From The Economist…
Al Gore shines by comparison with John Kerry
WHERE do Democratic presidential candidates end up? The answer, to judge from recent headlines, is that they go to global gabfests in posh skiing resorts. Al Gore was at Sundance the other week with the likes of Robert Redford, Paris Hilton and various film people who claim they are interested in “issues”. John Kerry was at Davos with the likes of Kofi Annan, Angelina Jolie and sundry slobbering journalists. The skiing was excellent in both places, we’re told; the networking was AU POINT; and the opportunities for meeting HOI POLLOI, other than as conveyors of drinks and canapes, just about zero.
It is easy to be cynical about the keenness of Messrs Gore and Kerry to discuss “the creative imperative” and other such tosh with their peers. After all, these are men cut from the same cloth, who have spent most of their life hobnobbing with whatever passes for the elite, even occasionally marrying them. They were both bred to be politicians. Mr Gore became a congressman at the age of 28, a senator at 36 and a presidential candidate at 39. Mr Kerry, who grew up thinking that the fact that his initials were JFK proved that he was destined for high office, was a leader of the anti-war movement at 27 (Richard Nixon charitably described him as a “phoney”, but an “effective” one).
And yet something extraordinary has happened over the past few years: the two men have started to become distinguishable. Mr Kerry remains a professional politician–the perpetual junior senator for Massachusetts, playing the pale thin man to Teddy Kennedy’s florid fat man. Conversely, he has also retained his tin ear for politics. Last week, he not only made the mistake of calling for a filibuster of Samuel Alito that had no chance of succeeding (to have any chance of making this archaic senatorial device work with a Supreme Court nominee, you first need to have demonised your victim); he also made the mistake of making that call from Davos.
From the perspective of Davos Man, this was doubtless an impressively global stunt (how Ms Jolie must have purred on the chairlift). But in the real world of American politics, it was disastrous. Scott McClellan, George Bush’s normally lacklustre press secretary, joked about it being “pretty serious yodelling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps”. The WALL STREET JOURNAL sniped that Mr Kerry had been “communing with his political base” in Davos. Democrats were furious. They saw it as a transparent play for support from the party’s over-excited activists, the insider turned calculating insurgent (Mr Kerry even wrote about the filibuster on a left-wing blog). Barack Obama, a newcomer to the Senate, said it was silly to oppose a nominee unless you’ve won the hearts and minds of the country. Mr Alito has now been confirmed for the Supreme Court, blue-collar America has been reminded why Democrats are not like them and Mr Kerry has confirmed his position as one of the perennial losers in American politics.
Mr Gore, by contrast, has morphed into a more interesting figure. The youngest presidential candidate from a major party since William Jennings Bryan, he has now abandoned the life of a professional politician for a portfolio career as part-time businessman and part-time tub-thumper. He calculates that he spends three-quarters of his time running his cable television project, Current TV, a sort of “Wayne’s World” for the digital age. Mockers may point out that most of Mr Gore’s original backers were big Democratic donors, that he had to give up his original idea of founding a liberal alternative to Fox News and that the channel now relies on help from Mr Gore’s political nemesis, Rupert Murdoch. But Current TV has developed into a genuine business rather than a political front.
It is ironic that a man who was once famous for his stiffness has embraced one of the most fluid forms in media; and rather odd that a man who was robbed of a normal youth by his father’s political ambition (the older Senator Gore boasted of raising his son for the White House) has plunged into youth television. But he has loosened up. Al the politician was wound up almost beyond endurance. (“How can you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret Service agents?”, went a popular joke. “Gore is the stiff one.”) The new Al is letting it all hang out. The evidence of this is partly physical: a man who was described as a “fantasy man” by FITNESS magazine in 1992 has ballooned. But it is more than that: Mr Gore is now quite a performer, a man who is no longer frightened of sweating and hollering.
LET IT ALL OUT, AL
Mr Gore now delivers no-holds-barred broadsides against the Bush administration for everything from Abu Ghraib to warrantless wiretaps. But the former vice-president is at his most impressive on his old passion–the environment. Wrongly or rightly, Mr Gore believes that humanity has only about a decade to fix a “planetary emergency”; and he has spent the past few years roaming the world perfecting his lecture-cum-slideshow on the dangers of global warming, much as Ronald Reagan spent the 1950s roaming America perfecting his speech on the evils of government. Mr Gore was at Sundance to promote a documentary based on his speech.Which points to an interesting paradox: Mr Gore is generating far more political capital by breaking the political rules than he did by obeying them. Mr Kerry’s Alito ploy looked brazenly political. But Mr Gore’s new persona (or perhaps, more accurately, his rediscovery of his hidden self) is causing something of a buzz. The party’s cash-rich Hollywood wing increasingly sees him as a liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton; and he is persuading all sorts of people to take a fresh look at Dudley Do Right. None of this means that he is a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. But it does mean that he is far better placed than the junior senator from Massachusetts.