How Gore did it
IN retrospect, it was a great advantage for Al Gore that one of his chief vulnerabilities was another person: Bill Clinton. All it took for Gore to improve his standing with the public was to say, “Look, I’m not him.” And he did. First, he selected as his running mate Joe Lieberman, whose scolding of the president, followed by acquittal votes on both impeachment counts, qualified him for the ticket in two ways: It gave Lieberman the requisite distance from Clinton, and it showed that his “independence of mind” wouldn’t get in the way of his partisanship. Then, there was The Kiss, of which Bill and Hillary would have been constitutionally incapable (holding hands in times of dire political peril seems as far as they can go). Finally, at the Los Angeles convention, Gore declared himself “his own man.”
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