Nearly the whole of his life has been a lie, but on the first night of last week’s Democratic convention, Bill Clinton nevertheless bestirred himself and spoke the truth. He identified more directly and completely than anyone else possibly could the central point of reference in the coming campaign, the single issue that will most determine the winner. It is his issue, after all, Clinton’s lifelong and loving preoccupation. The issue is: him.
The president spoke — and spoke and spoke and spoke, for nearly an hour — about himself, hardly mentioning the loyal son whom he was supposed to be ushering into political adulthood. Al Gore? He was “one of the best decisions of my life.” My decision. My life. Me, me, me. Twelve hours later, at the convention’s off-site transition ceremony in Michigan, Clinton all but emasculated Gore, shamelessly camera-mugging in the background while his badly upstaged protege struggled at the microphone for some scrap of attention.
Awful behavior, yes, but that is not the point. It is an unavoidable fact: Bill Clinton is the magnetic north of our public life, the figure all other politicians must define themselves against. He would have dominated the Los Angeles convention even had he not shown up. Just as he will dominate the entire campaign, right up to its waning moments, even if he somehow manages to stay invisible.
Gore and his party would obviously like Clinton to disappear. The convention keynoter, Rep. Harold Ford, ran off a great many words about the vice president’s multiform virtues, but never once referred to the vice president’s current boss. Neither did anyone else on Tuesday’s program. Neither did anyone on Wednesday’s program — not so’s you’d notice, anyhow. And neither did Al Gore himself in his acceptance speech on Thursday, except in a single sentence of impersonal thanks, delivered on behalf of “millions of Americans,” for “the job” Clinton has done. In the course of that “job,” though, Clinton got himself impeached. Rather embarrassing.
Los Angeles’s stagecrafters were intent to establish that Al Gore is not Bill Clinton. Gore loves his wife. She loves him. He loves his daughter. She loves him, too. Once upon a time, Gore even used to help his daughter Karenna with her elementary school homework — just like a real-life father would! Whatta guy.
A guy, but not a terribly effective politician, it turns out. Bill Clinton refashioned his party in the image of his own ambition — and called the confection a “third way,” something “new.” Gore’s grip is looser, the Los Angeles convention suggests. For last week, the real Democratic party, kept firmly locked in Clinton’s strategic closet these past eight years, finally wandered back into the sunlight. Watch that podium: The Democratic Leadership Council is dead. Long live . . .
Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers and John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO and teachers’ union president Bob Chase and public employees’ union president Gerald McEntee. And Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume. And one, two, three, four, five members of the Kennedy family. And Eleanor Holmes Norton, non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives from the nation’s capital. And Elizabeth Birch of the Human Rights Campaign. And Kate Michelman of NARAL.
If you believe it is important that the District of Columbia be the 51st state — and that women be allowed to marry each other and undergo partial-birth abortions, though not necessarily in that order — then you really must vote for Gore.
In any other season, this would seem an altogether bizarre advertising theme for a major-party presidential candidate to have chosen. Had the Philadelphia Republican convention been half so “out of the mainstream” as this, George W. Bush would have been preceded to the stage by Randall Terry, Jesse Helms, Charlton Heston, Jerry Falwell, the CEOs of Philip Morris, Dow, and Eli Lilly. And Linda Tripp. But Bush and his allies, though out of power and new to the national scene, were stiff-necked enough to prevent any such fiasco. Indeed, they scripted a seamless event. The incumbent vice president, by contrast, accepting his party’s nomination at a moment of unparalleled national strength and prosperity, nevertheless felt forced, like the ghost of Walter Mondale, to declare populist war on those “powerful forces” that are stealing bread from the mouths of America’s starving children.
The Gore campaign has been hemorrhaging for months. Every public opinion poll has been the same. Gore trails Bush among men. He trails among women. He trails among independents. He trails on bedrock questions of leadership, honesty, likability, national defense, even education. He trails so badly, in fact, that he is now forced to beg even grass-roots Democratic support.
And Gore trails this way because he is Bill Clinton’s vice president. Period, Nearly half the country says Gore is too much implicated in Clinton’s debasement of the Oval Office to steward their desired future. These same voters, in a different poll but on the same grounds, say there now is “no chance whatsoever” they will vote for Gore. Gore sinks in quicksand.
We think he did little to pull himself out last week. Gore’s acceptance speech was poorly organized, cycling back over essentially the same topical territory three times, by our count. It was poorly written and poorly delivered; Gore rushed so quickly over what few classic applause lines his speech contained that the convention audience had to be prompted by closed-circuit television monitors to respond at all. And, worst, for all its programmatic detail, the speech was almost empty of content about what should have been its principal subject: the campaign Gore is now engaged in. This failure, too, can be attributed to . . . Bill Clinton.
Al Gore’s strongest qualification for the presidency is his service in an incumbent administration that has coincided with eight happy years of American history. But it is Clinton’s administration, and Clinton was impeached, and Gore is too timid to repudiate or even acknowledge his boss’s grossest misdeeds. So instead, Gore all but pretends that the Clinton administration never took place — thereby depriving himself of the ability to brag about that administration’s apparently successful policies. Gore’s acceptance speech devoted just one sentence to a reminder of how bad things were before he became vice president — during the regime of his opponent’s father, that is. You’d have thought he’d want to elaborate on the subsequent recovery. But no: Gore outright denied it was relevant. This year’s presidential election, he said, is “not an award for past performance.”
What is it, then? Is it a choice between two very different prescriptions for the next four years of our collective life, one Republican and one Democratic, one Bush’s and one Gore’s? No, it is not even that, not very much. “This is not just an election between my opponent and me,” Gore announced. “It’s about our people.” So he did not utter the word “Republican.” And he did not utter the name “Bush.” That would have been “negative” and voters dislike politicians who are negative, a result Al Gore simply can’t afford. Too many voters already dislike him, you see, because . . . well, again, because they associate him with you know who.
“I will never let you down,” Gore promised toward the end, in the brief passage of his speech that came closest to an explicit acknowledgment of the “Clinton problem.” Gore made another, implicit reference to the president, though. Few people have remarked on it, but we think it was much the most important thing Gore said last Thursday — the clearest indication he gave of how completely Bill Clinton’s legacy is distorting his campaign, and how unsuccessful has been his attempt to escape that legacy.
There is a “word that we’ve heard a lot of in this campaign,” the vice president pointed out, “and that word is honor.” Honor is “not just a word,” Gore went on, “but an obligation.” What kind of obligation, exactly? An obligation to . . . raise the minimum wage, provide federally funded day care, defend affirmative action, protect Roe v. Wade, advance gay rights, and enact hate crimes legislation. Honor, in other words, resides in the policies a leader supports. Honor does not, by unmistakable inference, mean obeying the law and telling the truth and carefully husbanding the historical inheritance and reputation of the American presidency.
It is precisely this view of honor, Bill Clinton’s view of honor, that American voters appear to be rejecting as they lean toward George W. Bush. At his Los Angeles convention, Al Gore declined the opportunity to reject it with them. He embraced Clintonian “honor” instead. For all Gore’s frantic effort to push him out of view, Clinton and Clintonism remain the fundamental issue in this year’s election.
William Kristol and David Tell
