11/10/00 5:35 p.m.
The Agony of Al Gore
Perhaps this is the worst fate of all for Al Gore.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor-------------------------------------richardlowry@hotmail.com

ill Turque recounts an anecdote about Al Gore's father at the 1956 convention. Gore Sr. was angling to become Adlai Stevenson's running mate. He thought he had the spot sewn up, but Stevenson unexpectedly decided to let the convention make the pick. Turque writes:

Gore scrambled for support. George Reedy, a former Johnson aide, remembered seeing the senator in such a frenzy that at first he didn't recognize him. "A man came running up to us…. His eyes were glittering. He was mumbling something that sounded like 'Where is Lyndon? Where is Lyndon? Adlai's thrown this open, and I think I've got a chance for it if I can only get Texas….' I have never seen before or since such a complete, total example of a man so completely and absolutely wild with ambition. It had literally changed his features."

I thought of this anecdote often while watching Gore in the campaign's final days: his face puffy and his eyes watery from lack of sleep, his fists flailing away constantly, as he made his pledges to fight and fight and fight. In these final, desperate moments, Gore was very much his father's son. And somehow I don't doubt his features are — perhaps in a less manic way — just as distorted during deliberations over how to handle his election challenge, twisted by the depths of his determination to achieve his daddy's ambition for him. Even if it means a constitutional crisis.

One strange thing — among many — about Al Gore is that he may not have wanted, really, to be a politician. But, of course, he was raised for it. In a piece on two recent Gore biographies in The New York Review of Books, Lars Erik Nelson refers to Gore's politician-in-training upbringing as "child abuse." David Maraniss speculates in his biography that if Gore had lost his first congressional race, he probably would have quit politics forever.

But he won, and would give his life over to it entirely, despite how unnatural he seemed, despite his lack of connection with people — there's a reason President Clinton thinks that Gore is better suited for academia. Gore himself sometimes seemed to think this. The introduction to Earth in the Balance, written after his failed 1988 presidential bid, contains passages flagellating himself, basically, for being a politician.

Everyone talks of how hard Gore would have taken a loss this year, of how devastating it would have been. But maybe it would have come as a release. Now, he's stuck in between, such a close loss (seemingly) that he can't help continuing to claw for it, so close that he may still have a future in Democratic presidential politics. Perhaps this is the worst fate of all for Al Gore, locked indefinitely in an embrace with his own, and his father's, ambition.

As we'll see again in coming days, it's a not pretty sight. And when Gore writes his inevitable soul-searching Earth in the Balance-style memoir once he retires from politics, the chapter piously regretting how he prompted a constitutional crisis will be a real page-turner.