Almost President

by Scott Farris

  In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry famously asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” But he also earned the enmity of many veterans and others when he alleged that American atrocities in Vietnam were not isolated incidents, but were widespread, systemic war crimes that represented the “accepted policy” of the U.S. military and government.

  Kerry used his renown as an anti-war activist to launch a political career. He chose Massachusetts as his home, though in his second bid for Congress he betrayed his lack of roots by establishing residence in three separate congressional districts while he mulled which one to run in. Choosing the Fifth Congressional District, Kerry tried to connect with district residents when he proclaimed, “I learned to walk in the Fifth District,” a reference to the year his family lived there when he was a toddler.

  After losing congressional races in 1970 and 1972, Kerry took a ten-year break from electoral politics while he finished law school and became a prosecutor. In 1982, he was elected Massachusetts’s lieutenant governor and two years later was elected to the U.S. Senate. For twenty-five years, Kerry seemed “the perpetual junior senator from Massachusetts” as he served in the shadow of the state’s senior senator, Edward Kennedy. Never particularly interested in legislation, Kerry instead led investigations into U.S. foreign policy. His efforts helped spur congressional inquiry into what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Later, he and McCain, bonded by their war experience, spearheaded the effort to normalize relations with Vietnam.

  Kerry’s fascination with foreign affairs led to some snide remarks back in Massachusetts that Kerry had become “senator for the world.” At times, he seemed the caricature of a senator, a man with a stentorian speaking style that struck many as pompous. His positions were often so nuanced that it seemed he could argue both sides of an issue with equal conviction with one journalist concluding, “He lacks a center of gravity.” In 2004, however, he seemed the ideal presidential nominee for the Democrats.

  The circumstances around the 2000 election immediately gave Democrats high hopes of recapturing the White House in 2004 as George W. Bush entered office in controversy and his term began sluggishly. Then, on September 11, 2001, Islamic extremists from the group Al-Qaeda flew hijacked commercial airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while a fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All told, some three thousand people were killed in the terrorist attacks, and the nation rallied to Bush and his call to take the fight to the perpetrators of this evil act.

  Bush had widespread support for attacking Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda’s leaders were believed to be hiding with the support of that nation’s Taliban government. But when Bush then expanded the war to include Iraq, even though there was no provable link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks, his support began to erode. American forces had quickly overrun Iraq and deposed its dictator, Saddam Hussein, but the United States government seemed unprepared for what to do with Iraq once it was conquered. An insurgency against the American occupation would eventually claim the lives of more than four thousand American servicemen and women.

  But the Democrats were wary of being too aggressive in challenging Bush and the wars. In 2002, Republicans had made electoral gains by charging Democratic candidates with being weak on what Bush termed “the war on terror.” Even Georgia Democratic senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm as a soldier in the Vietnam War, was defeated for re-election after his patriotism was challenged because he had questioned the constitutionality of some Bush policies. Democrats wanted a presidential candidate who could correct the course of U.S. foreign policy but be inoculated against charges of being unpatriotic. Kerry, the former war hero turned anti-war activist, fit the image.

  Kerry reinforced the desired narrative in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, which he began with a sharp salute and the greeting, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.” Not surprisingly, the service records of Kerry and Bush immediately were scrutinized. Kerry seemed dumbfounded that his record was challenged by veterans still angry about his earlier allegations of atrocities committed by U.S. GIs, while Bush seemed to get a pass for sitting out the war while in the National Guard.

  Kerry’s greater problem, however, was public unease about his authenticity. Most famously, in explaining his nuanced position on the war in Iraq, Kerry explained, “I voted for the bill before I voted against it,” which might be understood in the context of a discussion of Robert’s Rules of Order, but which in a presidential campaign made Kerry seem indecisive and insincere. Still, Kerry would have been president had he been able to carry Ohio. Instead, Bush eked out a narrow win with 50.7 percent of the popular vote.

  Having come so close, Kerry intended to seek the Democratic nomination again in 2008, but, as recent presidential losers have discovered, there was little enthusiasm for a second Kerry candidacy and what little there was evaporated as a result of what Kerry called “a botched joke.” Speaking to a group of California college students in October 2006, Kerry said, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Republicans immediately charged Kerry with insulting American troops by suggesting that they were serving only because they were poor students. Kerry explained that he had left out the key word “us,” as in “you get us stuck in Iraq,” an allusion to Bush allegedly lacking the smarts to avoid an unnecessary war. But even Democrats criticized the remark and distanced themselves from Kerry, going so far as to cancel campaign appearances with him. A few months later, Kerry announced he would not be a candidate for president in 2008.

  Instead, he became a key early supporter of Obama, who was engaged in a tremendous battle for the Democratic nomination with New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Obama aides gushed that Kerry was “doing everything he’s asked and keeping his advice confidential.” Kerry even became a point man in attacking McCain, the man he had asked to be his running mate just four years before. He charged McCain with taking “the low road express” in his campaign against Obama. Pundits were amazed that the usually circuitous and long-winded Kerry now spoke for Obama “in more forceful terms than he’d ever used during [his own] presidential campaign.”

  Kerry had hoped his service in the campaign would lead to his appointment as secretary of state. But, like Stevenson, he was passed over for the post when Obama tapped Hillary Clinton instead. Kerry then threw himself into his duties as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. In explaining his new sense of purpose, a Kerry advisor said, “I think he’s decided that he wants to be a senator.” Kerry received kudos for his deftness in handling a variety of foreign policy crises. In 2009, he personally helped avert even more chaos in Afghanistan when he persuaded Afghan president Hamid Karzai to agree to a runoff election after an earlier election had been marred by allegations of fraud. The result was hailed as a “diplomatic triumph” for Kerry and led some to suggest that Obama was now using him as a “de facto secretary of state,” an assertion that Kerry, formerly known for his tendency toward “self-aggrandizement,” dismissed as inappropriate.

  Kerry continued to represent American interests in additional crises, including the popular uprisings against Arab dictatorships in 2011, and he was widely credited with playing a critical role in finally securing Senate ratification of a new arms control treaty with Russia. These efforts and their results led to speculation that Kerry might yet join Hughes, Bryan, James G. Blaine, Lewis Cass, and Clay by someday becoming the first losing presidential candidate in more than three-quarters of a century to serve as secretary of state.

  Born into privilege, Gore, Kerry, and McCain were also born with extremely high expectations that they would make their mark upon the world. Friends and observers even speculated that the los
s of the presidency was actually a liberating experience for each man. Freed from the weight of obligation their upbringing had forced upon them, they could now do what they wanted to do and pursue their interests and passions unfettered by political calculation. This theory seemed especially true of Gore, who was molded from birth by his ambitious parents to become president of the United States just as surely as Tiger Woods was groomed to be a golf prodigy. When Gore was tapped to be Bill Clinton’s running mate in 1992, his beaming father, former three-term Tennessee senator Albert Gore Sr., gushed, “We raised him for it!”

  Earnest, dutiful, and clean-cut, Gore has been described as “an old person’s idea of a young person.” It was to serve and please his father that Gore entered the Army. His father was facing a tough fight for re-election in 1970, and Gore did not want his father having a son of draft age who avoided military service to be a campaign issue. Gore was one of only about a dozen young men out of a graduating class of more than eleven hundred at Harvard who would serve in Vietnam. Gore did not see combat but served in Vietnam as a military journalist. After the war, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Nashville Tennessean, earned his law degree, and studied at divinity school. He won his first congressional seat in 1976, moved up to the Senate in 1984, and was pressured by his father to run for president in 1988 even though he was only thirty-nine years old. Gore Sr., then eighty years old, did not want to die before seeing his son elected president.

  Having lost the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination to Dukakis, Gore was mulling whether to pursue the presidency again in 1992 when he experienced what he described as a life-altering event. In April 1989, while leaving a Baltimore Orioles baseball game with his family, his six-year-old son Albert broke free from his grasp, ran into the street, and was hit by a car, sustaining life-threatening injuries. While helping to nurse his son back to health, Gore thought more deeply about what moved him and what he wanted to accomplish in the world. He had once considered himself a leading congressional expert on environmental issues. He realized that environmentalism was the international concern he most cared about, and so he began researching and writing a book with the working title The New World War.

  Gore had first learned about the problem of global warming as an undergraduate at Harvard from professor Roger Revelle, the first scientist to catalogue the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to chart its apparent impact. The theory, endorsed by the bulk of the world’s climatologists, is that greenhouse gases, most especially carbon dioxide, are entering the earth’s atmosphere at record levels because of humans burning carbon fuels for energy and transportation. These gases trap heat in the atmosphere, raising the average global temperature, which has a number of potential impacts, including melting the polar ice caps, thereby raising the world’s sea level, and changing weather patterns to devastating effect.

  Working without a ghostwriter, Gore began what came to be titled Earth in the Balance in the fall of 1989, and the book was published in January 1992. Drawing on his time in divinity school, Gore, a Baptist, infused the work with spiritual musings and biblical quotations that direct humanity to care for creation. His main recommendation was for the multinational creation and funding of a “Global Marshall Plan” to educate the public about the dangers of climate change and overpopulation, and to fund investment in new technologies to replace the internal combustion engine. The book was well reviewed and became a best seller.

  But his father’s dream intruded again when Clinton chose Gore to be his vice president. Following the model established by Mondale, Gore was an active and influential vice president. Clinton had chosen him, not only because they were in sync as moderate, young, Southern Democrats, but also because he was told Gore was loyal and would never embarrass him in public. Gore could not say the same of Clinton. While publicly he remained loyal to the president during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and ensuing impeachment trial, privately Gore indicated to aides that he knew Clinton had lied to him when he said he had not had sex with Lewinsky, a White House intern.

  When it was confirmed that Clinton had lied about having an affair with Lewinsky, Gore, partly out of political calculation and partly because of his own rectitude, made the fateful decision to disassociate himself from Clinton when he ran for president in 2000. He declined to involve Clinton in campaign strategy, and he declined to have Clinton campaign on his behalf. His choice of a running mate, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, the first practicing Jew to ever serve on a national ticket, was also seen as a rebuke to Clinton because Lieberman had been among the most vocal Democrats in condemning Clinton’s behavior. Gore even declined to run on Clinton’s record of peace and prosperity that he could have plausibly argued was his record as well. Gore, after all, had done an especially fine job heading up the administration’s “reinventing government” initiative that reduced the size of the federal civilian workforce by more than four hundred thousand positions. Instead, Gore rejected Clinton’s governing philosophy of centrist “triangulation” and adopted an aggressive populist tone, which he labelled—in shades of Bryan—a fight between “the people vs. the powerful.”

  In hindsight, it was the wrong strategy for the wrong time. The 1990s had been a time of exceptional economic growth and one of the key points of debate in 2000 was how to spend (or not spend) the new federal budget surplus. It was not a period of deep class resentment. Gore had also misjudged public sentiment regarding Clinton. Certainly, almost everyone disapproved of the president’s dalliance with a young woman half his age—and doing so right in the White House—but in impeaching the president, a majority of the public believed Republicans in Congress had gone too far. Gore’s populist message also did not match up well against his opponent. The affable Bush had pledged to govern as a “compassionate conservative”; he was not a reactionary who spurred deep anxiety among the working-class.

  Yet, Gore still won! The popular vote, that is, by a margin of a half-million votes. He did not win the presidency, however.

  On election night, it all came down to the state of Florida. More than six million ballots had been cast in the state. Initially, the television networks called the state for Gore, then reversed themselves a few hours later and called it for Bush. Gore immediately placed a congratulatory call to Bush. Perhaps he was simply trying to do the right thing, the gracious thing. Perhaps he understood that he was only fifty-two years old and would have time to try again, and did not want to be labeled a sore loser. Whatever his motivation, the call was reported in all the news outlets and it appeared the election was over.

  But as Gore was travelling to downtown Nashville to give his public concession speech, his staff intercepted him with news that Bush’s winning margin in Florida had been shrinking throughout the night and early morning hours. The last count had Bush ahead by only a few hundred votes. Further, there were reports of widespread problems during balloting, particularly in Palm Beach County, where the design of the ballot had confused elderly voters and had reportedly prevented them from casting their votes as they intended for Gore. Gore retracted his telephoned concession to Bush.

  The premature concession was probably Gore’s largest tactical mistake. Once he had conceded, in the public’s mind, it was now up to Gore to provide the incontrovertible evidence that the result already reported by the networks should be reversed. Gore, repeating the mistake made by Samuel Tilden in 1876, also initially tackled the problem as if it were technical or legal in nature, rather than an extension of the political campaign. The Republicans were much more successful in characterizing the dispute as sour grapes from a Democratic ticket they gleefully labeled “Sore-Loserman.” Gore also faced a serious obstacle in that the chief election official in Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was an ambitious Republican and the state’s governor, Jeb Bush, was Bush’s brother.

  Democratic appointees, however, dominated the Florida Supreme Court. That court was willing to allow a reco
unt of ballots in three counties selected by Gore as having the greatest likelihood of ballot problems. This was a third tactical mistake. In not simply calling for a statewide recount, it appeared Gore was trying to “cherry pick” those counties where he expected to pick up votes, while Republicans said Gore was passing over counties where a recount might favor Bush.

  Unlike 1876, when there had been an electoral commission consisting of members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, this time the Supreme Court alone intervened in the case. On a partisan 5-4 vote, the court halted the Florida recount, allowing the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to award the state’s electoral votes to Bush, ending the election on December 12, 2000. The court indicated that its decision was “limited to the present circumstances” and created no precedent for how future courts might decide a similar impasse.

  The next day, Gore gave a remarkably cheerful and upbeat concession speech. He said he had called Bush to congratulate him on “becoming” president, adding, “And I promised I wouldn’t call him back this time.” Gore quoted Stephen Douglas’s pledge to Abraham Lincoln upon losing the 1860 presidential election, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you Mr. President, and God bless you.” After urging his supporters and the nation to rally around the new president, Gore announced, “It’s time for me to go.”

  For the first year after his loss in 2000, Gore “disappeared so completely from national life that people thought of putting his face on milk cartons,” joked a New York Times writer. He grew a beard and gained weight. According to one of his key political consultants, Bob Shrum, Gore had already decided he would never again run for president, but publicly he insisted he was keeping his options open. By late summer 2001, he prepared to re-enter the debate and planned to attack some of Bush’s policies in a speech to Iowa Democrats when the terrorists attacked on 9/11. Gore changed his speech to pledge his support for Bush “in this time of crisis.”