Times

Opinion

December 17, 2002

Damian Whitworth

So, farewell then, Albert Gore Jr, the Prince of Tennessee. You made us laugh (mostly at you), you made us cry (heavy tears of boredom). But now you have made us smile.

For at last, after a lifetime’s quest for the most powerful job on earth, you have decided to give up. This decision, which saves your country from future misery untold, is the bravest you have ever made and demonstrates that you finally know who you are. So long, loser.

But, Jeepers! it took you soooooooooo long to see it.

At home I have a cartoon by our own Peter Brookes from the time of the interminable Florida re-count. It shows Rip Van Winkle watching Gore and Bush pulling each other’s hair out on television. He falls asleep and awakes 20 years later to discover the same show still running.

A friend visiting from Washington looked at the cartoon at the weekend, before Gore made his announcement, and was deeply depressed. “It will be like that,” he said. “I can’t bear it.”

Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one to feel this way. The prospect of Gore and Bush slugging it out until November 2004 dismayed Americans in general, and many Democrats in particular. Eventually, even the tin-eared Gore heard the message that he wasn’t going to win. He may have clinched the popular vote last time but he wasn’t going to do so again. Too many Americans are now perfectly happy with the President they didn’t vote for.

Gore’s chance was in 2000 and he blew it. He could point to the votes he lost because of the Clinton scandals and the splitting of the left-wing vote in Florida, where the Green candidate, Ralph Nader, arguably cost him the presidency. But in the end he can only blame himself for squandering the advantages of incumbency and a (then) booming economy to let in a relatively inexperienced Governor.

Gore just didn’t have what it takes to beat a natural. Many on this side of the Atlantic may mock George W. Bush, but he has the personal skills to be a successful US President; the ease with people, the sense of humour, the confidence in who he is.

Gore, with his awkwardness, stiff manner, laborious explanations of complicated policy positions and desperate ideas of what constitutes a joke, seemed to try too hard. Voters could smell his unease.

Travelling with Gore during the campaign, on behalf of The Times, was often an excruciating experience — and not just because by the end he was dragging us across the country for 20 manic hours a day, fuelling himself with gallons of Diet Coke. At public events it was hard to find the genuine passion of voters for his candidacy that Clinton had enjoyed. In private, on the rare occasions he came back on the plane, he would be over-anxious to make self-deprecating jokes.

Remember, this was the man who dressed as a werewolf and a mummy at Hallowe’en parties, to try to belie his image as a dullard.

Both Gore and Bush were dauphins. But their paths to the presidential battlefield were different. George Bush Sr originally thought that his political heir was another of his sons, Jeb, now Governor of Florida. George W. was the black sheep who emerged as a contender only after his hard-drinking and “young and irresponsible” days, like Prince Hal “breaking through the foul and ugly mists/ Of vapours that did seem to strangle him”.

Gore, meanwhile, was directed towards the presidency almost from the cradle by his father, a Tennessee Senator. There was always a suspicion that Gore was standing in front of an audience only because his father’s ghost hovered at his shoulder telling him to.

The family was everything in the Gore campaign. While Laura Bush was reluctant for her husband to run, and the couple’s twin daughters were downright opposed to it, Tipper and the Gore girls were his key advisers and cheerleaders, responsible for some of his weirdiest-beardiest reinventions of himself. The decision to bow out was taken at a full family conference. When even your own family knows the game is up, it’s time to quit.

He was still able to produce some classic Gore-speak, claiming that he could still beat Bush but he didn’t think it was right to “focus on the past”. But let’s be generous. It must have been hard to close the door to the Democratic nomination when it was still open. That his announcement came as such a surprise to the political world means it must have been agony to make. Gore has always been a man who fought on when there was only the faintest glimmer of hope.

He has finally shown that he knows who he is. He sees, for the first time, that he is a nearly man, someone who will never be President, and a protagonist in a personal tragedy of great expectations. He will retire to spend even more time with his long-suffering family.

Exit Tipper, pursued by A. Bore.

-- Anonymous, December 16, 2002