The Untested v the Uninspired

Arriving back in Washington after a trip abroad last week, I looked up at one of the airport shuttle buses to see a face from the past that has returned to haunt the nation once more. There, among a crowd of tired commuters, was Al Gore. In a blazer and open-necked shirt, the weekend uniform of the former US vice-president seemed invisible to the passengers around him. Hemmed in near the bus’s automatic doors, he was fingering the internet pager that was his ever-present companion on his belt in the US election 2000 campaign – on which an aide sent him the now-famous election night message: “Never surrender. It’s not over yet”, launching a month of recounts in Florida. It must surely prey on his mind that had it not been for a few hundred confused pensioners and a fistful of hanging chads, he would now be flying across the country on Air Force One instead of having to compete for overhead baggage room on scheduled flights. Now Gore is back in Washington to decide whether to seek vengeance in a 2004 rematch – two years is not a long time in presidential politics. The other Democratic challengers, sensing that President Bush may be vulnerable after all, are already buzzing around Iowa and New Hampshire, the key first states in the primaries, setting up offices and political networks. The race will get under way the moment results are in for this November’s congressional elections. Gore is already dabbling in electoral foreplay. He has shaved off the beard that helped mask the bitterness of defeat for more than a year and is talking to his former donors. Last week he published a lengthy attack on President Bush in the New York Times. Once our shuttle-bus had stopped, I struggled to catch up with him in a vain attempt to gauge his intentions, but he vanished into the throng. In any case, he would undoubtedly have told me no more than he has told everyone else – that he will make up his mind over whether to run or not, by the end of the year. His indecision is not helping divisions within the Democratic party that his possible candidacy has opened. Among Democratic voters, Gore sweeps the field at the moment. In a poll last month 46% said they would back him, compared to 6% backing for his ex-running mate, Joe Lieberman, and 5% or less for all the other would-be nominees. The lead reflects his superior name recognition, which will naturally erode as other contenders had their turn at the national microphone during the primaries. It also points to a widespread feeling among the party ranks that Gore was robbed of winning election 2000 by the electoral college system, and the intervention of the supreme court’s conservative majority. After all, as the ex-vice-president’s supporters will never tire of pointing out, he won the nationwide popular vote by half a million votes. In the higher ranks of the Democratic party, however, there is deep resistance to Gore’s resurrection. With eight years of Democratic prosperity and the feeling that he was being fielded against an untested opponent, many believe election 2000 should easily have been won by Gore. Instead, the detractors argue, he threw the election away by the constant reshaping of his rather wooden personality – which alienated so many of his campaign workers. The row over Gore goes much deeper than his campaign tactics, to the unresolved question at the heart of the Democratic party’s identity. Namely, is it still the “champion of the downtrodden and neglected”, or the “vehicle of a classless society driven by the vibrant entrepreneurship of the new economy”? The dilemma was evident at a meeting last month of the centrist Democratic leadership council in New York, where the party’s fresh talent were supposed to show off their vote-winning abilities. Instead, the news reports focused on an argumentative postmortem of the Gore 2000 campaign, in which Lieberman picked up the pro-business banner by criticising his running mate for pursuing a too populist agenda. Others argued, that by his attempts to appear all things to all focus groups, Gore was watering down party positions on core issues until they were all but invisible. Ever aloof, he snubbed the New York gathering, pointedly choosing to meet his publisher in a restaurant around the corner instead. But weighed in soon after with a New York Times opinion piece arguing: “The suggestion from some in our party that we should no longer speak the truth, especially at a time like this, strikes me as bad politics and, worse, wrong in principle.” Faced with a dilemma, most of the serious Democratic contenders have taken the Bill Clinton approach, dashing for the middle ground whilst claiming to move the debate onwards and upwards. On the pro-union end of the spectrum, Dick Gephardt, the party leader in the House of Representatives, and John Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, have gone to great lengths to stress they are not anti-business, merely anti-corruption. Meanwhile, the North Carolina senator, John Edwards, went out of his way to show he had some fight in him, with a blistering attack on Bush cronyism. Edwards is seen within the party as an exciting new prospect, with relative youth, clean-cut looks, and a respectable reputation. However, he is a former personal injury lawyer, a profession held in even lower regard than journalism by most Americans, and remains relatively obscure. In politics, of course, money is often the cure for obscurity, and the North Carolina senator is already amassing an impressive campaign fund. So far he has raised over $4m (£2.6m) – significantly more than any other contender. Many of Edwards’s biggest financial backers funded Gore in election 2000, and the former vice-president must worry that the well may be dry by the time he makes up his mind whether to run. If he does run, Lieberman has promised to drop out of the race. The party’s congressional leaders Gephardt and Tom Daschle, are generally viewed as too partisan for voters necessary to win a presidential election. Barring the emergence of any new stars, that would leave Edwards and Gore, the new pitted against the old, or – depressingly for the Democrats – the untested against the uninspired.

——————
Articles are copyrighted

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Bishopsteignton Taxis RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Related posts:

1. Airport Transfer – by

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.