The Wilderness Campaign:
Al Gore
Hey, Dwayne? … Dwayne?”
“Yes, Mr. Vice-President?”
“Could I have some more coffee?”
“Yes, Mr. Vice-President. Coming …”
“Thanks, Dwayne.”
It was ten in the morning in Nashville, a quiet weekday, with most
of the neighbors off to work, and Albert Gore, Jr., sat at the head
of his dining-room table eating breakfast. His plate was crowded
with scrambled eggs, bacon, toast. His pond-size mug had, in a
flash, been refilled by Dwayne Kemp, his cook, a skilled and
graceful man who had been employed by the Gores when, as his boss
often puts it, “we were still working in the White House.” Freshly
showered and shaved, Gore was wearing a midnight-blue shirt and gray
wool trousers. In the months after losing the battle for Florida’s
electoral votes and conceding the Presidency to George W. Bush, on
December 13, 2000, Gore seemed to let himself go, dropping out of
sight, traveling around Spain, Italy, and Greece for six weeks with
his wife, Tipper. He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap tugged
down low. He grew a mountain-man beard and gained weight. When he
began appearing in public again, mainly in classrooms, he took to
introducing himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Al Gore. I used to be the
next President of the United States.” People looked at this rather
bulky and hirsute man-a politician who had only recently won
50,999,897 votes for the Presidency, more than any Democrat in
history, more than any candidate in history except Ronald Reagan in
1984, and more than half a million more votes than the man who
assumed the office-and did not know quite what to feel or how to
behave, and so they cooperated in his elaborate self-deprecations.
They laughed at his jokes, as if to help him erase what everyone
understood to be a disappointment of historic proportions-“the
heartbreak of a lifetime,” as Karenna, the eldest of his four
children, put it. “You know the old saying,” Gore told one audience
after another. “You win some, you lose some-and then there’s that
little-known third category.”
Gore has since dispensed with the beard but not the weight. He is
still thick around the middle. He eats quickly and thoroughly, and
with a determined relish, precisely like a man who no longer has to
care that he might look heavy on Larry King Live. “You want some
eggs?” he asked. “Dwayne’s the best.”
This has been the first election season in a generation in which Al
Gore has not pursued national office. He ran for President in 1988,
when he was thirty-nine; for Vice-President, on Bill Clinton’s
ticket, in 1992 and 1996; and then again for President in 2000.
Having decided that a rematch against Bush would be too divisive
(or, perhaps, too difficult), Gore has made an effort not to brood
on the sidelines. Instead, he used words like “liberated” and “free”
with a determined conviction to describe his inner condition. He was
free of the burden, free of the pressure, free of the camera’s eye.
At home in Nashville, the phone barely rang. There were no advance
people at the door, no aides at his shoulder. He could say what he
wanted and it hardly made a ripple in the media. If he felt like
calling George Bush a “moral coward,” if he felt like comparing
Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to islands in an “American gulag” or the
President’s media operatives to “digital Brown Shirts,” well, he
just went ahead and did it. No worries, no hesitation. True, at noon
at the Belcourt Theatre, he was to deliver a speech to a group
called the Music Row Democrats, but the only cameras were likely to
be local. He jokingly outlined the speech on a small notepad with
just two words: “war” and “economy.”
When Al and Tipper Gore had recovered from the initial shock of the
2000 election, they spent $2.3 million on the house they live in
now: a hundred-year-old colonial on Lynwood Boulevard, in the Belle
Meade section of Nashville. They still own a place in Arlington,
Virginia-a house that was built by Tipper’s grandfather-and a
ninety-acre cattle farm in the Gore family seat of Carthage,
Tennessee; but Arlington was perilously close to Washington, and
Carthage was too remote for a full-time residence, especially for
Tipper. Belle Meade, which resembles Buckhead, in Atlanta, or
Mountain Brook, near Birmingham, is a prosperous redoubt for
businessmen and country-music stars; it encompasses a neighborhood
of broad, sloping lawns, and houses with magnolia trees and “estate”
driveways up front and glassy modern additions and swimming pools
out back. Chet Atkins used to be a neighbor; Leon Russell still is.
Some of the features of the house, which the couple expanded with
the help of an architect, are distinctly Gore-ish: Tipper’s full
drum set, in the living room (complete with congas); Al’s
grip-and-grin photographs with the Clintons and world leaders, along
the walls. There are fewer books and more televisions than you might
expect. When the architect was designing the rear addition to the
house, Gore asked him to curve the walls inward in two places in
order to save several trees. “The trees weren’t anything special,
nothing rare or anything,” he said. “I just couldn’t bear to bring
’em down.” In the backyard, around the patio and the extra-long
pool, where Al and Tipper do laps, Gore also installed an anti-bug
system that sprays a fine mist of ground chrysanthemums from various
discreet sources: a tree trunk, a patio wall. “The mosquitoes just
hate it,” he said. Other features of the house are less
environmentally correct. A 2004 black Cadillac, which Gore drives,
was parked in the driveway. A ’65 Mustang-a Valentine’s Day gift
from Al to Tipper-was parked in the garage.
Gore finished his eggs. He walked to a covered patio on the side of
the house and settled into a soft chair. Dwayne brought his coffee
cup and refilled it.
Gore has hardly been a recluse since deciding, in late 2002, not to
run again. In the past year, he has delivered a series of speeches
in New York and Washington sharply criticizing the Bush
Administration, but he has answered few questions. “It’s better that
way for a while,” he said. He has given speeches for money all
around the world. And he is teaching courses, mainly about the
intersection of community and the American family, at Middle
Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, and Fisk University, in
Nashville.
“We’ve got about forty hours of lectures and classes on tape,” Gore
said, deadpan. “Now’s your chance to watch them.”
Gore is beginning to make serious money. He is a board member for
Apple and a senior adviser to Google, which just went through its
IPO. He has also been working on creating a cable-television station
and developing a financial enterprise.
“I’m having a blast,” he said.
In a parliamentary system, a candidate for Prime Minister, after
losing an election, often returns to the party leadership or at
least to a prominent seat in parliament. It doesn’t work that way in
the United States. Here, you make your own way: you give speeches,
write memoirs, accumulate a fortune, find a righteous cause.
Sometimes a reporter might come calling, but not often. In any case,
Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, said, “When it was
over, the Democratic Party kicked him to the curb,” preferring to
forget not only the Florida catastrophe but also Gore’s own
misplays: his mutating personality in the three debates with Bush;
his reliance on political consultants; his inability to exploit Bill
Clinton’s enduring popularity and his failure to win Clinton’s
Arkansas, much less Tennessee; his decision not to press immediately
for a statewide recount in Florida. Now, everywhere he goes, Gore is
faced with crowds who despair of the Bush Administration and see in
him all that might have been, all the what-ifs. The heartbreak of a
lifetime. Sometimes people approach him and address him as “Mr.
President.” Some try to cheer him up and tell him, “We know you
really won.” Some tilt their heads, affecting a look of grave
sympathy, as if he had just lost a family member. He has to face not
only his own regrets; he is forever the mirror of others’. A lesser
man would have done far worse than grow a beard and put on a few
pounds.
Consider the expectations: more than Franklin Roosevelt, or even
John F. Kennedy, Gore was raised to be President. His father, Albert
Gore, Sr., a senator who was known to look as noble as a Roman
statesman, expected it of him. When Gore’s mother was pregnant with
Al, Gore Senior told the editors of the Nashville Tennessean that if
his wife gave birth to a boy he didn’t want to see the story tucked
deep in the paper. After Al was born, the headline read, well, mr.
gore, here he is, on page 1. Six years later, the Senator planted a
story in the Knoxville News Sentinel about how young Al had coaxed
his father into buying him a more expensive bow-and-arrow set than
they had planned to get. “There may be another Gore on the way
toward the political pinnacle,” the story said. “He’s just six years
old now. But with his experiences to date, who knows what may
happen.” By the time Gore made it to Harvard (the only school he
applied to), he was informing his class of his ultimate ambition.
His first run, in 1988, after he had spent just a few years in the
Senate, was less an act of youthful presumption than a hurried
attempt to win the White House in his father’s lifetime.
Gore is fifty-six years old. After the 2000 race was finally
resolved, some of the people around him consoled him by telling him
to “remember Richard Nixon,” how Nixon lost the Presidential race in
1960, lost the California governorship in 1962-informing the press
that it would no longer have him to “kick around anymore”-and then
came back to win the White House in 1968. Somehow, when that advice
is mentioned to Gore today, it is neither consoling nor enticing. If
John Kerry wins in November, that would likely spell the end of
Gore’s career in national politics; if Kerry loses, there would
still be strong figures in a prospective field for 2008, not least
John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
“Basically, the answer is, I do not expect to ever be a candidate
again,” Gore said. “I really don’t. The second part of the answer
is, I haven’t ruled it out completely. And the third qualifier is, I
don’t add the second part as a way of signaling coyness. It’s merely
to complete an honest answer to the question and it in no way
changes the principal part of the answer. Which is, I really do not
expect that I will be a candidate. If I did expect to be a candidate
again, I would probably not feel the same freedom to let it rip in
these speeches the way I am. And I enjoy that. It feels”-and there
was that word again-“it feels liberating to me.” Running again for
the Senate or accepting a Cabinet position, he said, was also out of
the question.
Gore, along with no small part of the country, is convinced that had
things turned out differently in Florida in 2000, had the
conservatives on the Supreme Court not outnumbered the liberals by a
single vote, the United States would not be in the condition it’s
in: the front page would not be describing chaos in Iraq, record
budget deficits, the rollback of numerous environmental initiatives,
a diminishment of civil liberties, a curtailment of stem-cell
research, an erosion of American prestige abroad. Gore does not
admit to any bitterness, but it is plain in nearly every speech he
gives; and while the feeling may be partly personal-who could blame
him?-it runs to a deeper, more public-minded sentiment than the
disappointment of his own, or his father’s, ambitions.
“Here you have a guy who worked all his life to achieve the one
thing he wanted-to be President of the United States-and it was
there, in his grasp,” Tony Coelho, Gore’s campaign chairman in 2000,
said. “He felt Clinton hurt him, but nevertheless he worked his butt
off and brought it off. He won the most votes, by half a million,
but then the Supreme Court steps in and it’s gone. It is hard for
any of us to understand what that means or how it feels. The truth
is that Gore is really a policy guy, not a political guy, and for
him to feel that he was on the cusp of the ultimate policy job, that
he could affect policy and the world like no one else, and then
nothing-well, imagine that!”
In a little while, a new friend of Gore’s, an eccentric musician and
visual artist named Robert Ellis Orrall, was going to swing by to
take him and Tipper to the Belcourt.
“You’ll like Bob,” Gore said, smiling. “But I’m warning you: he does
his own thing. He’s a crazy kinda guy.”
Gore delivered that last sentence in what I came to think of as his
Mr. Goofy voice. When he wants to undercut something he is saying,
to indicate that he knows he is speaking in a cliché or taking on a
stentorian or pompous tone, he uses the Mr. Goofy voice, stretching
his face into a kind of clownish expression and affecting a tone
more suited to a television dinosaur. Then, there is the Herr
Professor voice, Gore as lecturer. Gore didn’t really want to talk
politics at first, but when the subject of the press came up he
seized on it and gave, at my best estimation, a twenty-minute
discourse on the degradation of “the public sphere,” a phrase coined
by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the nineteen-sixties.
(One tries, and fails, to imagine the current President alluding to
the author of Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.) “He’s a
ve-rrry interesting guy,” Gore said. “Why am I just finding out
about him?”
It’s easy to see that Gore, lacking public office, likes to teach.
In his uninterrupted answer, he mentioned the brain-imaging center
at New York University; The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard
Shlain; Broca’s Brain, by Carl Sagan; an Op-Ed piece in the Times
about the decline of reading in America, by Andrew Solomon; the lack
of research on the relation between the brain and television-“There
is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television”;
Gutenberg and the rise of print; the sovereign rule of reason in the
Enlightenment; individualism-“a term first used by de Tocqueville to
describe America in the eighteen-thirties”; Thomas Paine; Benjamin
Franklin. “O.K., now fast-forward through the telegraph, the
phonograph.” O.K., but we didn’t fast-forward: first, there was
Samuel Morse, who failed to hear the news of his wife’s dying while
he was painting a portrait-“You know, he has a painting in the White
House, if I remember correctly”-and therefore went out and invented
a faster means of communication. “Now fast-forward again to Marconi
… now that’s an interesting story”; the sinking of the Titanic;
David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term “broadcast”;
moving right along to “the nineteen visual centers of the brain”; an
article on “flow” in Scientific American; the “orienting reflex” in
vertebrates; the poignancy and “ultimate failure” of political
demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public
sphere-“I mean, what do you really have? A crowd of people holding
posters with five words on them at most hoping for a TV camera to
come along for a few seconds of airtime?”-and, finally, Gore’s own
1969 Harvard thesis, on the effect of television on the Presidency
and the rise, at about that time, of image over print as a means of
transmitting news. This was all a way to talk about the
cable-television station that he is developing.
“What kind of station will it be?” I asked.
“Well, I really can’t talk about it,” he said. “Not yet.”
What Gore does care to talk about, and what he has talked about
openly and in language shocking in its contrast with his old stilted
caution, are the failures of the man who prevailed in 2000.
“You’re free to speak clearly,” I offered.
“I’m unplugged,” he said.
A few minutes later, Robert Ellis Orrall arrived. A charming man in
his late forties with close-cropped hair and an earring, Orrall has
a vibrant sense of performance, insofar as he is always performing.
He began telling jokes the moment he arrived, and Gore seemed to
relax completely in his presence.
Tipper Gore, wearing a cotton sweater and hot-pink pants, came out
on the patio to greet Orrall.
“How are you, Bob?”
“Just fine, Tipper, but a little nervous. They asked me to introduce
Al at this thing, so I’ve got this little speech …”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Reporting
by David Remnick
Copyright © 2006 by David Remnick.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
David Remnick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-307-26358-4
