Not ““Seinfeld,’’ not ““Ellen,’’ but not bad, and it’s helped by a dose of political fatalism. He knows he could blow it, and have to retire in three years with his shoe box full of Buddhist-temple incense to . . . Washington. That’s Gore’s home; has been since he grew up in a fancy hotel there, son of a senator. And it’s his albatross. Even after five years in the capital, Clinton is still Hot Springs meets Hollywood. Gore wants those Silicon Valley implants; he wants to go West where the votes, money and future are. But he’s still got the Beltway strapped around his neck.
Last week brought another example: Gore’s closest longtime aide, Peter Knight, was at best knocked out of the box as his 2000 campaign manager by a Bob Woodward roundhouse in The Washington Post; at worst Knight, now a lobbyist, faces prosecution for crude influence peddling in connection with a Massachusetts energy company that won lucrative federal contracts. (Knight denies wrongdoing.) This was not the kind of green Gore was supposed to embody. He’s looking like the Washington business-as-usual candidate at a moment when the capital is simultaneously smelly and sleepy, bitter and boring, like a cup of sour milk no one in the rest of the country wants to drink.
So it was time to change the subject to something that sells in today’s marketplace–like lesbianism. I’m actually doing a disservice to Gore’s speech in Hollywood, which amplified a longtime Gore theme that the entertainment industry must be responsible for the images it conveys. (A theme he and Tipper were sounding well before Dan Quayle.) And the reference to Ellen DeGeneres’s sexual orientation was tame; the vice president merely said that ““when the character “Ellen’ came out, millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light.’’ But he had to know that post-““Murphy Brown,’’ any reference to a controversial prime-time show would get noticed.
The question is what they were trying to accomplish. Ann Lewis, White House communications director, says that ““Ellen’’ is simply a mirror of reality–millions of Americans are gay or have family and friends who are (including Lewis, whose brother, Barney Frank, is an openly gay member of Congress). Of those who object to ““Ellen,’’ Lewis says: ““They’ve got a problem with reality.’’ In other words, besides striking a welcome blow for tolerance, Gore may have signaled his belief that the center of gravity in politics is shifting. Within the Democratic Party, tolerance for homosexuality now ranks with support for legalized abortion as a social-issue litmus test.
But there was still something ham-handed about the gesture: Gore’s reference to ““Ellen’’ was ill-timed. Just this month, DeGeneres threatened to quit her show after ABC put a warning label stating DUE TO ADULT CONTENT, PARENTAL DISCRETION ADVISED on an episode featuring a long kiss between two women. The show, struggling for ratings, is no longer about a character who happens to be gay; it’s about gay sexual themes every week. Contrary to DeGeneres’s claim of bias, giving parents a chance to discuss her show with children before viewing is perfectly appropriate. But Gore won’t say what he thinks about that. While the vice president has pushed hard for ratings, his spokeswoman says he doesn’t think politicians should take positions on which shows should be rated. So why wade into the debate at all?
Every time a Gore story breaks, we get a new piece in the great political puzzle of 1997: why the vice president gets pummeled in the polls while the president rides higher than ever. Some of it’s structural. The years 1984 and 1985 brought a bunch of articles (I wrote a couple myself in NEWSWEEK) about the sinking fortunes of the then Vice President Bush. It’s the same now. A re-elected president is a lame duck; there’s no percentage in blaming him. A veep is a sitting duck.
Some of it’s Schadenfreude. Who doesn’t crack a smile when the teacher’s pet is hauled into the principal’s office? Or root for the rogue to escape and the Boy Scout to get caught? And some of it goes back to childhood. Compared with Clinton, who honed his fine survival instincts growing up in a dysfunctional family and a treacherous Arkansas political world, Gore had it easy. He has less experience taking punches.
Gore has an agile mind and a quick thrust in debate, but he can look like a plodder: the linebacker in the Velcro jersey who’s slow to read which way the play is moving. His infamous ““no controlling legal authority’’ press conference is an example. The vice president isn’t patronizing, but he sometimes comes across that way in public. He enunciates as if he thinks the audience needs a little extra help to understand him. If that person doing sign language for the deaf decided to speak, odds are he’d sound like Al Gore.
Even if the economy hums, the shine is off the veep. His own mother, Pauline, once described him as a born conformist: ““He wanted to do what we wanted him to do.’’ But survival at the top takes different instincts. We’ll soon find out if he has them.
