Gore already fading in 2004
“George W. Bush is my commander in chief.”
So said Al Gore, a mere 13 months ago, at the Iowa Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. My, how Gore has turned on the popular Republican president since then.
Gore recently told Time magazine that Bush’s economic agenda is “catastrophic,” his foreign policy “horrible” and his environmental stance “immoral.”
“Our country is headed for very deep trouble,” Gore warned.
And, of course, the former vice president thinks he’s just the man to turn things around. That’s why he’s considering another run for the White House. “It’s about how I can best serve my country,” said Gore, who jokingly refers to himself as the man “who used to be the next president.”
Gore’s problem is most Americans aren’t buying what he’s selling.
Indeed, a recent Time/CNN poll found if Gore ran against Bush today, the Republican would win in a 57 percent to 40 percent landslide. Even Democrat party insiders don’t want Gore … the “Nearly Man,” as the Brits might refer to him to be their standard bearer in 2004.
In a recent Los Angeles Times survey of Democratic National Committee members, 48 percent said the former vice president ought not run, versus only 35 percent who think he should give it another go.
Yet Gore is undeterred. He thinks it his manifest destiny to win the White House, after being only the fourth presidential candidate in history to capture the popular vote, but lose the overall election by coming up on the short end of the electoral vote.
While he claims to have gotten over his narrow defeat, it is clear Gore still suffers the delusion that the U.S. Supreme Court jobbed him out of the Oval Office; that he would have won the election if the Florida recount (and recount and recount) had been allowed to continue until Gore and David Boises were satisfied. Of course, he conveniently overlooks the 10-month, $900,000 study, sponsored by a consortium of eight news organizations, which concluded last November that even if the nation’s highest court had not overturned Florida’s Democrat-controlled Supreme Court’s order of a statewide manual recount of 43,000 disputed ballots, Bush still would have won the state’s 25 electoral votes.
The re-reinvented Gore has loser written all over his dour visage, even more so than in 2000. He has bent further left politically at the same time that mainstream America has moved right (as evidenced by the fact the party of Bush now controls the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives).
Gore clearly hasn’t learned from his 2000 campaign, when he trotted out his “people vs. the powerful” theme. Even his former running mate Joe Liebermann says Gore’s old school liberal appeal to class warfare turned off much of the electorate. Now, Gore is making yet another attempt to pit one class against another, to divide America into “us” and “them” by calling for repeal of Bush’s 10-year, $1.3 trillion across the board tax cut.
Gore seems to think his inability to connect with the public is merely a failure of political tactics. “I don’t think I’m a very good political tactician,” he told Time magazine.
Well, yes. That’s true. Gore is pretty lousy at politics. But that’s not his biggest problem. It’s because Gore drifted even further away, ideologically, from the mainstream America since 2000. He either has to come to the prevailing views of the American people, which are right of his, or he has to try to bring them over to the left, where he has positioned himself. Neither is likely to occur in the next two years. That is why Gore is likely to remain the man who used to be the next president.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)