Asked on Meet the Press yesterday about Mike Pence’s role in counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes, Al Gore sneered: “In the current environment, just doing what the law and the Constitution requires seems heroic to some.” Gore even had the audacity to try to take a little credit for being a role model to Pence: “You know, he was a freshman congressman sitting in the chamber when I counted the electoral votes in early January of 2001.”
This takes some serious chutzpah. First, when Bill Clinton committed multiple federal felonies in office, Gore not only refrained from criticizing his boss, he held a pep rally for him on the White House lawn. If Gore had not been a willing enabler of his boss’s sexually predatory activities, he might well have become president. It is easy and comfortable for Gore to engage in le courage de l’escalier two decades later, but would Gore have had the fortitude to stand against his own party’s president and a screaming mob of his own party’s activists? Color me unconvinced.
Second, of course, Gore did a lot to create the world in which what Trump did was thinkable — and the fact that Gore didn’t go as far as Trump did down that road doesn’t excuse what he did to start us down this road. No presidential candidate since 1876 had seriously challenged the outcome of an American presidential election. Gore’s legally meritless six-week assault on the vote count dragged the country through a constitutional and public crisis and deliberately cast a pall over the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, to the point that multiple major figures in the Democratic Party treated Bush as having stolen the election, and do so to this day; this set a template for widespread Democratic attacks on the legitimacy of the next Republican president after Bush. Gore fretting publicly about all of this now has the air of “Dr. Frankenstein speaks against monsters.”