rank and file—the one that votes in primaries, by the way—Gore remains a hero, or at least a celebrity victim.
Making a virtue of a necessity, Gore has decided to cast his lot with the second party. His speech in San Francisco reveals how he will run, if he does (and it’s still not certain he will). This political changeling, forever in “rewrite,” now wants to be thought of an outsider, eschewing the mundane Beltway-based mechanics of politics for a series of I’m-mad-as-hell town pronouncements. As it happens, that’s largely the way Gore ran the last two months of the 2000 campaign and, those who worked with him on it say, that’s what he liked. “He enjoyed that and felt liberated,” one former staffer told me.
For those who have followed Gore’s career, it’s an amusing and, in a way, inspiring sight: the aging princeling of the Beltway—groomed from childhood by his senator father, educated at the right schools, heir to his dad’s Tennessee political patrimony, House and Senate veteran, veep for eight years—gearing up to run as the Merle Haggard of the Hustings. What is more, Gore seems intent on running to the left in 2004, though he has spent the previous three decades carefully building a record as a hawkish centrist who went to Vietnam, who backed Pershing missiles in 1982 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and who shamed President Clinton into committing American troops in Bosnia.
It’s hard to overstate the Beltway/Broadway party’s loathing for Gore. Professional staffers who worked for him thought he was insufficiently thankful after 2000. Stories of his failure to call or write them are legion. They now circulate tales of his near-paranoid micromanagement on the campaign trail. Most say they would never work for him again, and it seems that few of them will contribute money to another Gore campaign, though many owe their lucrative legal or consulting careers to their Clinton-Gore years.
The list of those who were said to have advised the former vice president on his San Francisco speech was revealing. According to aide-de-camp Jano Cabrera, advisors included Leon Fuerth (Gore’s longtime foreign-policy advisor); New Republic publisher Marty Peretz; former FCC commissioner Reed Hundt (who Gore has known since prep school); Elaine Kamarck, another old friend; his wife, Tipper, and his daughters. Former secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was on the list, too, but aside from him the rest can be described as the heartiest of Gore diehards. Conspicuously absent were people such as former secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.
For a former veep it wasn’t a very showy list, but maybe that was the point.
So will he run? My USD wasn’t sure. “It’s asking an awful lot of a guy NOT to run after losing the way he did in 2000,” he said with what sounded almost like sympathy. “But if he does run, he wouldn’t be able to survive a second-place finish in any primary. That’s tough. And Gore is very smart. So maybe he’ll decide it’s too risky, potentially too painful. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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