Let me stipulate: Al Gore is the deserved winner of the
Nobel Prize, as his film documentary on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth,
had previously merited the Academy Award it got. Gore’s unstinting campaign to
alert the nation – nay, the world – about the perils of global warming has been
his finest hour.
Equally praiseworthy are the political points the former
Tennessee senator and vice president has publicly made since his Supreme
Court-assisted defeat for the presidency in 2000. An early critic of the Iraq
War, Gore accurately foresaw the extent of the debacle, and he has been eloquent
and on point concerning the ongoing erosion of Americans’ constitutional
liberties.
Having materialized as a veritable tribune of the people,
even an oracle, should Gore not, then, seek again the presidency which, so many
think, he was unfairly deprived of?
The answer is no. As Gore himself as noted, such a course
would prove divisive – and perhaps destructive — to his current cause. It would
also necessitate his moving away from a position of unquestioned moral authority
into the murky untruthiness of politics — a world which, despite his scaling
its heights, Gore may never have been ideally suited for.
A current myth has it that, in 2000, a wicked establishment
press made the perverse decision to waylay Gore, mischaracterizing as lies his
essentially accurate statements about his own past and otherwise finding fault
relentlessly.
So dedicated did the Establishment press become to the
downfall of Gore that its members embraced the patently undeserving George W.
Bush, who was regarded as an acceptably hail-fellow-well-met alternative to the
goody two-shoes Gore.
Or so goes the story.
The truth is not much prettier but is, well, different. In
fact, the media animosity to Gore (and that part was certainly real) was
probably born not in indulgence toward good-ole-frat-boy Bush but in solicitude
toward the honest if plodding Bill Bradley, the recently retired New Jersey
senator who was Gore’s Democratic primary opponent. The unfortunate Bradley was
gleefully being attacked by Gore as often and as gratuitously as Gore himself
later was by an unforgiving media.
When Bradley and Gore tangled in a debate at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire in October 1999, ABC’s Jake Tapper, then with Salon,
was watching the affair via closed-circuit TV in a nearly media room. He
remembered it this way: “The reporters were hissing Gore, and that’s the only
time I’ve ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at
any event.” Time‘s Eric Pooley: “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the
room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting
down some hapless nerd.”
Gore had been mauling the preternaturally docile Bradley
fore and aft, on everything from the New Jerseyan’s alleged indifference to
disaster aid for Iowa flood victims (The New YorkTimes: “Mr.
Gore’s accusation was false and unfair. Mr. Bradley supported the 1993
legislation that provided $4.8 billion in emergency flood relief for farmers…”)
to his racial positions (Campaign chroniclers James W. Caesar and Andrew Busch:
“Bradley landed few clean blows and even took some unfair blows from Gore, who
charged before [a] mostly black audience that ‘racial profiling’ of blacks by
the police ‘practically began’ in Bradley’s New Jersey.”).
The Daily Kos’s Markos
Moulitsas Zúniga recalled the Gore campaign’s “blatantly unfair” attacks
on Bradley, as did The Nation‘s David Corn, who found Bradley “more
progressive,.. less irritating [and] sincere in his desire for political
reform,” while Gore’s campaign “bends, manipulates, dodges or obliterates the
truth…..”
Said Newsday: “…Gore
effectively criticized former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley for proposing an
expensive health care reform, for being too liberal, and being out of touch with
ordinary voters…[H]is aggressive tactics worked.”
And the Washington Post‘s
Dana Milbank reported Bradley’s responses to Gore in that Dartmouth debate: “‘Attack,
attack, attack, every day, the people are fed up with it…You’re the elephant of
negative advertising….Why should we believe you’ll tell the truth as president
if you won’t tell the truth as a candidate?'” And, to bring us full cycle,
Milbank segued into this: “In the WMUR press room, my colleagues laugh
derisively at Gore’s offensives….”
That feeling, fair or not, was the likely cause of the
media animosity, and not any imagined bonhomie of Bush’s. The gallant Gore has
at length found – nay, become — his better angel. He should, we should,
leave well enough alone.
