by Scott Farris
He remained restless. He and his wife, Tipper, published a book on the American family in 2002. (The couple would separate in 2010.) Asked in 2007 when she and her husband got over the disappointment of 2000, Mrs. Gore looked at her watch and laughed, “What time is it now?” Trying to get her husband out of his funk, Mrs. Gore suggested he resurrect the slideshow he had originally prepared while writing Earth in the Balance. Always interested in new technology, Gore replaced the slideshow with computer graphics and began traveling the country, warning of the danger of global climate change that he attributed to humans spewing trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through our burning of carbon fuels.
The presentations were not reaching a large audience, and in the wake of 9/11, Americans seemed more concerned about security than a potential environmental catastrophe that few understood. Then, in April 2005, Gore gave his slideshow in Beverly Hills at the request of Hollywood producer Laurie David. In the audience was another producer, Lawrence Bender. Upon seeing Gore’s presentation, Bender thought, “This has got to be a movie.” As the movie was being filmed in the summer of that year, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and generated public debate on whether the world’s weather patterns were changing. The movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006, and by May it was widely distributed throughout America, becoming a surprise hit. It won the Oscar for best documentary film, and the companion book sold one million copies.
“Al Gore may have done for global warming what ‘Silent Spring’ did for pesticides,” wrote James Hansen, then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Admirers gushed that the formerly stiff and reserved Gore had undergone a “rediscovery of his hidden self.” No longer “a hamster locked in the cage of a broken political process,” Gore, who had so long played the role of “Dudley Do-Right,” was “generating far more political capital by breaking the political rules than he did by obeying them.”
He also seemed to be having fun. To continue to raise awareness of climate change, Gore helped produce “Live Earth,” a concert broadcast to all seven continents (including Antarctica) via satellite that featured some of the most popular music performers in the world. Seen in more than one hundred countries, it was estimated that one billion people saw at least part of the event.
Gore had long been interested in how new media could link people together as a community, particularly in the cause of democracy.34 Gore has called democracy a “conversation,” and he has charged television with destroying that conversation because it involves only one-way communication. He has noted that 80 percent of the money raised in political campaigns is spent on thirty-second television ads that are “a manipulative exercise utilizing the tools of persuasion.” Gore has said the goal of his Current TV project is the “democratization” of television news by providing alternative viewpoints to what is normally heard on network and cable news, including from the viewers themselves.
Here, Gore was echoing William Jennings Bryan as a sophisticated user and critic of the news media. Bryan, in order to have his own message delivered unfiltered to the masses, created his own newspaper, the Commoner. In one of his first editorials, Bryan, like Gore, said his use of the media was designed to urge the average citizen to join the cause and “contribute by brain and muscle to the nation’s strength and greatness.” The Commoner grew so large in circulation that, adjusted for the change in population, if around today it would dwarf the readership enjoyed by such influential publications as the Nation, the New Republic, and the National Review. Current TV has had a more modest start. Critics said some programming was so crude that it appeared to have been produced in someone’s basement, like the Saturday Night Live skit “Wayne’s World.” In prime time, in early 2011, its programming was viewed by only an average of twenty-six thousand households, but Gore announced plans to broaden the network’s appeal, in part by hiring populist broadcaster Keith Olbermann and populist filmmaker Michael Moore.
Gore’s faith in the project could not be discounted, for he had already attained the highly improbable when, in 2007, he won the biggest prize of all, the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gore’s winning the prize seemed to provide considerable momentum to address climate change in the United States. A significant number of states, particularly in New England and on the West Coast, were moving forward to develop a “cap and trade” program designed to put a price on carbon in order to reduce emissions.
There was optimism in 2008 that the federal government would also take action during the next administration as both the Republican presidential nominee, McCain, and the Democratic nominee, Obama, stated that they accepted the scientific explanation that climate change was occurring, that it was at least partially human-caused, and that, unabated, climate change could have devastating effects. But the world financial collapse and subsequent efforts to stimulate economic growth put climate change on the back burner. In addition to his attempts to stimulate the economy, President Obama used the bulk of his political capital to push through legislation to reform the nation’s health insurance system and dropped administration efforts to address climate change through legislation, though he did direct the Environmental Protection Agency to outline how carbon emissions could be reduced through regulation.
Meanwhile, McCain changed his view on climate change during the 2008 election and joined an increasing number of conservative Republicans who questioned the science—or who concluded the cure would be worse than the disease. Gore soldiered on, continuing his slideshow but with less acclaim than he had enjoyed a few years before.
The questioning by others of what he believed to be incontrovertible science particularly exasperated Gore. In 2007, he wrote a book titled The Assault on Reason in which he charged that, whether the issue was the environment or foreign policy, “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions.” This rejection of reason in favor of “the politics of fear” was one cause of an alleged decline in participation in the democratic process, Gore said. In the book’s conclusion, Gore quotes the Book of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It was an interesting bookend to Bryan’s planned summation at the Scopes Trial, which he ended up publishing as a newspaper editorial and which cited Christian dogma for another purpose: “It is not scientific truth to which Christians object, for true science is classified knowledge, and nothing therefore can be scientific unless it is true.”
The final legacies of Gore, Kerry, and McCain are unknown because they remain so active in public service as of this writing. If they continue to follow the forceful examples of Clay, Bryan, Stevenson, and the other men featured in this book, their legacies may be substantial indeed. More important, by resurrecting the notion that the loss of a presidential election should not be the end of an influential career in public service, they hopefully herald a renewed tradition in which the expertise of our unsuccessful presidential candidates continues to be tapped for the national benefit.
We have in our history often lamented that we do not make full and good use of our former presidents. They have learned so much from their experience in the White House as leader of the free world yet are so seldom sought out for further duty. The same can be said of our former presidential nominees. They, too, have had a unique experience. They have been tested by the rigors of a national campaign. They have traveled throughout the country and discussed issues and concerns with thousands of their fellow citizens. They enjoyed successful, even stellar careers as public servants before they were nominated, and they earned the political allegiance of tens of millions of voters while a presidential candidate.
And yet, for these past several decades, they have not been valued as elder statesmen and have seldom been asked to re-enter the debate with vigor in order to share their wisdom and expertise. More often, the
y have been shunted aside, ignored even by their own party like crazy uncles, and ridiculed simply because they did not win the greatest political prize, more likely to be seen on late night television as the butts of jokes than on Mount Rushmore as paragons of American achievement and citizenship. This was not always so. Before the age of television created the image of failure, a losing presidential candidate remained a revered figure, still venerated by many followers and still holding the promise of what might have been.
Al Smith once suggested that former presidential nominees be made honorary U.S. senators. Perhaps there is no need for something so formal. Perhaps, they simply need the cue from us, the public, that we respect what they have accomplished and that we want them to find other opportunities for continued service to the nation. That does not require us to wait for an act of Congress.
33 This was a problem that McCain and Gore faced as well, with McCain attending roughly twenty schools as the son of a roving naval officer and Gore being raised primarily in a Washington, D.C., hotel.
34 Gore was famously ridiculed for allegedly claiming to have “invented” the Internet. He made no such claim. He did author legislation, signed into law in 1991, that expanded access to the Internet, which had been solely the province of the federal government, to libraries and schools.
APPENDIX
Not every presidential nominee has had as great an impact on contemporary politics as those profiled in the previous chapters. Yet each man nominated for president was a distinguished public servant whose life is worthy of study. The following are sketches of these other men who were “almost president.”
THE THREE FEDERALISTS
1804, 1808, 1812, 1816
Because George Washington ran unopposed and Thomas Jefferson lost to John Adams but was later elected president, the United States did not have its first presidential “also ran” until 1804, when Jefferson walloped Charles Pinckney of South Carolina by a tally of 162–14 electoral votes. (The popular vote would not be widely used to help select the president until 1824.) Pinckney was the first of a series of essentially token presidential candidates put forward by the Federalists, who would be defunct a dozen years later as the United States drifted into one-party rule by Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans.
Active in South Carolina politics, Pinckney declined offers from Washington to be secretary of war and secretary of state, though he was Adams’s vice presidential running mate in 1800. Nominated by the Federalists for president again in 1808, he modestly improved his showing but was still defeated by James Madison by a better than two-to-one margin. Madison, a brilliant constitutional scholar and legislator but a mediocre president, had more difficulty winning re-election in 1812 over New York City mayor DeWitt Clinton.
Clinton, a renaissance man and visionary politician best known as the driving force behind the development of the Erie Canal, was also actually a Jeffersonian Republican, not a Federalist. But he had had a falling out with local Tammany Hall leaders and was lukewarm in supporting the War of 1812. Falsely viewing Clinton as a peace candidate (Clinton supported the war once it was declared), anti-war Federalists decided to put Clinton forward as their own presidential candidate. Clinton won more than 40 percent of the Electoral College vote, but after the election he returned to the Democratic-Republican fold and later became a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson.
The last Federalist candidate to run for president was former New York senator Rufus King in 1816. King had been the Federalists’ vice presidential nominee back in 1804 and was an early anti-slavery activist. King carried a handful of New England states in his losing campaign against James Monroe, but the Federalists were in such disarray that they could not even settle on a single vice presidential candidate, with votes split among three men.
The Federalists put forward no candidate in 1820, allowing Monroe to join Washington as the only people to run unopposed for president.
The Federalists’ demise has been blamed on many things. Skeptical of the wisdom of ordinary citizens, the party lost touch with the growing democratic sentiment in the nation. The Adams presidency, marred by passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, had been unsuccessful. The Federalists’ political and tactical genius, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in an 1804 duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Jefferson and Madison also absorbed some Federalist support as they federalized their own views when an exigency demanded it, such as Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory without consulting Congress.
The Federalists were badly discredited in January 1815, when Federalists vehemently opposed to the War of 1812 concluded a weeks-long convention in Hartford, Connecticut, where they discussed the possible secession of the New England states. Unfortunately for the Federalists, their convention coincided with Jackson’s great victory over the British at New Orleans and word that American diplomats had simultaneously concluded a peace treaty on honorable terms with Great Britain. The Federalists’ secessionist talk at the very moment of an American victory led their last few adherents to abandon the Federalists’ banner, and Federalist thinking would not emerge again as a distinct political philosophy until Henry Clay and Daniel Webster revived its nationalist elements within the new Whig Party.
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
Shaw Livermore, The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party, 1815–1830 (Gordian Press, New York, 1972).
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2009).
LEWIS CASS
1848
Lewis Cass was considered the nation’s leading expert on Native Americans, which remains a sad commentary on how little we understood (or still understand) our indigenous peoples. Cass’s writings on the subject led to his election to the American Philosophical Society, and his notes on Michigan’s tribes inspired Longfellow to write his poem, “Hiawatha.” Cass correctly lamented that Native Americans had suffered badly from contact with whites, through disease, alcoholism, and cultural demoralization, yet he was not above using whiskey to help secure lopsided treaties, such as persuading the Ottawa and Ojibwa to sell six million acres of land for three thousand dollars and the use of a blacksmith.
Initially, Cass argued against Indian removal as complicated, expensive, and inhumane. But he was a loyal Democrat. Selected as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, by 1830 he was forcefully arguing that separation was the humane course of action since Native Americans allegedly lacked the capacity to reason and assimilate into “civilization.” Cass oversaw Jackson’s brutal “Trail of Tears” Indian removal policy.
Born in New Hampshire in 1782, Cass moved west, studied law, and served in the Ohio Legislature, beginning fifty years in public service. He served with distinction during the War of 1812, earning the moniker of “General Cass.” In 1813, President Madison appointed him governor of the Michigan Territory, and it was in this post, held for eighteen years, that he did his most important work. As historian Walter A. McDougall has said, Cass “all but invented Michigan.” Curious, able, and courageous, Cass led expeditions that mapped the Michigan wilderness and its immense natural resources. Honest in the discharge of his duties, Cass nonetheless made a fortune in Detroit real estate.
Dedicated to learning, he founded the University of Michigan in 1817 and established a model public school system. By 1837, Michigan became a state, but only after a skirmish between Michigan and Ohio militia settled which state claimed Toledo. The incident led Ohioans to label their feisty neighbors “wolverines,” an appellation Michiganders enjoyed so much they made it their university’s mascot.
Having also served as President Martin Van Buren’s minister to France, Cass was given the Democratic nomination for president in 1848. Opposed to slavery in the
abstract but believing it necessary to maintain the Union, Cass, not Stephen Douglas, first developed the doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty.” Cass’s acceptance of slavery led Van Buren to bolt the party and run as the Free Soil Party candidate for president, which assured Whig candidate Zachary Taylor’s victory in the general election, although Cass carried as many states (fifteen) as Taylor did. Cass later served in the Senate and then as President Buchanan’s secretary of state. He died in 1866.
Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1996).
Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828 (Perennial, New York, 2004).
Andrew C. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass (Chelsea House, New York and London, 1980).
Joel H. Sibley, Party Over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848 (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2009).
WINFIELD SCOTT
1852
Few presidential losses have been of greater benefit to the United States than General Winfield Scott’s to Franklin Pierce in 1852, and not because Scott would have made a poorer president (Pierce was one of that office’s greater nonentities). Rather, the loss freed Scott to go back to what he did best: leading the Army of the United States and ultimately developing the Union strategy that won the Civil War.
Scott is not only arguably the greatest soldier America ever produced, but the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon, deemed him the world’s “greatest living soldier” after learning of Scott’s masterful capture of Mexico City against overwhelming odds during the Mexican-American War. Scott essentially created the modern American army and was the first soldier since Washington to earn the rank of lieutenant general. His rapid rise through the ranks was aided by his commanding physical presence; he stood six-feet-four-inches tall and in his prime weighed 230 pounds. Scott credited his mother, who raised Scott after his father died when he was six, for instilling in him the discipline and perseverance that made him a success.