I
n the summer of 1992, after he was assured of the Democratic nomination for president, Bill Clinton took a room at the Capitol Hilton, in Washington, and set about the business of interviewing potential running mates. Al Gore was then in his second term as a senator from Tennessee. Gore had run for the Democratic presidential nomination himself four years earlier, on a platform (boiled down to its crudest political elements) of electability. The basic argument of his campaign was that a Democrat could not win the presidency unless he was a white Southerner. Gore lost the nomination, but he did not lose the argument. George Bush, a Connecticut Yankee, defeated Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, by running as a Texan. The lesson was not lost on the Democrats. Bill Clinton rose from the ashes of Michael Dukakis.
1
According to the account in Bob Woodward’s
The Agenda
, Gore’s vice-presidential interview lasted three hours. Afterward, Clinton told his staff that he was pleased by their compatibility and was inclined to offer Gore the spot. In the context of a transaction usually governed by the political consideration known as “balance,”
this was not the obvious choice. Putting Gore on the ticket, the Bush campaign would say when the selection was announced, strengthened Clinton’s chances in Arkansas. Why Gore? one of Clinton’s advisers, Paul Begala, asked him. “I could die, that’s why,” Clinton said.
Well, that was one possibility. It has become a little hard to remember, thanks to the short-term, not to say the micro-term, mindset of his administration, in which every movement seems to be scripted by the morning’s poll results, that Clinton ran for the presidency with the intention of doing something more than simply clinging to the office. But he did. He wished to change the DNA of the Democratic Party, to shed its associations with big government, interest-group politics, and agnosticism about “values.” And in this matter he and Gore thought exactly alike. Their shared commitment to genetic engineering had led them, long before that summer, to enter into a mutual nonaggression pact. Clinton remained neutral in the 1988 primaries to help Gore’s chances against Dukakis, and, according to Woodward, Clinton would have stayed out of the 1992 primaries as well if Gore had decided to run. In 1989, though, Gore’s son was struck by a car and almost killed; the event led to a period of intense family introspection, and Gore was still not ready, three years later, to take on a national campaign. The door was opened for Clinton, and he walked through like a conqueror.
By choosing Gore as his running mate in 1992—by, in effect, doubling the Southernness of his candidacy—Clinton was casting himself off from the party of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Mario Cuomo. He was placing all his chips on the future. And he won the bet. The selection of Gore gave the campaign a huge bounce in the polls coming out of the convention, and it never looked back. As the Bush people had predicted, Gore helped deliver Arkansas; he also helped deliver California and Michigan. And in the end, the McGovernites went along, too. After all, they had no place else to go.
In short, Gore has always been Clinton’s designated successor. He is the ideological heir, the legacy-bearer, the anointed’s anointed. “I could die”: if anything were to happen to Clinton, the genetic
code would not be lost. Gore would know what to do. And if nothing happened to Clinton, if Clinton made it through his terms of office, then Gore would carry on the work for another eight years, and the Democratic Party would be saved for a whole generation. In accepting the vice-presidential nomination at the 1992 convention, Gore told the delegates that he finally had the job of his dreams: he was the warm-up act for Elvis. In his own mind, he must have been imagining the day when it would be said that Elvis had been the warm-up act for Al Gore.
Mortality does not seem to be the gravest threat right now to the grand design of Clinton and Gore. The gravest threat is what it has always been: Clinton. The trouble with Clinton is that he is, in the considered and no doubt heartfelt words of George Bush, a bullshit artist. A bullshit artist is not the same thing as a liar (though this may seem like the kind of distinction a bullshit artist would make). Clinton always sounds like he is trying to please everyone because he is always trying to please everyone. That is the basis of his approach to government. And since he can’t always please everyone, he often finds himself obliged to warm the truth a little. This is not because he wishes to deceive you; it’s because he wants you to know that his heart is in the right place. He cannot bear to be the bringer of bad news—which is why it is fully believable that he did not tell his wife the truth about Monica Lewinsky (or, for that matter, tell Monica Lewinsky the truth about his wife). He thinks that even though the situation may not be 100 percent copacetic right this minute, everything will be fine in the long run, so why cause unnecessary pain? Monica will be happy with her new job at
George
, where she will find another celebrity to flash her underwear at and forget all about Bill; Bill will spend more time with Hillary; Ken will self-destruct. He truly is the man from Hope.
It is the sour and rather pathetic irony of his career that Clinton is now in the position of having to defend himself against the charge that he is a liar by arguing that he is only a bullshit artist. He wasn’t good (to paraphrase Lyle Lovett), but he had good intentions. The success of this argument will be politically determined. From the perspective of the grand design, though, the danger is that Clinton’s
personal weakness, his tendency to let his intentions vouch for his actions, will discredit his politics, which are the politics of compromise and coalition-building. Reaching out will come to seem indistinguishable from pandering, and the so-called Third Way—the path, which Clinton is credited with blazing and which most of Europe is now supposed to be trying to follow, between welfare-state liberalism and free-market conservatism—will look like an empty formula for political survival. And if Clinton goes down, can Gore rise from
his
ashes?
One morning in late September 1998, a few days after the day on which the House Judiciary Committee had made the nation a Rosh Hashanah gift of Clinton’s grand jury testimony, I went to the White House to talk to a man now contemplating the fact that he was about to be handed, and possibly sooner rather than later, an unpleasantly limp baton.
The vice president’s office shares a reception area with the president’s, and on this morning members of the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Maxine Waters, were arriving to meet with Clinton. The Black Caucus had recently appointed itself the fairness referee in the president’s impending struggle with Congress, and if they had been wearing mood badges that morning, every badge would have displayed the same message: Comfort Level Extremely High. The African-American public is almost united in its contempt for the charges Starr chose to bring against the president, and this has put the black congressional leadership in the unusual position of being able to take a stand on principle without giving up an inch of political ground. If the president pulls through, they will have earned many favors. If he falls, they will be there to pick up some of the pieces. Charles Rangel, the longtime Harlem congressman who sat on the House Judiciary Committee that voted articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, was slapping backs and growling with genial pleasure, like a politician inside his own local clubhouse. The thought occurred that Charles Rangel always gives the impression of a politician inside his own local clubhouse. But the manner seemed to fit the moment.
Several nights earlier, Gore had introduced the president at a
black-tie dinner sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, and I had watched him on C-SPAN, doing some homework on the famously inscrutable Gore body language. He has, as a public speaker, only two dials on the console: pace and volume. To convey gravity, he slows down; to convey urgency, he gets louder. Clinton purrs; Gore declaims. In his address to the Black Caucus, he ended by listing, at about volume nine, the positions to which Clinton has appointed African-Americans during his administration. It was, indeed, a long and impressive list, and it accomplished the desired end of bringing the audience to their feet. When Clinton’s turn at the podium came, he was, by comparison, muted, long-winded, and a little dry, as though the only thing on the minds of everyone in the room must be the pros and cons of pending empowerment-zone legislation. “Just doing the job the American people elected me to do” was the message implied by the performance. One could see the division of labor for the midterm campaign ahead.
Once we were inside the vice president’s office and the door was closed, the world of the Black Caucus and the Starr report seemed shut out. The vice president said that he was glad to have the chance to discuss serious subjects; so much of his time was being taken up by what he called “all these political events.”
Physically, what strikes you first about Gore is the solidity. He has the frame of an athlete, but the upper body is heavy, and the complexion is unexpectedly pale. The mask is, indeed, a mysterious feature. He inflects with his face, rather than with his voice. He grimaces, as though he were putting a kind of facial English on the words, and though the effect seems self-conscious, it brings out a certain ruggedness. You see the muscular Gore, the superachiever, the star quarterback who is also captain of the debating team and is invited on Sunday afternoons to have tea with the dean. But in repose the face sometimes goes completely flaccid, the eyes become hooded, and you see the Vulcan side. The light for the hard drive is on, but there is no message on the screen.
Like the face, the manner sends disparate signals. The initial impression is of mildness; the demeanor is formal, the aura is tepid. The system has clearly been designed to avoid wasteful heat loss.
The second impression, though, is of a certain stubbornness, and a certain capacity, carefully walled off, for impatience. This is, after all, a man who ran for president when he was forty, something that requires not only unusual self-discipline (not to mention self-importance), but an unusual willingness to demand self-discipline of others. One imagines that Gore has trained himself so well to live within the narrow definition of what a politician must be today in order to survive that he has little tolerance for ordinary fecklessness. He could, by his appearance, be the head of an extremely prosperous nondenominational church, a man of God who sits on the boards of corporations, and for whom a degree of personal rectitude that would be pretty much inconceivable for most of us is just part of the job description. When I explained that my assignment was to capture the essence of his thought, the vice president laughed self-deprecatingly. “I wish you luck,” he said. But he did not seem displeased.
Still, I said, I wanted to know his answer to a political question first: Why has the Clinton-Gore administration been the object of so much animosity? It is, after all, basically a centrist, pro-business, pro-defense administration; it adopted a Republican welfare plan and it balanced the budget without losing the support of traditional Democratic constituencies. These were precisely the policies the new genome was supposed to produce. But the halo of electability had not been transformed into a halo of leadership ability. The Whitewater story broke in the
Times
even before Clinton had taken the oath of office, and his presidency has endured ever since a political and journalistic inquisition the essential effect of which, whatever the justifications, has been to place its legitimacy on permanent probation.
It’s true that for people with a reputation for brains the Clintons are amazingly inept at (as editorial writers say) “getting the facts out.” They apparently cannot bring themselves to admit that their actions are less than noble, even when their actions, like avoiding the draft or making a quick buck in the commodities market or lying about an affair, are merely human. Since their hearts are in the right place, what does it matter where their hands happen to be? The arrogance
is a little exasperating. But politically, Clinton is an accommodationist. There is no point of view he cannot share. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, he informed the grand jury on August 17, were both telling the truth. What is there in America that doesn’t want to be accommodated?
Gore’s answer was striking for its dispassion. After all, the question of whether, if he inherits Clinton’s legacy, he will also inherit Clinton’s enemies can never be far from his mind. He must, in his man-of-God mode, be distressed at finding his own carefully tended ambitions threatened by the moral negligence of his brother Bill. In his star-quarterback mode, he must be ready to strangle the guy. But he took a very, very long view of the situation.
He began, with great deliberation (throughout our conversation, the speed dial was turned way down), by suggesting two reasons for the present toxicity. The first is political. “I view our efforts as being rooted in a longer and larger Democratic tradition,” he said. “Franklin Roosevelt would have recognized the kind of outreach and broad-based coalition building that we have engaged in. So would John F. Kennedy.” In those days, he said, the Democratic Party was the dominant party in America, and that is the party he and Clinton have been trying to resurrect. “The success of the 1990s version of the Republican Party,” he said, “really depends on a cartoon image of the Democratic Party, rather than a rebuilding of the Democratic Party at its best.” The Republicans understand that if the new DNA takes, they are doomed to minority status forever, so they cannot merely oppose Clinton. They must deny him legitimacy.