I believe Tipper and Al are not saying goodbye. They're just pretending? :)At least they seem to be having fun!
CAMPAIGN 2004
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002782
The Long Goodbye
Al Gore retires from politics--just like Nixon in 1962?
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Tuesday, December 17, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
As I watched Al Gore tell Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" that he wasn't going to run for president in 2004, my thoughts went back 40 years and one month to another vice president telling the press, in angry tones, that his days of running for office were over. That vice president concluded by saying, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen"--not the word you'd use to address reporters today--"this is my last press conference."
There are a lot of similarities between Nixon's position after the 1962 election and Mr. Gore's after the election of 2002. Both were former vice presidents whose presidents had high job ratings from the public; both ran to succeed them and only narrowly lost, and by a margin that some questioned. Both had the galling experience of watching the new presidents, men they looked down on as less qualified, win high job ratings at a time of national peril. Both fared poorly in the off-year campaign--Nixon lost his race for governor of California, and Mr. Gore's speeches calling on listeners to remember how awful they felt when they heard about the Supreme Court's decision did not help the likes of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Maryland.
After the election both former vice presidents made bitter complaints about the press. Richard Nixon, used to favorable coverage in the Los Angeles Times, lashed out at the Times and added--it reads oddly considering today's conservatives' complaints about most television coverage--"and I can only say thank God for television and radio keeping the newspapers a little more honest." Al Gore, used to reliably anti-Republican if not reliably pro-Democratic coverage in the mainstream press, complained about a "fifth column" taking instructions from "inside the building" of the Republican National Committee made up of the Fox News Channel, the Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh.
But the greatest similarity between Al Gore and Richard Nixon is that they were both not natural politicians. Nixon as a boy may have heard trains in the night and dreamt of success in the wider world. Mr. Gore as a boy was used to the company of senators and, he once told me, used to roll a bowling ball down the marble halls of the Russell Senate Office Building. But it is not clear that either man would have done what for most people is the unnatural thing of running for office but for the intervention of older men who gave them offers they could not refuse to run for Congress.
The 33-year-old Richard Nixon was approached by a group of Republican leaders and businessmen in the fall of 1945 to run in the 12th District of California against a 10-year Democratic incumbent in a year which they sensed, correctly, would be good for a Republican. For Nixon it sure looked like a better bet than returning to a $2,000-a-year law practice in Whittier. Mr. Gore had been groomed for politics all his life by his parents. But the nudge came to the 28-year-old Gore when Rep. Joe Evins of the Fourth District of Tennessee, his father's old House seat, gave him a heads-up on his decision to retire in 1976. Mr. Gore knew that if he could win the primary, he would have a safe seat, which surely looked more attractive than writing crime stories for the Nashville Tennessean, or dabbling in divinity school.
Nixon and Mr. Gore prospered in politics through intelligence, hard work and happy accidents. Both ran for the Senate on the retirement of senators of the other party who looked half-favorably on their candidacies--Sheridan Downey in California in 1950, Howard Baker in 1984. But both lacked the traits that most people who propel themselves into politics have in abundance.
"What do you hear?" Tip O'Neill would ask anyone he ran across. Nixon and Mr. Gore were not political schmoozers, eager to pick up the phone or chat in crowded hallways; they preferred to read and write in their own private space, Nixon writing out drafts on his yellow legal pads, Mr. Gore reading books on ecology and typing out "Earth in the Balance."
Both had a penchant for negative attacks on opponents that went far beyond standard political practice and that was infuriating to opponents and annoying to supporters. Nixon, in his early career, had the habit of saying that of course he wasn't accusing Opponent X of being a Communist, but--a smarmy way of suggesting he was just as bad. Mr. Gore had the habit of taking plausible arguments and exaggerating them to the point of unbelievability--he actually was interested early in the Internet, but he didn't invent it. Natural politicians have an instinct that protects them from such self-defeating tactics. Mr. Gore, like Nixon, lacked that instinct.
Finally, there was always some question about what they really stood for. Both took a stance between extremes in their parties--Nixon between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, Mr. Gore between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives (their numbers once included Trent Lott's boss William Colmer). But where exactly were they? In the 1950s and the 1960s we had various New Nixons, and in the 2000 campaign cycle we had three or four iterations of Al Gore--New Democrat, the alpha male, people versus the powerful. For that matter, neither man had a real home. After his vice presidency, Nixon lived in Beverly Hills, Manhattan (underneath Nelson Rockefeller!), Key Biscayne, San Clemente, Manhattan again (in Judge Learned Hand's old townhouse) and Saddle River, New Jersey; after his vice presidency, Mr. Gore has lived in his wife's mother's house in Arlington, taught in universities in New York and Murfreesboro, Tenn., and has recently moved into a house in Nashville's posh Belle Meade.
The ways in which both men were propelled to positions that enabled them to run for national office at age 39--Nixon for vice president in 1952, Mr. Gore for president in 1987--are examples of market failure in the political marketplace. But markets tend over time to be self-correcting, and the marketplace sent signals to the former vice presidents that they did not ignore. The one political reason Mr. Gore gave to Lesley Stahl for his decision not to run was the shrewd observation that "a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would in some measure distract us from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about." Nothing in politics is free; there is just some question about when you have to pay the price.
Mr. Gore concluded by saying, "I will probably never have another opportunity to run for president." In 1962, Richard Nixon didn't seem likely to have another opportunity. His chance came only after his party was badly beaten in 1964 and the country came to be in dreadful shape in 1967 and 1968. Nixon had worked hard for Republican candidates in the interim and did some serious thinking on public policy (he called for an opening to China in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1967); and so he was well positioned to run when his party had not developed many attractive alternatives. Democrats certainly hope their party will not be shellacked in 2004 and all of us hope the country will not be in dreadful shape in 2007 and 2008. But if those things happen, Al Gore could emerge as a serious candidate again. In that case, we can only hope that Mr. Gore's inaptitude for politics will not produce the results that Nixon's did. But for the time being, let's not kick him around any more.
Mr. Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and co-author of "The American Political Almanac." |
