'For Selfish Purposes': Gore as campaigner

When Al Gore's fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson was nominated for the presidency in 1828, he pretty much stayed at home, declining at first even to discuss such key issues as federal appropriations for roads and canals. He had been in the public spotlight for a long time, Jackson reasoned. His positions and his character were well known. "Was I now to come forward and reiterate my public opinions on these subjects," he said, "I would be charged with electioneering for selfish purposes."

By contrast, Al Gore has developed a reputation for taking positions on everything under the sun, and maybe even the sun itself. Typically, these are lengthy, detailed, complex positions-and they are always subject to change, as the political situation requires.

Even more striking about Gore's career than the well-chronicled changes and inconsistencies are the fundamental structural weaknesses that have carried over from one campaign to the next. In saying this, I exclude the past two presidential contests, when Gore was harnessed to a political genius, and look instead to 1988, when he last sought the presidency in his own right.

Common to both Gore's presidential campaigns has been the lack of any figure of authority at the top. Fred Martin, a former Mondale middleweight, was the nominal '88 campaign manager, but his voice was one of many. It would take a Sherlock Holmes to unravel the mystery of which media adviser-if any-was shaping Gore's message at any time and developing spots to drive it home. Various media men showed up at the behest of Gore, or his father, or others. David Garth, compliments of Ed Koch, took over the critical New York campaign and made Gore sound like a right-wing Likud candidate for the Knesset.

"We had conflicting advice from different advisers, and a not totally well-grounded candidate hearing all these different versions of what he should do," former chief of staff Roy Neel recalled. "It is almost impossible to say how any of the critical decisions were made because there was no structure at the time."

This time around the early lack of structure and direction was so palpable that Gore took the risky step of bringing in the scandal-ridden Tony Coelho as campaign chairman. By mid June, however, Coelho was out, replaced by commerce secretary William M. Daley. The stated reason was ill health. But background reports indicated that Gore and Coelho disliked each other, and that Coelho was not on the same wavelength as his colleagues. The New York Times zeroed in on the real significance of Coelho's departure: It showed "how even after years of preparation, the vice president still has had trouble assembling a stable inner circle to run his organization."

The reason that ciphers and damaged goods have found their way to the top of the Gore campaigns reflects another consistency between Gore in 1988 and Gore in 2000-his inability to delegate meaningful authority. Fred Martin called him "a control freak" who would phone from the road six to eight times a day appropriating every decision, from Tipper's schedule to carpools. "He spent an enormous amount of time handling crap," complained Martin. A Times piece in June of this year had Gore-in marked contrast to George W. Bush-still designing campaign logos, intruding into arcane policy formulations, and clipping obscure material from the daily newspapers in order to generate new staff work.

Gore is, of course, a smart man. But he is not the first smart man to run for president. What makes his conduct unusual is that most of these smart men have managed to rely on staff people they trust to write speeches, reduce policy determinations to specific positions, prepare media spots, clip papers, and handle travel schedules for themselves and assorted surrogates. They do this so they can concentrate on tasks to which most candidates are uniquely suited: developing broad themes, presenting them effectively to critical constituencies, meeting key opinion-makers face-to-face, and making the sort of do-or-die decisions under deadline pressure that confront the typical campaign.

When you immerse yourself in minutiae as Gore did in 1988 and as he appears to be doing today, you tend to lose focus, to react to too many things because you insulate yourself from none of them, to split the difference between competing advisers rather than give your top lieutenants the authority to bring discipline and cohesion to your effort. This in turn leads to sharp changes in style and substance, to perilous inconsistencies, to charges of political opportunism, or, in Andrew Jackson's words, of "electioneering for selfish purposes."

Gore's 1988 campaign was a case study in political U-turns. When he delivered his formal declaration of candidacy from the steps of the courthouse in Carthage, Tenn., he seemed to be flagging the ozone layer and global warming as critical issues in his campaign. Then, with the Super Tuesday primaries in the South in mind, he became the son of Old Dixie, a defense-minded, tough old dirt farmer who could restore his party's traditional base. Next it was the guy in the flannel shirt hitting themes of interest to rank-and-file working people. Then it was on to New York and the anti-Jesse Jackson, pro-Israel campaign.