Al Gore Was Such a Good Sport to Give In Gracefully – Really?

The Washington Post, conveyor of the conventional wisdom, has just printed a telling testament to how Beltway culture functions. It is an op-ed by Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant who has purportedly seen the light and has now denounced the GOP. In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign, we’ve seen a fair number of people like Stevens warn us about their former party (as if we needed a reminder), and they’ve gone on to form organizations like the Lincoln Project, of which Stevens is senior advisor.

An unusually large number of these converts are political consultants—and they make up the bulk of the Lincoln Project’s leadership. For those of us who have worked in government and tried to stay honest, political consultants represent the lowest form of animal life in the Beltway ecosystem; we regarded them with about as much affection as we reserve for the invasive Burmese Python. For a consultant like Stevens to have moral qualms about the behavior of politicians is as remarkable as a drug dealer cutting public service announcements about preventing substance abuse.

Stevens tells us that we should look with fond respect on Al Gore, the presidential candidate who so gracefully conceded the 2000 election despite having more popular votes and despite the fact that Florida, where the election was decided, was legitimately in play even as the Supreme Court issued its diktat that George W. Bush had won the election.

It is by no means clear that Gore lost that election. It is by no means certain that the U.S. Supreme Court, a court now widely seen as illegitimate and out of control, was acting in a nonpartisan manner even then.

Gore, says Stevens, did the decent thing by conceding the election gracefully, so unlike the crude vulgarians around Donald Trump in 2020. Gore represented the spirit of civic democracy, now under threat by MAGA. That’s easy to say for Stevens, who profited from his relationship with the Bush administration.

But might we suppose that the maintenance of a healthy democracy should require a little more controversy, a little more getting one’s hands dirty, even a little more rancor, especially if one’s cause is just? It is by no means clear that Gore lost that election. It is by no means certain that the U.S. Supreme Court, a court now widely seen as illegitimate and out of control, was acting in a nonpartisan manner even then. It is definitely not assured that George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, who happened to be governor of the state in contention, was averse to putting his thumb on the scale.

Stevens doesn’t mention any of that, or the fact that the then-chief justice, William Rehnquist, had a daughter seeking a prospective Bush administration job (she got it). And Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, author of so much recent mischief, was then employed by the Heritage Foundation to vet job seekers in the hoped-for Bush presidency.

Perhaps the Gore campaign should have been a bit more elbows-out, demanding recusal of Rehnquist and Thomas as a condition of accepting the jurisdiction of a court to decide an election rather than the normal method of a supervised recount. What might then have happened lurches, of course, into counterfactual territory, but there is no such thing as historical determinism: the flow of events is contingent on real people making actual decisions.

What would have been more important for the future well-being of the United States: Al Gore setting an example of gentlemanly civic behavior, as Stevens insists, or the Gore campaign doing whatever it took, within the bounds of honesty and legality, to transform his popular mandate into an electoral-college mandate?

It is quite possible that future historians will judge 9/11 and its extended fallout as an inflection point for the United States as significant as the Civil War, even though its consequences are less obvious. September 11, 2001 set in motion a chain of events that has still not played out, with each event a seismic shock destabilizing the country.

Any honest examination of 9/11 must begin with the fact that the Bush administration was hardly less than willfully negligent in failing to protect the country, with the August 6, 2001 president’s daily brief titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” being Exhibit A for the prosecution. Bush’s response to the briefers was “you’ve covered your ass,” after which he played golf and cut brush at his summer ranch for almost a month.

It is hardly wild speculation to think that Gore, an Armed Services Committee member in the Senate before becoming vice president for eight years, might have reacted differently and put the appropriate agencies on alert, just as the Clinton administration had done when it foiled the so-called millennial bomb plot. Gore’s qualifications were certainly deeper than Bush’s, whose only previous acquaintance with national security was going AWOL from an air national guard unit.

As it was, 9/11 with its xenophobic revenge fantasies, hubris turned to grief on the stony soil of the Middle East, financial roulette where the billionaires always win, and color-coded threat warnings made a large swath of the American people functionally mentally ill.

No 9/11 means no Global War on Terror, a two-decade exercise in grandiose futility that thoroughly ruined two countries, gave rise to ISIS, and cost an estimated $8 trillion. And no Bush tax cuts, which instantly transformed a budget surplus into the large and intractable deficits that Republicans incessantly complain about (at least when they don’t control the White House).

Further idle speculation, but would Gore have let the foxes run the chicken coup as Bush did with respect to financial regulation? The whole spectacle of liar mortgage loans, synthetic CDOs, and massive credit default swaps resulted in perhaps the most predictable financial collapse in history, resulting in three years of lost growth that can never be recouped, more deficits, blighted lives, and increased public cynicism.

Without all of that, there may have been no public clamor for a dictator, and consequently no violent attempt to overthrow the Constitution. As it was, 9/11 with its xenophobic revenge fantasies, hubris turned to grief on the stony soil of the Middle East, financial roulette where the billionaires always win, and color-coded threat warnings made a large swath of the American people functionally mentally ill. Some even gush with enthusiasm at the prospect of dictatorial rule. Trump may go, but they will latch onto some other charlatan as a substitute Jesus-figure to worship. The rest of us will likely have to deal with all of this for the rest of our lives.

Beltway culture, which has been gradually “wired” to be Republican since the 1980s, apparently thinks all the disasters of the last two decades have been worth it, because it preserved the political parties in their scripted roles: Republicans as the rule-breaking but lovable Cool Kids, and Democrats as the gentlemanly losers.