AL, GORED

For a man who may soon be facing a federal investigation into his potentially illegal fund-raising activities, it was a bold tack to talk about how proud he was of anything related to last year’s campaign. On the other hand, if you’re an ambitious vice president whose chances of succeeding your boss are suddenly beginning to look a lot slimmer, what else do you do? If you’re Al Gore, your first move is to pretend that nothing has happened. Then you embark on a flurry of trips and public appearances designed to make your present job look busy and productive. Next, you schedule periodic interviews with the press to wax indignant about the need to stop the very kind of abuses you’re accused of committing. And, finally, you never, ever stop patronizing the public, if only because you realize that some people will always mistake self-righteousness for rectitude.

The script is unmistakably Clintonian, and Gore has followed it to the letter. The Thompson committee began hearing testimony about Gore’s role in various fundraising scandals — including his presence at the now-famous Buddhist temple in Los Angeles — when it reconvened in the first week of September. During just the first five days of that week, Gore appeared at no fewer than 11 public events outside of Washington, as well as various others within the city. He attended a Labor Day parade in Illinois, climbed a glacier and gave a speech in a national park in Montana, hosted a panel discussion on welfare at the White House, announced an initiative to help female entrepreneurs in New Hampshire, gave an address about global warming at Dartmouth Medical School, and read stories to at least two groups of schoolchildren. On Thursday, he and his wife arrived at the British embassy to express their grief at the death of Princess Diana. “The memory of the People’s Princess will endure throughout the world,” Gore wrote in the condolence book. According to news reports, Gore looked “somber.”

How has the damage control worked so far? Perfectly, according to a number of people around Gore, all of whom cite recent polls indicating that most Americans still consider Gore far more honest than Clinton. “When it’s all over,” says one adviser, “people won’t even remember this. They’re just going to remember that there was a big partisan hearing and that Gore raised money.”

The reasoning is as cynical as it is plausible: “Clinton has changed the rules. So much stuff has been thrown at him, and so little of it stuck that at some point people began to see all of it as just politics. You’d rather not have an independent counsel. But there was an independent counsel looking at Iran-Contra when Bush ran for president. Clinton had all sorts of things swirling around him when he ran for president. I could argue that if you don’t have an independent counsel after you, you probably can’t get elected.”

No one in the White House really wants an independent counsel, of course, and it’s hard to tell how much of the upbeat talk is spin. (Or self-delusion: “Al’s just got to remind the American people why they fell in love with him in the first place,” one former employee says mistily.) Gore himself seems convinced of his own invincibility. “I’ve been in a number of meetings with him recently,” says a White House staffer, “and to the extent he’s talked about this stuff, he talks about it in a joking way, like ‘It’s just politics. ‘ I honestly, honestly, do not think he’s rattled. I mean, he’s been in the Clinton White House for five years.” A Democratic consultant who has worked for Gore agrees: “He really isn’t worried about it. This all makes for interesting cocktail party chatter, but absent an indictment, the consequences at the end of the day are almost nil.”

Perhaps Gore isn’t rattled. But there are indications that others in the White House are. One of those indications is James Carville, the former Clinton campaign strategist who now works as one of the administration’s freelance firemen. Carville says that over the past few days he has been in frequent contact with “some of my friends in the White House,” as well as with aides in the vice president’s office. The result: You’ll be seeing Carville on television soon. He has, he says, “three or four requests” from talk-show producers on his desk right how. “And it’s only Wednesday. I’m going to have to get up off my sofa and get to work here,” he explains, sounding slightly frustrated. “It’s irritating to me because I was cruising along, dealing with a few things that come up with the president, and now I’ve got to go out and study this and get my talking points and start defending Gore.”

Carville has spent the last year viciously attacking independent counsel Kenneth Starr — “I think Whitewater was the most successful political dirty trick in the history of the world,” he volunteers without prompting — and he is generally regarded as someone who will say just about anything in defense of a partisan cause. But not in this case. Although he dismisses some of the criticism of Gore as “unfair and unjust,” even Carville does not pretend the Democrats are innocent in the fund-raising mess. “You can’t return three million dollars and claim nothing happened,” he says. “You don’t give back three million dollars for no reason. There were obvious — what’s the euphemism? — ‘errors of judgment.'”

No matter how many talk shows Carville appears on, it is Gore himself who ultimately will have to explain those errors and his own part in them. Is he capable of it? There are those who know him who claim that the private Al Gore is nothing like the mechanical version the rest of America sees on television, the robot who the last time he attempted to defend himself repeated the phrase “no controlling legal authority” so many times that the Washington Post mocked him on its front page the next morning. Gore may seem like “this cigar store Indian envirotechnocrat,” says Bill Curry, a former White House aide who is running for governor of Connecticut. But in real life, assures Curry, “he is almost the only politician in town with a sense of irony, certainly the only person in the White House. There’s a real guy trapped in the suit.”

Those who actually go to Gore’s speeches will have to take Curry’s word for it, since the “subtle, wry, funny person” he describes is nowhere in sight. Gore in public still exudes the same awkward phoniness that helped kill his run for president in 1988. Standing on the dais before a speech to the Software Publishers Association in Washington the other day, Gore did his best to seem cheery and relaxed. At one point, in response to nothing in particular, he attempted a chuckle. His stiffness precluded ordinary laughter, however, and Gore came off like a blind man listening to music, swaying back and forth rigidly with his arms at his side.

It got more painful from there. Gore’s stock opening joke — about how, because Clinton’s swearing-in was delayed during the first inauguration, he technically had been president for a moment — could have been moderately amusing. But Gore overplayed his part. The joke went on, and on, for the better part of five minutes, till the audience’s laughs were tinged with embarrassment. The rest of the speech meandered from cliche (“Will we build walls or will we build bridges?”) to banality (“We’ve got to take the steps to make sure all our citizens have the tools to keep innovating”) to outright boring technotalk. It didn’t take long for the reporters in the press section to begin shifting in their chairs; within minutes at least one of them had fallen dead asleep.

For Democrats, the problem with Gore’s inept public performances is not necessarily that they make him look stiff — “Voters aren’t electing the most coordinated person to be president,” Republican political consultant Doug McAuliffe points out — but that they raise the suspicion Gore has bad judgment. Why else would he have blathered on about “controlling legal authority”? And why else, grumbles a growing number of those who advise him, hasn’t Gore hired his own lawyer yet?

Talk of his inner tranquility notwithstanding, Al Gore’s in trouble if not legally, then certainly politically. A special prosecutor, even one who does not indict him, would at the very least squander a great deal of Gore’s time and energy, to say nothing of his reputation for being ethically pure. Ambitious Democrats smell Gore’s weakness. Despite Clinton’s efforts to secure an uncontested primary for his successor, Gore now faces potential challenges in 2000 from senators Bob Kerrey, Paul Wellstone, and John Kerry, as well as from outsiders like Jesse Jackson and former senator Bill Bradley. Rep. Dick Gephardt is already campaigning. The list certainly will grow, and every new entry means a smaller pool of money and campaign staff for Gore. An experienced private lawyer — his very own Bob Bennett — might successfully argue Gore’s case before the Justice Department, sparing him an extended investigation. In any case, a good lawyer could prove a useful flack and strategist, leaving Gore free to focus on 2000. Why hasn’t he hired one?

Perhaps Gore figures that the public-relations costs would be too high, that hiring an attorney would be seen as an admission of guilt. Or perhaps, like all people sincerely convinced of their own virtue, Gore simply cannot conceive of being in trouble. Maybe he just hopes the scrutiny will end soon.

James Carville certainly does. “I was enjoying my life,” he says wearily. ” But I like Gore and I think the flag is under siege, so I’ve got to go get my flak jacket, my weapon. Hopefully, this will all pass and I can get back to my sofa.” He doesn’t sound very hopeful.

Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.