Every few election years, some presidential candidate gets tagged as an intellectual. The evidence is usually thin. Adlai Stevenson claimed to write his own political addresses, and his speechwriters declined to contradict him. John F. Kennedy hired the diminutive Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to slip quotes from Suetonius into his speeches while the charismatic young president preoccupied himself with less scholarly labors, like banging his way through the White House stenographic pool. Jimmy Carter quoted Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan, who would seem to cancel each other out. Michael Dukakis once taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School. As I say: thin.
Now it’s Al Gore’s turn. This election takes place at a point in American history when the threshold for being considered an intellectual is lower than ever and, meanwhile, fewer people than ever want to be considered one — a situation well suited to the vice president’s emergence as a thinker. Jack Kennedy wowed the educated classes with Arthur’s Suetonius; nowadays you can floor them with a few references to parallel processing. Plus, Gore went to Harvard. And he really did write that book. And this summer he gave an interview to the New Yorker that was widely noted for his flights of intellection.
Last week Gore topped himself, with the release of an interview he gave not long ago to the Internet business magazine Red Herring. The interview is worth spending some time on, to discover how the vice president uses language, and how he thinks. It wasn’t one of those adversarial, hot-seat Q & A’s, journalistically speaking. In the transcript the questioners, Peter D. Henig and Jason Pontin, come off less like Gore’s adversaries than like co-dependents. “This is good, this is good. Keep going,” they say at one point. “We love your metaphors,” they say at another.
Their enthusiasm is unusual, but not as unusual as those metaphors. The vice president loves metaphors — or, more accurately, he loves the word “metaphor.” He uses it all the time. Like many of our politicians with intellectual aspirations (Newt Gingrich comes to mind), Gore relies heavily on a few ambiguous catchphrases: “parameters,” for example, and “model,” as both verb and noun. If these words were suddenly banned from the language — if you said, “Al, I’m sorry, but you can’t say ‘model’ anymore” — his whole edifice of baloney would probably collapse. “Process” (also as noun and verb) is another favorite. The vice president spends much of the interview comparing the process of democratic decision-making to microprocessors. Computer processing, in his view, is an illuminating metaphor for democracy.
“Our democratic system,” he says, “makes it possible for the average citizen to participate in the decision-making of this nation by processing the decision-making directly relevant to him or her in an individual congressional district or state. Then, in the process of biennial or quadrennial elections, our process harvests the sum total of those decisions . . . ”
At first this seems kind of a neat metaphor, comparing the way a computer uses information to the way people make up their minds and express their opinions in a democracy. But then you get to the payoff, the conclusion. “Now, the capacity for each individual [he continues] to process a lot more information and take much more responsibility for shaping the future is greatly enhanced by the incredible increase in information and processing power available.”
Suddenly the vice president’s metaphor (computer processing) isn’t a metaphor anymore, but is actually acting upon the thing (democratic decision-making) that it used to be a metaphor for. Some metaphor — it’s a megametaphor! But there are other problems here. If you’re going to use the word process, or some variant of it, five times in three sentences, you ought to be clear about its definition. Does it mean comprehend? Act upon? Think about? Transform? And even if we pretend we know what the word means, I don’t think this last sentence says what it sounds like it’s saying. To the extent that it means anything at all — and I’m open to the argument that it doesn’t — it simply says that the capacity to process more information is greatly increased by the increased capacity to process information.
In the world most of us live in, this is called a tautology. The tautology is a specialty of the vice president’s, as it often is of people who strain to make the simple and straightforward seem as complicated as possible. Here, for example, he contrasts democracy with other forms of government: “In a communist system, or a monarchy, or some other system that relies ultimately on a single decision maker, the role of government is to make all of the decisions.” A less metaphorically minded person could put it more simply: “In a system where the government makes all the decisions, it’s the role of government to make all the decisions.” Heavy.
In a democracy, by contrast, where the people, collectively or individually, make all the decisions, people will make all the decisions collectively or individually. If you see what he’s driving at. The vice president has spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of government in the new technological era. Thinking, thinking, thinking. This is the subject of the interview, in fact. But where earlier politician-intellectuals might have sought inspiration in Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau — what the hell, even in Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — the vice president seems to have immersed himself in the work of business-management gurus like John Naisbitt and Stephen Covey.
“You could look at the transformation in the role of government as being similar to what has happened in the management of companies over the last twenty years,” he says. (We’re on to a new metaphor, by the way: government as corporation, which makes the president the CEO.) A good CEO is someone who, like the vice president, sounds like he has memorized entire chapters of Megatrends. “The new role of the CEO is first of all to establish a vision,” he continues. “Second . . . to establish goals which, if attained, would further the vision. Third, it is the establishment of a set of values and the maintenance of constant awareness of those values, so that decisions made by any individual . . . will be made according to the same set of values.”
We may be tangled up in another tautology here — the role of the CEO is to establish a set of values so that a set of values will be established — but it’s hard to tell for sure. Visions, goals, values: These are airy words, sent aloft at a very high level of abstraction. What’s interesting is that after all this talk from the vice president, a few thousand words of it at least, we still don’t really know how it is that government is like a corporation or a microprocessor, or how a president is like a CEO, or indeed what the role of government is in this new era, which is ostensibly the point of the discussion. But this isn’t all that surprising: Intellectuals of the vice president’s kind seldom actually arrive at conclusions that are expressible in concrete terms. That’s how we know they’re so smart.
Once again Newt Gingrich comes to mind. Like Gingrich, Al Gore spawns concepts so large that words can’t contain them; like Gingrich, who preferred to give speeches with a blackboard close at hand, Gore illustrates his points by doodling. Red Herring helpfully reproduces several of the sketches he made during the interview. They are highly schematic. One shows a bagel shape, explainable as follows:
“The CEO [Gore says] of an organization stands at the center of an organization, yet an organization encounters change at the edge. In a two-dimensional model, if you have an organization moving along a plane and encountering change, the point of contact with change is typically at the edge, and in that metaphor [Oh no — not another one!] the CEO would be equidistant from all types of change. Now if, on the other hand, this information processing sector has been pre-empowered with the organization’s vision . . . ”
The vice president is not merely a scribbler, he is a Talker. I capitalize the word on purpose, for the Talker is a type — readily familiar to anyone unlucky enough at some point in his life to have been stuck after midnight in a college dorm room. The beer has run out and the liquor store has closed, somebody spilled the bong water and the room is beginning to take on that extremely lived-in odor, and everybody should go home and everybody wants to go home except . . . the one guy . . . sitting on the bed . . . talking. He has ambitions to be a grad student when he grows up, and he’s been talking for most of the night, and he sounds cold sober. “Let me take the metaphor to a slightly higher level,” he says. “Look at how this transformation played out in history in relationship to new iterations of commonly available technology . . . ”
Gore’s Red Herring interview, like much of his New Yorker interview, is gibberish, but gibberish of a particular kind — it is meaningless in a meaningful way. One interesting thing about his diagrams is that people appear in them, when they appear at all, as featureless little circles, or indistinguishable groups of specks. His love for abstraction is surely related to the bloodless ease with which he exploits personal unpleasantness to score political points. His little fib last month about his mother-in-law’s arthritis medicine is the least gruesome example in a long train, stretching back to his notorious invocation in speeches of his sister’s death and his son’s near-death. For a man besotted by abstraction, persons are not so much individuals as instances of larger processes — most useful as a means to illustrate the high-flying concepts he finds truly compelling. This is the true meaning of the vice president’s increasingly frequent intellectual rambles. He has recast the old radical rallying cry for a new millennium. In Al Gore’s America, the personal is the metaphorical.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
