Start With Gore When Blame Game Begins by Robert Kuttner
AL GORE MAY YET prevail, just as the Boston Red Sox may yet win next year's World Series. But don't hold your breath. And the recriminations have already begun.
Did Gore run too populist a campaign or one not populist enough? Did Ralph Nader recklessly ruin Gore's chances or were Gore's own ample liabilities quite sufficient? Was Gore foolish to distance himself from the Democrats' most popular president in a generation, sins and all? Or did he get Clinton's liabilities anyway, without the assets?
Gore's biggest problem, in the end, was Gore. This was, after all, a very winnable election. The nation was enjoying prosperity and peace. Gore's opponent was a 40-watt bulb, the very untested governor of a state with a weak governorship.
Gore's popularity soared after his convention speech, the one moment when he sounded as if he might deliver the things for which voters traditionally look to Democrats. But because so much about Gore seemed contrived, calculated, poll-driven, focus-group-tested, and overly scripted, even his flirtation with economic populism felt pasted on.
Gore's advisers were so eager that he not sound too partisan or too tied to Bill Clinton that they and he squandered advantages. (What dunce hired these people?)
While voters may reject Clinton's personal morality, they like the prosperity of the past eight years. But Gore so distanced himself from Clinton you would hardly think they were part of the same administration.
Gore repeatedly let Bush get away with blaming the Democrats for Congress's failure to pass major legislation such as improvements in Medicare. But don't the Republicans control both houses of Congress? Gore's advisers vetoed having the candidate (fairly) blame the Republicans, because superficial research showed that voters thought the election was more about the future than the past.
Thus did the candidate let himself be paralyzed by his own idiot-savant technicians.
The Gore-Lieberman ticket was the dream team of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded in the early 1980s to move Democrats away from public programs, identity politics, and Democratic interest groups such as unions,the women's movement, and the NAACP.
But to the extent that Gore gained ground, it was by championing traditional Democratic strong suits -- Social Security, Medicare, public education. And to the extent that voters were rallied to Gore, it was groups like the NAACP, NARAL, and unions that did the heavy lifting.
The DLC wizards must be composing two different drafts of a postelection spin document. If Gore pulled out a squeaker, it was because he resisted entreaties to run as an economic populist. If he lost, it was because he ran as too much of a populist. Both things, of course, cannot be true.
Perhaps the saddest schism is the increasingly vituperative split between Gore's forces and Nader's. Nader's people urged liberal voters in safe Gore states to vote Green but did not propose the converse, that liberal voters in swing states support Gore. In the campaign's closing days, Nader concentrated his fire on Gore and sounded as if he would actually prefer a Bush victory.
In livid rejoinder, one slashing letter signed by dozens of pro-Gore liberals accused Nader of a variety of sins, including sectarianism of a familiar sort in the century just past. Nader may be reckless, but he's no Red.
Far from moderating Nader, these mutual insult contests only hardened the lines. Earlier, one of Nader's attractions was that he would energize new voters to elect progressive Democrats to Congress. By the campaign's end, he was talking of Green candidates unseating liberal congressmen and senators.
Liberals need this latest schism like they need diphtheria. In reality they need both leaders who are experienced at governing and idealists who can rally activist energy. But both camps are now too angry.
This is the fourth time in living memory that the liberal coalition has turned fratricidal.
In the '40s, some radicals got starry-eyed about Stalin, and many liberals joined in the Red-baiting. Eisenhower followed. In the '60s, hard-hats and students split bitterly over Vietnam, race, and ifestyle. Nixon followed. In the '80s, the DLC made unions, feminists, and minorities anathema. Clinton papered over the split, and liberals actually enjoyed a brief truce in the infighting.
Now another split. And future generations may bitterly debate who lost the winnable election of 2000.
There is, alas, plenty of blame to go around. But as the Polish proverb has it, a fish stinks from the head. The election was Gore's to lose.