Davenport, Iowa
Three days before he came here, Vice President Al Gore appeared at a memorial service for slain students in Littleton, Colorado, where he got a big surprise and a political dividend. The surprise was the size of the crowd in the parking lot of a shopping mall. Expected to be as small as 10,000 people, it grew to a mammoth audience of 70,000. Before the service, Gore and his wife Tipper embraced the parents of all the shooting victims and some of the wounded students. Gore says one parent whispered in his ear, “You’ve got to tell me these children didn’t die in vain. We have to make changes. Promise me we will. Promise.” Gore responded, “I promise.” After his speech, Gore led a silent march through the crowd to a wreath-laying ceremony a half-mile away. Like the funeral procession of Princess Diana, Gore and the bereaved parents and kids had flowers strewn in their path. “It was,” says a Gore aide, “the most incredible thing I’ve ever been to.”
The political dividend is that Gore, perhaps more than any politician in the country, now seems to understand the significance of Littleton. “The magnitude of that event is overwhelming,” he told a group of students and teachers in Davenport last week. And though he talks up gun control, Gore insists the fallout from Littleton cannot be addressed solely by a legislative agenda or improvements in school safety. It is a defining cultural event, he believes, and its impact will linger. Gore also characterizes Littleton in quasi-religious terms. The boys who killed 12 students and a teacher “simply made a choice in favor of evil over good,” he told Democratic supporters here. “We have a mandate to choose good over evil. They did not.”
Gore’s speech at the memorial service captured some of this. He mentioned Cassie Bernall, the 17-year-old who was killed after affirming her Christian faith, by name. He quoted the Bible eight times. The speech was stridently delivered and was panned by columnist Richard Cohen of the Washington Post as “stiff and uninspiring.” But in subsequent days, and especially on a trip to Iowa on April 28, Gore has spoken more effectively. He doesn’t wait for the issue of Littleton to come up. He raises it. At a house party in Dubuque to promote his presidential candidacy, he mentioned Littleton first, starting with praise for “those who stared death in the face and affirmed their belief in God.” Only later did he get around to what he calls his “number one priority” of “keeping prosperity going.”
According to Gore, Littleton has “opened up a lot of things,” and he’s eager to seize the opportunity. So when Tom Brokaw invited him to co-host a town meeting on MSNBC on the “lessons of Littleton,” Gore rearranged his schedule and appeared on the stage of a Des Moines high school with 50 people. (Afterwards, he went to the library for three local TV interviews.) Gore repeated all the liberal boilerplate about gun control, media violence, and the need for more high school guidance counselors and mental health care. Brokaw put him on the spot by asking why he’d been to see The Matrix, a highly violent new movie. Gore said the movie had a “sophisticated plot in which the action made sense.”
The striking thing about Gore’s appearances in Des Moines, Dubuque, and Davenport was that he didn’t overstate his case. He said opponents of gun control have a point when they claim it’s not the answer to school violence. But it’s “part of the answer,” Gore said. Violence in movies, TV, and video games may not have a bad influence on most kids, he said, but some are “pushed over the line” to commit violent acts. He agreed with evangelist Franklin Graham that America has a “problem of the heart.” He overreached only when he linked school violence to sprawl, one of his favorite targets. Schools are so big that counselors can’t spot the troubled kids who later shoot and kill, Gore suggested. “It may be that [Columbine High School in Littleton] was just too big,” he said, adding, “The issue of sprawl doesn’t apply just to communities.”
Wherever he goes, Gore says he was deeply moved by his trip to Littleton. He sounds sincere about this, and it’s made him a born-again Hollywood basher. Brokaw taunted him about all the money Democrats get from Hollywood moguls and dared Gore to criticize them. Gore did. He said he’d meet with Hollywood executives and “put it to them.” And Gore boasted he’s already been calling Internet executives to seek curbs on violent and pornographic Web sites.
What’s the political impact of Gore’s emphasis on Littleton? For one thing, it helps the Clinton administration to have Gore out front and not Clinton. Both the president and Gore sense the country is now more receptive to gun control, and Clinton is fine at delivering the gun control message. But Gore also has recognized something more important, the national hunger for a moral response to Littleton. Clinton could deliver that message, too, but no one would take him seriously. When Gore, a straight arrow in his private life, emphasizes the role of right and wrong, good and evil, in Littleton, no one snickers.
I think Gore’s embrace of Littleton could give his presidential chances a nudge. He stands pretty much alone on the issue. Neither Bill Bradley, his Democratic foe, nor most of the Republican presidential candidates have had anything compelling to say about Littleton. And the issue helps exactly where Gore needs help, on the values side. Gore is being dragged down in polls because of his association with an immoral president. On Littleton, he’s on the side of good, Christianity, and morality. Now, the country will be watching as he pushes his Littleton agenda. If he really pressures Hollywood to tone down its movies and TV shows and gets Internet executives to adopt curbs, we’ll all know. And Gore will get kudos.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
