by Sarah Vowell
We get to the muddy Mall just as Chief Justice William Rehnquist is swearing in Dick Cheney as vice president. From where we stand, the men are faraway specks. But, thanks to the CNN JumboTron, their faces are bigger than the Capitol dome. Rehnquist, as one of the five Supreme Court justices who effectively gave Bush the presidency, was a particular object of the group’s e-mail scorn. We all boo him. Then we boo Dick Cheney. Or rather, I would like to think that it’s nothing personal, that we are booing the fishy process that got him here. Staff Sergeant Alec T. Maly of the United States Army Band sings “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” I’m stunned when Kevin boos him too. I ask him, “You’re booing the army guy? You’re booing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’? Are we against everything now?” Yes, he answers, we’re against everything, and boos louder.
George W. Bush places his hand on the same Bible that George Washington placed his hand on in 1789 and repeats after Rehnquist that he will “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I’m sure he means it, if he’s actually thinking about it, but it’s reassuring to have that underground vault at the National Archives as a backup.
I told myself I came down to “protest.” But I choose to display my dissent by bursting into tears as Bush finishes up his oath. Alas, my tears are my picket sign.
It’s happened. It’s over. He’s it.
Once, I was prepared for this, even looking forward to it. Because before I am a Democratic nerd, I am a civics nerd first and last. Back before election day, there was a part of me—the part of myself I don’t like—that harbored a secret, perverse desire that Bush would defeat Gore. Because a Bush victory, I thought, would offer me four illustrious years of taking the high road. I would be dignified. I would be wise. Unlike my Republican brethren, who pooh-poohed Bill Clinton’s legitimacy from the get-go—Texas Congressman Dick Armey, speaking to Democratic colleagues, referred to him as “your” president—I would be a bigger person. During the Clinton era, being a civics nerd of any political stripe was like having the school bully paste a “Kick Me” sign on your back every day year after year. In my preelection daydream of what a Bush presidency might be like, I imagined that I would criticize his policies and lambaste his statements with a civic-minded nobility. All my venom, spite, and, as long as we’re dreaming, impeccable logic, would be directed at our president. As in “Look how our president is wrecking our country.”
Making my pompous little fantasy come true, however, hinged on one thing—a majority of people voting for Bush. Not only did he lose the popular vote by more than half a million ballots but he essentially won the electoral college by a single vote—that of the fifth Supreme Court justice who decided to halt the Florida recounts. So now what?
The CNN camera pans around the dais. Seeing Bush embrace his ex-president father, seeing him shaking the now ex-president Clinton’s hand, seeing Gore clapping like a sad, good sport, all makes me cry harder. About the only person up there I find myself happy to look at is the former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole. I’ve developed a soft spot for Dole because he symbolizes a simpler, more innocent time in America when you could lose the presidential election and, like, not actually become the president.
Once he’s back home in his apartment, Kevin sends an e-mail to those in our group who didn’t come with us, describing what being on the Mall was like:
Nearby, a pro-Bush family prayed with their heads down, holding hands, while the chaplains gave the invocation and the blessing. I found myself looking down, too, at all the mud on the Mall, and thinking about how young the country was. This was, after all, the primeval mud of our soggy capital, sunk into a Maryland swamp that everyone—diplomats, presidents, congressmen—used to complain about in the early decades of Washington’s existence. There were plans in the mid-nineteenth century to really landscape the Mall—to turn it into some ingeniously planned English-style facsimile of nature, much like Central Park. But the landscape architect they hired died in a spectacular steamboat crash on the Hudson, and they never did get around to putting his plan in place. Instead, the Mall remains an intriguingly blank, muddy expanse, a sort of parade ground of democracy, and we all just stood out there to hear the speech.
The colossal head of Bush—President Bush—delivers his Inaugural Address on the JumboTron. It is not terrible. I find myself begrudgingly agreeing with most of it, though it will be weeks before I feel adult enough to admit that out loud. He says that the story of America is “the story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom.” I can’t stomach unquestioning jingoism today, so I’m relieved that he refers to the slaves. That’s where my head’s at right now—that mentioning the slaves would cheer me up. It’s a reminder that, hey, we enslaved people, we deserve to have this guy be our president.
This part of Bush’s speech isn’t bad:
While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country.
That line about not sharing a country is about the only time Bush even halfway alludes to the warring throng before him. After he finishes, Jack and I will trudge to the Lincoln Memorial to read the Second Inaugural Address carved into the wall. Bush thinks he’s got problems? In his speech of March 4, 1865, Lincoln asked his countrymen “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” He recapped the still raging Civil War in point-blank terms, as if to say, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how much we loathe each other.” The speech’s bravery derives from its very honesty. I think it’s a mistake that Bush doesn’t similarly come clean. How many furious citizens might have given him the benefit of the doubt if he just said that he sees us, if he just buttered us up a little, pronouncing that he knows he didn’t get our votes but he will try to earn our trust? Well, Kevin wouldn’t have bought it, but the rest of us suckers might have cut the new president some slack for a day or two.
PART TWO Nerds v. Jocks
On inauguration day, when Jack and I were walking down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, past all the giggling Republican faces, it felt like being stuck inside the cover of that old Frank Sinatra album No One Cares. It’s the one where there’s a party going on and all the partygoers are smiling and dressed up and dancing, but Sinatra sits all alone at the bar, sighing into his whiskey glass. He has his coat on and he looks like he’s remembering better times.
I was once a Washington intern, back when being a Washington intern was a goody-goody, model-citizen thing for a young lady to do. It was during the Clinton administration’s bubbly first year. I moved into my new Adams-Morgan apartment the night before Yitzhak Rabin shook Yasir Arafat’s hand for the first time on the White House lawn. I thought I could feel the world being saved a few Metro stops away. Looking at all the gleeful partisans on Bush’s inauguration day took me back, that feeling of, Washington is ours! Oh, how my friends and I once cooed with excitement in the fall of ’93 when we were seated at brunch a couple of tables over from George Stephanopoulos. All the other nubile New Democrats were smitten with George, though I myself had a little crush on the sad-eyed economic adviser Robert Rubin.
I had looked forward to Gore’s Washington. With Gore running the country, it would be different. I would feel even more at home. Clinton had appealed to the rock ’n’ roller in me, the part of me that went to Graceland and cried when Kurt Cobain died and thinks about James Brown’s hair. But Gore appeals to the real me, the one who can still sing a song from college German class about which prepositions to use with the accusative case—“Durch, für, gegen, ohne, um: Akkusativ.”
Gore’s pencil neck tugs at my nerdy soul. I think the most lovable thing he has ever said can be found in a sentence in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. On page 67, he asks, “What happened to the
climate in Yucatán around 950?” Something about the specifics of that query lit me up. For the first time, I could see casting my ballot for a man who would pose such a question. It was just so boldly arcane. The kind of mind that would wonder about temperature variations on a Caribbean peninsula a thousand years ago might have the stomach to look into any number of Americans’ peculiar concerns. Paradoxically, this fervor for scientific facts—the thing that alienates him from voters because they see him as cold—requires no small amount of passion. You don’t write a four-hundred-page book about ecology unless you have the heart.
Of course, Gore being Gore, he doesn’t write just about what he knows. Gore being Gore, he is compelled to confess the dweebish details of how he learned what he knows. Earth in the Balance features countless hints that his life is an ongoing study hall: “Since that time, I have watched the Mauna Loa reports every year” or “Beginning in January 1981, I spent many hours each week for more than thirteen months intensively studying the nuclear arms race.” January 1981 he says—I bet it was his New Year’s resolution. Every other member of Congress was vowing to cut back on the hookers, but then-Senator Gore probably French-kissed Tipper at midnight and made a mental pledge to really get a handle on those ICBMs.
This is the Gore of the first presidential debate with Bush, the sighing, eye-rolling, eager beaver, buttinsky Gore, interrupting Bush to ask the moderator, Jim Lehrer, “Can I have the last word on this?” Ross G. Brown commented in the Los Angeles Times, “Gore studied hard and was thoroughly prepared for the televised civics and government quizzes each debate provided. A teacher might have given him an A. But much of the rest of the class just wanted to punch Mr. Smarty-Pants in the nose.”
“I didn’t think of Gore this way,” my friend Doug told me on the phone one day, “but he was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you’re not smart. You’re a smarty-pants. It’s annoying. People get annoyed with knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework. Everyone knows what that’s like. ‘Time to hand in your assignments.’ And that dread of ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t do my assignment.’ It calls that back. It’s this feeling of ‘There’s something I should know. I don’t know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don’t. So I’m going to have to make fun of him now.’”
Before and after the election, I found myself having versions of this conversation again and again. “One of the frustrations about Al Gore,” explained my friend John not long after the election, “is that he’s uniquely qualified to be president by having the actual equivalent of street knowledge. He knows how the system works. I remember seeing an interview with him on TV, it might have been a Nova episode on global warming in the mid-eighties. It was basically the first time I had ever heard of global warming. And Gore was the young senator from Tennessee. He very articulately explained what politics is. Politics is people worrying about next year and right now. The problem you have when the more you know about global warming as a politician is the more you realize you can’t do anything with it. Experts bombard you with cold, hard facts about what’s going to happen fifteen years from now. You look at your children. You know they’re going to be living in that world. You can see the train coming down the track. Gore said one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t run on that because the public is not interested in wisdom and the public is not wise. The public is actually reactive. So unless you can create it as a scenario that’s going to work for them right now, it’s just something you have to do behind the scenes. You have to figure out how to sell your idea to people within the system. And I just thought that’s the most thoughtful assessment of the nature of that kind of political problem. He was a young guy. He was really casual and super savvy about it. I just thought, Wow, that guy should be president! Later on, this election, he couldn’t even be who he was. He couldn’t say, ‘I know a lot about this shit!’ Because you can’t say that you know a lot about something or people will think you’re uppity.”
This is the subtext of the Gore campaign’s press coverage. Writing about a man who knows so much and who isn’t shy about sharing his knowledge must have gotten on a lot of journalistic nerves. Recalling Gore’s press conferences, Eric Pooley of Time wrote, “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some helpless nerd.” Right after the election, a search on the Nexis journalism database for the following terms revealed these results. For “Al Gore and nerd,” 804 articles. For “Al Gore and geek,” 826 articles. For “Al Gore and dork,” 136. For “Al Gore and Poindexter,” 110. For “Al Gore and homework,” 966. Searches for “George W. Bush and” the words dumb, stupid, and idiot were unable to be completed because those queries “will return more than 1,000 documents.” All of which was distilled perfectly in the election day headline in the London Daily Mail, “The Nerd Versus the Nincompoop.”
To be clear, I believe Al Gore technically won the 2000 presidential election. What baffles me is how close an election it was considering the simple, gaping chasm between the two candidates’ qualifications. Compare their résumés. Gore served in the Congress, as both a representative and a senator, for sixteen years. As vice president, he helped mastermind the country’s most successful economic expansion. He is an expert on environmental issues, foreign policy, military technology, and the digital communications industry. Before Bush was a two-term governor, he was a late-blooming, failed oilman who lucked out owning a baseball team.
In the televised presidential debates, Bush did well enough on general questions from his platform, but on a complicated question about what the United States should do if ousted Serbian President Milosevic refused to leave office, Bush said he would ask the Russians to lead the charge. Vice President Gore replied,
Now I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved, and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize Kostunica as the lawful winner of the election, I’m not sure that it’s right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this dispute there because we might not like the result that comes out of that. They currently favor going forward with a runoff election. I think that’s the wrong thing. I think the governor’s instinct is not necessarily bad because we have worked with the Russians in a constructive way in Kosovo, for example, to end the conflict there. But I think we need to be very careful in the present situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in mediating.
BUSH: Well, obviously we wouldn’t use the Russians if they didn’t agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.
GORE: Well, they don’t.
I don’t understand why Gore didn’t secure a landslide right then and there. On knowledge alone, it was a no-brainer. So why couldn’t Gore carry his own home state of Tennessee, much less sweep the rest of the country? Clearly, it has something to do with who he is as a person, and who he is as a person is a big honking nerd. Nobody minds this in a vice president. The vice presidency is actually a nerd’s perfect job. A sidekick is supposed to be a bigger geek than the star. Like in the teen TV drama My So-Called Life, when the dreamboat boy Jordan Catalano gets the telephone number of a girl he doesn’t know in two seconds flat, the nerd Brian Krakow asks him, “This is, like, how you live?” How many times Gore must have wanted to ask that question of Clinton, with the sidekick’s tone of disdain mixed with awe.
The one time I ever saw Al Gore in person was during the 2000 primary. I attended his performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Gore narrated Copland’s piece, which sets Lincoln’s writings to orchestral accompaniment. It is possible that easily a third of the audience was there to have some fun at Gore’s expense. But there was something quaintly reassuring about the way the crowd clapped—some even stood—out of respect for his office, which, lest we forget, is only respect for the electorate and its
judgment. Even in cool New York, Americans are not above a little “He’s here!” excitement, even over the then—vice president, a man who once joked about himself that Al Gore is so boring his Secret Service name is Al Gore.
The Lincoln Portrait has a long instrumental introduction, which provided ample opportunity to watch Gore wait and wait and wait for his turn to speak. It was like watching the institution of the vice presidency in action. This must be what it’s been like for him all these patient years, listening to someone else’s noise until it’s finally his cue.
Gore, who sat in profile next to the conductor, Leon Botstein, looked like the head on a coin. Which is to say he never looked more presidential. It’s an easy trick to come off dignified while wearing a nice blue suit in front of tuxedo-clad violinists and orating the words of Lincoln. Then again, orating the words of Lincoln is itself a gamble. Who could begin to compare? The music on the stage wasn’t coming from the woodwinds. It was coming from the page, from the grave, from the rhythm of “new birth of freedom” and the melody that “we cannot escape history.” Hearing words like that spoken by a presidential candidate was especially striking in the primary season. The practicality of the campaigners, Gore included, was mind numbing. They seemed to think of the American people as a bunch of penny-pinching misers who hoard their precious votes for the candidate who might save us forty bucks a year on the 1040EZ.