The Comeback Kid
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As Democrats worry about their 2008 chances, out of the wilderness comes a stranger to save them. Wait a minute. That’s no stranger. that’s . . . Al Gore!?!
By John Heilemann
New York Magazine
05/21/06
nymetro.com
<<...Gore insists that An Inconvenient Truth isn’t meant to be a precursor to a presidential run. “This is a different kind of campaign,” he informs me flatly. “Politics is behind me.”
Yet Gore’s statements about 2008 are as precise and elusive as a Basho haiku: Saying that politics is behind him doesn’t foreclose the possibility that it might also be in front of him. What’s clear is that Gore would love to be president, but the thought of the whole awful business of getting there makes him nearly nauseous. Gore’s awareness of this conundrum is keen and wrenching. How he resolves it will determine not just the shape of the 2008 campaign but whether the New Gore is the real deal or the Old Gore in disguise.
Eleven years ago, I wrote a story about Gore in which I remarked that “what any sensible person does in anticipation of a sustained piece of oratory by Al Gore” is “order another cup of coffee—black.” So I can’t help but laugh when Gore arrives for the first of our conversations carrying a dainty white cup, walks silently over, waiterlike, and intones, “I understand, sir, you take it black.”
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in April, and Gore and I are in a conference room at DreamWorks (whose corporate parent, Paramount, is distributing An Inconvenient Truth) high above Madison Avenue. Gore, 58, is dressed in a dark-blue suit, a crisp white shirt, and cowboy boots. His hair is grayer, but not much thinner, than it was a few years ago. Since 2000, Gore has taken constant ribbing about his weight, to the point that he’s apparently become self-conscious about it. A friend of mine describes attending a party at an apartment in the city and finding Gore in the hallway, facing the wall, furtively wolfing down an ice-cream sundae.
Gore explains that his “life post-politics” consists of five major strands. There’s teaching: He lectures at Middle Tennessee State University and Fisk University. There’s technology: He sits on the board of Apple and serves as a “senior adviser” to Google (a hopelessly vague connection that is rumored to have netted him millions of dollars by way of Google stock). There’s Current TV, his youth-tilted, user-driven cable network. There’s Generation Investment Management, an equity fund run by London moneyman David Blood (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management) and former Gore aide Peter Knight, who describes its philosophy as “trying to push the capital markets towards long-term thinking and sustainability.” And then there’s the crusade against global warming, which is clearly first among equals.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore traces his interest in climate change to his days as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he took a course taught by Roger Revelle, the first scientist to monitor carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In 1981, Gore held the first congressional hearing on the subject. But it wasn’t until the end of the decade, after his precocious but failed presidential-primary run and his son’s near-death in a car accident, that Gore immersed himself in global warming. “I took stock personally of what I was doing in all aspects of my life,” he tells me. “I decided this was the issue that I was going to focus on far more than any other.”
Gore started putting his slide show together. He sat down and wrote Earth in the Balance. And, according to his old friend Reed Hundt, the former FCC commissioner, he set his sights on making a documentary, “something along the lines of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos”—plans that were scuttled by a call from Bill Clinton in 1992.
After the smoke from 2000 cleared, Gore updated his slides—“Tipper said, ‘You should put those in computer-graphics form, Mr. Information Superhighway,’ ” Gore recalls—and started giving his talk in any forum that would invite him. One audience member who saw the presentation was Laurie David, the influential Hollywood activist and wife of comedian Larry David. David tells me she was floored: “It was just so clear that it had to be a movie,” she says.
After rounding up some producing partners and a director, Davis Guggenheim (Deadwood, 24), David flew to San Francisco to pitch Gore on the idea. “I was dubious,” Gore recalls, “that anyone would be willing to make a movie with so much science in it.”
An Inconvenient Truth does, in fact, contain a startling amount of science—and is all the better for it. But it also contains much familiar material drawn from Gore’s life. The story of his son’s accident. Of his sister’s death from cancer. Guggenheim reports that Gore was reluctant to use the personal stuff. “When he’s brought up those stories in the past,” Guggenheim notes, “he’s been punished for it.”
The inclusion of biographical material gives An Inconvenient Truth, at times, the feel of a campaign film. But when I mention this to Gore, he adamantly disagrees. “Audiences don’t see the movie as political,” he says. “Paramount did a number of focus-group screenings, and that was very clear.”
That may be true when it comes to the science: Gore’s presentation is lucid, empirical, and scarily persuasive. But when it comes to Gore himself, it’s impossible not to be struck by impressions with political implications. Two of those impressions come as no surprise: that Gore is a classic pedant or pedagogue, depending on your tastes (I know more about this than you do, so please listen closely), and that he has a messianic streak (The world is about to end unless you follow my lead). But overriding both is something less expected and more alluring: the image of Gore as passionate, funny, full of conviction, free of contrivance—utterly authentic.
Among Gore’s friends, there is nothing unexpected about it. “This is the true Al Gore,” says Elaine Kamarck, a senior Gore adviser in the White House...
...Speculation about Gore’s inclination to thwart Hillary has grown in lockstep with the mounting disquiet over her status as the Democratic front-runner. The disquiet, says Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry, “comes from two things. It’s not just the sense that we’ve been into that soap opera before and we don’t need to see the country polarized again in that unique way that the Clintons seem to polarize people. It’s also this new, edgier voice that’s emerging in the party, which says, ‘We have got to stand up for what we believe, and that means not standing in the mushy center.’ ”
What those who see Hillary as the Great Equivocator (or, if you prefer, the Great Triangulator) and those who see her as the Great Polarizer share in common are doubts about her electability. “We can’t afford to fool around anymore—we need to win the next election,” says Laurie David. “It’s not time to experiment with trying to put in office the first female president or with somebody people feel is such a polarizing figure.”
Hence the argument for Gore. To begin with, unlike all but a handful of Democrats, Gore, with his ties to the Netroots and his burgeoning personal wealth, could readily raise the requisite funds to take on Mrs. Clinton. Having loudly and steadfastly opposed the war, he could challenge her from the left. Yet on national security, he could simultaneously run to her right, given his long-held expertise about bombs and bullets and his advocacy of intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia; as a putative commander-in-chief, his credentials are beyond reproach (no small thing in an age of terror). Similarly, Gore’s anti-global-warming jihad would stand him in good stead with the greens and other liberals, while his long and demonstrated history as a moderate on countless other issues (from the deficit to “reinventing government”) would allow him to score with centrist Democrats who fear that Clinton is a once-and-future lefty.
Thus does the Gore 2008 bandwagon gather steam from coast to coast. “I’d quit everything to work for the guy if he’d run,” David says. “And I think the Hollywood community would do anything to support him.” Donnie Fowler, the San Francisco– based operative who was runner-up to Howard Dean in the race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, concurs: “Sure, I think he should run again. He’s speaking with no fear now about what he believes in, and that’s what the American people want from political leadership.”
The Washington Establishment, for its part, is more circumspect. Only one congressman—Jim Moran of Virginia—has called openly for Gore to run. And there are plenty of people inside the Beltway who doubt that Gore has overcome his shortcomings as a candidate. “He was god-awful in 1988, he was god-awful in 2000, and he’d be god-awful again in 2008,” says a Democratic think-tank maven. “This whole world-is-ending spiel is very dark and unattractive.”
But McCurry, among others, believes the party “would be receptive” to a Gore candidacy. “Rank-and-file Democrats, in a primary setting, are only going to have one thing on their minds: winning. If people watch Gore and think, By God, this guy’s got what it takes now, it’s perfectly possible that he could be the candidate of the party.”
How Gore might fare in a general election would depend, of course, on whom the GOP chooses as its nominee. But at least one senior Republican strategist for a top-tier presidential wannabe maintains that Gore would be far tougher to handle than Hillary. “Gore has liabilities of his own,” he says. “But there’s just no question that hers are much deeper than his.” (This strategist even goes so far as to suggest a perfect slogan for the former vice-president: “No more Clintons. No more Bushes. Gore 2008.”)
No surprise, then, that the prospect of Gore redux is causing queasiness in the Clinton ranks. For some time, the thinking there has been that only two potential candidates have the capacity to toss the chessboard in the air, altering Team Hillary’s carefully calibrated plans: Barack Obama and Gore. And it is Gore who would produce the biggest fits—not least because he would bring to the surface all the old internecine rivalries and interfamilial weirdness of the Clinton years.
“Think about Bill,” an old Clinton hand says, half-jokingly. “You can see him talking to Hillary one minute, then ducking into his study to take Gore’s call and advise him on how to beat her. He’s Clinton, you know—he just can’t help himself.”
Al Gore stares across the table. He’s ready for the question. He’s probably been waiting for it since he first laid eyes on me.
What Gore has said about 2008, repeatedly, is that he does not intend to run, that he does not expect to run, that he has no plans to run. All of which, as every politically sentient being knows, is thoroughly meaningless. What Gore has not said—the magic words—is that he will not run.
I tell him that all of his allies are telling me that everyone they know is telling them that he ought to run. He knows. I tell him about people in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, New York and Washington who say that the country needs him to run. He knows. So what does he say to those people?
“I don’t want to give them any false signal,” Gore replies. “I don’t want to be responsible for anyone feeling that I’m inching toward running again when I’m not. You won’t find a single person in Iowa, New Hampshire, or anywhere who has had the slightest signal that originated with me or anyone speaking for me.”
So let’s clear this up: Why don’t you say right now, unequivocally, that you will not run? Then no one will have the impression that you’re leaving the door ajar.
Gore puts his left elbow on the table, cups his cheek in his hand, and audibly exhales.
“It’s really more a function of my own internal shifting of gears, not an outward coyness. It’s just honest. I was in elected politics for 24 years. I ran four national campaigns. I was first elected to Congress in my twenties. I was around it for all my life before that. And when I say I’m not at a point where I’m willing to say, ‘Never, never, never again under any circumstances,’ I’m just not at the point where I want to say that.”
Coy is not what Gore is being. What Gore is being is smart. His rehabilitation has been propelled by his liberation—by the fact that, as Roy Neel puts it, “he’s not forced into various boxes that you subject yourself to when you’re a traditional politician running for office.” But Gore’s liberation isn’t simply about the words that he can utter; it’s about how those words are heard. He is liberated from the filters that people put on their ears when they’re listening to scheming candidates.
This second form of liberation is essential to the success of his global-warming efforts. Recently, Gore’s people announced the formation of a new nonprofit called the Alliance for Climate Protection. Funded initially by Gore, its mission is to promote public awareness about the climate crisis. The group will be scrupulously nonpartisan, with board members ranging from Carol Browner, Clinton’s head of the EPA, to Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41’s national-security adviser. Were Gore an out-front candidate like, say, Mark Warner, the group would seem tainted—indeed, it might never get off the ground.
Gore is also aware that the moment he becomes a candidate, the halo above his head would be removed with extreme prejudice. “Right now, everyone loves him because he’s not running,” notes Fowler. “But as soon as that changes, all the stored-up venom will be poured on top of him.”
Tony Coehlo agrees. “If there’s a need, he can be a candidate, but it’s not time yet, “ he says. “If he starts thinking that he’s running for president, he screws up what he’s got going, because then he starts to fudge and round his edges. His being free to say what he believes is the right thing, because it’s not how people have ever perceived him. If people start to know who he is, they’ll listen when he speaks about anything.”
The people are listening on a hot Sunday afternoon in West Palm Beach. Gore has returned to the scene of the crime to talk to a group of the Floridian Democratic faithful. The mayor of West Palm introduces Gore with a blend of awkwardness (“We wish you would have had, uh, a better result here”) and fury (“If Al Gore had been president, our sons wouldn’t have been in war!”). The song playing when Gore takes the stage is Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
Though Gore is a religious man, one doesn’t recall him quoting Scripture often in the past in his oratory. But today his talk is built around a biblical refrain: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Time and again he repeats the phrase to punctuate a litany of Bush abominations—all of them illustrating the central theme of willful blindness. The ignoring of the warnings before 9/11. Of the warnings before Katrina. Of the warnings about global warming.
This is a stump speech—or rather, half a stump speech. And a damn fine one at that. It’s certainly a more coherent and rousing condemnation of the Bush administration than I’ve heard from any other potential 2008 candidate.
The second half of the speech, of course, has yet to be written: the half that’s not about the GOP but about Al Gore. Yet its themes are not difficult to imagine. When Gore ran in 2000, he did so from a position of entitlement: the vice-presidency. But the story that he could tell in 2008 would be infinitely more compelling: how he suffered the harshest defeat imaginable and pulled himself back up. As Ron Klain observes, “Americans love a comeback. We’re a comeback-crazed country. And this would be a comeback beyond all comebacks.”
Could it happen? Certainly. In a way, it already has. In 1960, Richard Nixon was beaten by John F. Kennedy by the slenderest of margins (in another possibly stolen election). But eight years later, Nixon—benefiting mightily from the comparison with the 1964 GOP nominee, Barry Goldwater—sloughed off the rejection by the voters and his party to secure the White House.
For all the similarities between Gore’s trajectory and Nixon’s—including Gore’s having a Goldwater of his own in the person of John Kerry—the two men differ in a pivotal respect: Nixon loved politics, lived for it, in a way Gore never has. One night when we were talking, Gore candidly confessed, “I don’t think that my skills are necessarily best deployed as a candidate—I really don’t! I’m not being falsely self-critical. I think there is just an awful lot about politics that I don’t like, a lot of things that feel toxic to me.”
Gore’s ambivalence about politics is as genuine as anything about him. And, in the end, it might keep him out of the hunt in 2008—that and the appeal of the novel role that he’s carving out for himself in public life. The Democratic Party is in dire need of elder statesmen, not to mention truth-tellers, and Gore could provide a valuable service by filling both those voids. And the planet is certainly in need of saving, a cause to which his commitment is evident.
When I ask Gore whether that commitment—and his views about the imminence of environmental calamity unless the U.S. changes its policies—obligates him to seek the White House, he says, “I don’t dispute that a president can make a huge difference. So I feel what you’re saying there. But it’s not the end of the conversation, because what we need more than that is a change in the political conversation in America. In both parties. We need to breathe life back into American democracy. I think I’m making a contribution by speaking my heart as clearly and as boldly as I know how.”
He almost had me convinced with that, so well reasoned and apparently sincere was his disclamation. But then, a few days later, Gore replanted the seeds of doubt. At a talk in Atlanta, after yet another crowd beseeched him to run, he responded with a trusty comeback: “I am a recovering politician.” Then he added, mischievously, “But you always have to worry about a relapse.”...>> |
