Al Gore’s curse isn’t dullness; it is his utter reliability. He is the soul of propriety. There is no wildness in him, at least not publicly (privately, he has a great cackle of a laugh that hints at an ironic sensibility). Even his grand passions, ecology and technology, seem safe. This dependability has made him an anchor for the Democratic Party faithful–especially the high-fiber, low-cholesterol, National Public Radio, National Council of Churches liberals–throughout the tempest-toss’d moments of the Clinton administration. But these strengths may begin to seem weaknesses as the vice president assays the year 2000. And those weaknesses could become a lens through which to appreciate his predecessor: Al Gore is Bill Clinton’s perfect foil.
Nixon, Humphrey, Ford, Mondale, Bush… Gore? There is a vice presidential style in American politics. It is inherently conservative. It is almost inevitably disappointing. With the exceptions of Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman–whose incandescennt personalities could not be contained by the enforced servility of second-bananahood–it is difficult to think of a vice president who turned out to be a memorable number one (and Truman wasn’t truly appreciated until years later). A vice president is, by definition, a member of the establishment–and Americans tend to fall for passionate, charismatic outsiders, especially in the television age: Kennedy, Reagan and, yes, Bill Clinton (Jimmy Carter campaigned as a charismatic but, once elected, quickly assumed his natural, vice presidential proportions). It is difficult to imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln serving as anyone’s number two; Franklin Roosevelt might have done so in 1920, but that was before polio made him whole. In 1976, Bob Dole was, and he remains, a more natural vice president than Jack Kemp.
The charismatic path to the presidency is to excite passions; the vice presidential path is to service constituencies. If there was any fascination to last week’s debate, it was in seeing how Kemp and Gore serviced their respective flocks. Bob Dole wasn’t the only one hoping–publicly, throughout the day of the debate–that Kemp would attack the president’s character; the religious wing of the Republican Party was, too. Ralph Reed announced his desire for blood in The New York Times. And by refusing to play the game, Kemp disappointed not only Dole but also a crucial constituency he will need to win the nomination in 2000. It was, at once, a courageous, foolhardy and not very vice presidential act. ““It’s not who Jack Kemp is,’’ Kemp told CNN the day after. But a true vice president is never who he is; he’s always who someone else wants him to be.
Al Gore has been very good at that, but he is now entering the trickiest period of his political career. If Clinton is re-elected, Gore will have three masters: the president, the Democratic factions he’ll need to win the nomination and the requirement of his own ambition–to stake out an independent identity for himself. If Kemp had been more adept, he might have explored the tensions among these various roles. He might, for example, have raised the issue of school vouchers. Clinton infuriated the teachers’ unions in the first debate with Dole by appearing tolerant of local efforts–Cleveland’s, for one–to experiment with real school choice. Gore sends his kids to private school. Kemp might have made an issue of that (it’s also the neatest path to the ““character’’ issue of liberal elitism). It would’ve been fascinating to see how Gore might have differed from Clinton, who no longer really needs the teachers; how hard the vice president might have worked to please what is arguably the most important Democratic interest group.
Gore’s next four years will be filled with such tests, and with tiny bureaucratic struggles to gain control of the party machinery. He’s already earned the enmity of the Gephardt wing with his persistent efforts to deny FODs (Friends of Dick) ranking positions in the Clinton re-election campaign. These petty dust-ups are irresistible to a vice president, who inevitably sees national politics from the inside out and suffers from the delusion that control of the party innards is worth worrying about. In a way, it is: the machine is how the Mondales and Bushes get their nominations. But the most successful national politicians are outsiders–this is, after all, a nation of people who came from somewhere else. And so, Al Gore’s conundrum: he is a prisoner of the Clinton presidency. His ““inevitability’’ for the top job in the year 2000 will depend on the president’s success in a second term. If Clinton fails, Gore will fail with him; if Clinton succeeds, Gore will seem pale by comparison. He’ll struggle mightily to overcome this fate, but the rigor and precision Al Gore brings to the effort may only make us nostalgic for Bill Clinton’s voracious appetites.
