Every two hundred years, we tend to have a small problem. A glitch appears in the electoral system; a deadlock ensues; a loophole presents itself; an unscrupulous figure bursts through the breach, calmly creating incredible havoc. In 2000, this figure is Albert Gore Jr., trying to make up new rules after the election is over. In 1800, it was Aaron Burr.
Burr was the dark star of his generation, itself a cauldron of testy emotions and rivalries. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were locked in a father-son bond, with all the resultant attachments and tensions. Hamilton and James Madison were friends. Thomas Jefferson was also friends with Madison. Then Madison broke with Hamilton to become Jefferson’s closest ally. Jefferson and Hamilton became bitter political enemies. Jefferson and Madison broke with George Washington. John Adams and Hamilton detested each other. Adams and Jefferson were the closest of friends, the most bitter of enemies, and then friends again. Most at some times had harsh words to say about one another. But all had harsh words for Burr. He was regarded as brilliant, but self-involved and dangerously ambitious. Gore may or may not be brilliant, but he is certainly divisive and ruthless, and wholly obsessed with achieving his ends.
The problem in 2000 is an election so close as to defy belief, and a ballot confusion in some Florida precincts that served as the edge of the wedge for Gore’s ambition. The problem in 1800 was a disconnect between the electoral system as set up by the Framers, and the party system that grew up on its own. The Framers had planned for a world without parties, in which the president and the vice president were picked independently, each elector having two votes in the process, with the winner in the Electoral College filling the office of president, and the lesser office going to the runner-up. They were unprepared for what happened in Washington’s first term, when his government started to split into factions. The Federalists clustered around Hamilton, John Jay, Adams, and Washington; the Republicans (later Democrats) around Jefferson, Madison, and, in New York City, Aaron Burr.
For the first two elections, the old system lasted, as Washington and Adams, though never close, were of the same party. But in 1796, the first contested election, Adams defeated Jefferson, and the two top offices were split. In 1800, when Vice President Jefferson ran against President Adams, both men ran on de facto tickets, each trying to achieve a measure of balance, Adams running with Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and Jefferson, of course, with Burr. Each party’s electors were to vote for both ends of the ticket, holding one vote back from the vice president, to preserve the succession. With the Federalists, this worked splendidly. Adams received 65 electoral votes and Pinckney 64. With the Republicans, something slipped up; Burr and Jefferson ended with 73 ballots apiece. Jefferson waited for Burr to acknowledge the will of the voters and defer to him as president. To his growing shock and horror, Burr did not.
Burr’s refusal to defer to Jefferson as the president-designate was perfectly legal, but it brought on a season of maximum danger. There were threats to call a new constitutional convention, threats by Federalists to install Jefferson’s enemy chief justice John Marshall as an interim president; threats by Jefferson that should this last event happen, the Virginia militia would march on the capital. Five days and nights brought no resolution; the break possibly coming in a surprise letter from Hamilton to his friend James A. Bayard of Delaware, urging a vote for his old rival Jefferson, while calling Burr “a profligate, a voluptuary . . . bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country . . . artful and intriguing to an inconceivable degree.” When Jefferson let it be known to the moderate Federalists that he would neither dismantle the navy nor subvert the public credit, Bayard cast a blank ballot, and the crisis was over. Though, as Bayard later said, “by deceiving one man (a great blockhead), and tempting two,” Burr could have made himself the president of the United States.
Burr’s career after the crisis was even stranger than his conduct during it had been. As vice president under Jefferson, he continued to plot with the radical Federalists, joining them in a scheme two years later to lead New York and the New England states out of the Union, with himself serving as president. This was quashed — once again — by more pleas from Hamilton, and it was things that he said and wrote in the course of this crisis that led to the duel in which Burr shot and killed Hamilton in July 1804. Returning to Washington under indictment for murder, Burr continued to preside over the Senate, though a mortified Jefferson, easing him off of his ticket, was plotting his political demise. In March 1805, Burr gave a stirring farewell speech to the Senate, calling that body an “exalted refuge” from corruption and “phrensy,” and a “sanctuary, a citadel, of law.” By this time, Burr had been plotting for seven months to once more dismember the country, this time along the spine of the Allegheny mountains, offering to the French and British his assistance in cutting off the western sections of the country from the East. It was in the course of this scheme to “liberate” the west (and then invade Mexico), that Burr was arrested and brought to trial, in 1807, near the end of Jefferson’s second term. Largely to annoy Jefferson, John Marshall acquitted him on a technicality, and Burr fled to Europe, where he spent the next five years peddling plots, to no takers. He returned to America in 1812, in what passed for obscurity, married a rich widow, Eliza Jumel, rumored to have once been a madam, and proceeded to run through her money. She divorced him, for adultery, sometime before his death at 80. Meanwhile, the Twelfth Amendment, mandating the distinct election of the president and of the vice president, had been ratified on June 15, 1804.
Gore’s life is not yet this picaresque. But there are points of contact. Like Burr, he is a divinity school dropout with a strong sense of moral superiority. Both men share grandiose views of their own historical destiny. Burr saw himself as Alexander or Caesar. Raised to be a great leader, Gore “believes he is a historical figure,” Leon Wieseltier told journalist Peter Boyer. “He really does believe that he was born to lead.”
Both breach the limits of rational conduct. Burr was understood by his contemporaries to be an unstable and reckless man. Gore is seen as compulsively mendacious. Politicians lie, but few do so as audaciously and with such self-satisfaction as Gore. He never voted for any pro-life positions, he bragged (except that he did). He fought Big Tobacco from the hour of his sister’s death in 1984 (except when he didn’t). He didn’t know it was a fund-raiser. He was out of the room when fund-raising was mentioned. He was a farmer. He was a home builder. He was a combat veteran. He was a romantic hero. He was a crime-busting, crusading journalist, who sent many people to prison (except that he didn’t). His managers in his first presidential campaign were so worried by this compulsion that they sent him a memo, to which he did not pay attention, suggesting he establish more touch with reality: “The main point is to be careful not to overstate your role.”
David Maraniss, author of a Gore biography, reported that Richard Ben Cramer, in his mammoth multibiography of the men who ran for president in the 1988 cycle, decided in the end to leave Gore out of a book that ran on for more than a thousand pages. Cramer had asked Gore how he decided to run. “He said there were thousands of people — that was the honest-to-God number he used, thousands — writing to him telling him he ought to be president. . . . I sensed that probably didn’t happen. . . . So I thought to myself, life’s too short to talk to this guy any more. It wasn’t the fact that he wasn’t telling the truth, it was the pallid bankruptcy of the lies, all in the service of a picture of himself that wasn’t even interesting. He wasn’t even an interesting liar. That was the kiss of death for me.”
Like his fantasy quotient, Gore’s aggression levels are well above average. Politicians attack, but few are uniquely attackers, or attack so readily. When pressed, Gore’s first resort is to class and race warfare. His headquarters this year was nicknamed the “slaughterhouse,” his researchers were dubbed “killers.” The carnivorous metaphors come almost unbidden. In a column about Gore’s campaign “brutality,” Jacob Weisberg describes Gore “ripping into (an opponent’s) flesh like a crazed weasel.” Gore likes “sinking his political fangs into the flesh of the other side and ripping it,” says Michael Barone.
The tension and unpleasantness of the past days in Florida — the ugliness of it all — is thus a tribute to Gore. It was almost comical when Democrats began complaining on November 22 that Republicans had intimidated the canvassing board of Dade County. Yes, there were angry Republicans in suits and ties, brandishing Sore Loserman posters. But this came after two weeks of provocation. In the hours following the election, Gore had unleashed an invasion of lawyers, with their stream of drummed-up complaints. He had countenanced the theater of mobs and protests, the frenzied attacks on public officials, the purposeful suppression of the votes of servicemen, the playing of the race card, and the whipping up of hatred against his opponents. All of these things have been Gore’s doing. Have a close race, a tie, and you have piles of kindling. Add a Gore or a Burr, and it bursts into flames.
For all his flamboyance, Burr did little harm to the country. With Gore, harm has already been done. Win or lose, he will have damaged himself and the country. The presidency George W. Bush may get may be weaker than usual, but the one Gore might get would be far weaker still.
“Our campaign continues,” a Gore aide exulted in the early morning of November 8, and by acting on this in the way they have acted, they have made certain, that should he prevail, the campaign against him will also go on, at full throttle, in every possible avenue, until the bitter ending of his term. On November 20, the Washington Post quoted congressmen in both parties saying that while Bush would be able to find allies in Congress, Gore would walk into a threshing machine: “Democrats are concerned about the growing intensity of Republican outrage over Gore’s tactics — and what that might mean.” Sowing the wind does mean reaping the whirlwind. Has Gore really understood what a presidency ground out in this manner would bring? The bond that unites Gore and Burr over two centuries is a willingness to massage, bend, and twist the law to achieve advantage, heedless of the cost to the country and its culture. Both seem to believe that the Constitution, in Burr’s notorious phrase, is a “miserable paper machine” when it does not serve their purpose. “All things are moral to great souls,” Burr once told a stunned Hamilton. Exactly. All things are moral, to Burr, and to Gore.
A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.
