The Problem with Al: Jerk, pretender, fraud

We've heard it a thousand times: At home, around the dinner table, he's a charming and effortless host. And funny. And straight-arrow honest. And hip. "Friends are puzzled by the Al Gore they see campaigning around the country," begin the inevitable What's-wrong-with-Gore? newspaper accounts. Occasionally, the "friends" cited are ill-concealed fellow Democratic politicians, but more often they are journalists themselves-CNN pundits and Washington Post reporters who want so much to like Gore, and are so confused by his strange hustings persona that they have manufactured a news story about it.

And the stories are all the same: "Longtime associates" and "close friends" will say that the Gore who hired Naomi Wolf and flip-flops on everything and cannot answer a simple yes-or-no question is not the Gore they know. The Gore who drones condescending lectures out on the stump isn't the Gore they had rosemary-focaccia sandwiches with just last Tuesday. The Gore who can't pick a campaign manager and stick with him for longer than eight weeks isn't the Gore who sings funny made-up songs 'round the campfire. The Gore who broke campaign-finance laws and then lied about it isn't their Gore, the good-old-Al, let's-play-Boggle-after-sorting-our-recyclables guy who likes to work out with weights and listen to the Grateful Dead. They cannot understand why the Al Gore they all find so likable is so disliked.

What's wrong with Al Gore? Why are his negative poll ratings so solidly stuck in the 40s? The assorted "strategists" and "family friends" finger something called "Clinton fatigue"-the almost counterintuitive suggestion that the support of a popular sitting president is somehow tainting. A country weary of scandal has pinned the tail on the vice president, goes the thinking. How ironic, say "Gore intimates" and "Beltway observers," that it's Al Gore-family man, environmentalist, ramrod decent-who's wearing the tin hat in the lightning storm.

But does anyone doubt that if Bill Clinton himself-the creator of the eponymous "fatigue"-somehow, some way found a loose thread in the Constitution, pulled it, and unraveled enough of it to run for a third term-Could happen! The guy is very, very good at that kind of thing!-does anyone seriously doubt that he'd be five points up in the battleground states and maybe, maybe, pulling ahead in Texas? People don't dislike Gore because he reminds them of Clinton; they dislike Gore because he doesn't remind them of Clinton. When Clinton strides into a room and grabs the mike, hugs the fat lady, talks for 20 extemporaneous minutes, wolfs down a pulled-pork sandwich, and shuffles off to the next backwater district, you know he's loving every minute of it. He's doing it because he needs it: The campaign trail is his bacon double cheeseburger and zaftig big-haired intern all rolled into one, and he's going to savor every last greasy moment of it. No one loves being loved more than our rascally, callow, charming president.

When Gore grabs the mike, you instinctively think, "Uh oh." When he hugs the fat lady, they both look creeped out. And when he uses his growling I'm-gettin'-into-it voice, the effect is so discomfiting that it's hard not to look away in embarrassment. Watch the tape of Gore speaking at the NAACP convention in Baltimore. His stemwinding preacher voice develops a very distinct Driving Miss Daisy quality. Watch the smiles freeze on the faces of his audience. See those on the dais shift uncomfortably in their seats. Notice his head, sliding from side to side on his extremely white shoulders in a weird, off-putting imitation of every young black woman who has ever appeared on a bad TV talk show. You half expect him to say, "You go, girl!"

A few years ago, I heard a stand-up comedian talk about his itinerant, womanizing, ne'er-do-well father. The father, apparently, was quite something-a white-trash version of the dad in Angela's Ashes. When he wasn't drunk, he wasn't around; and when he was around, he dispensed rotten, amoral advice to his adoring young son. "Kiddo," he drunkenly slurred one day, "lemme tell you something. Remember this when you're older. I don't care if it costs you all your money, your wife, your kids-whatever. But when you're on a hot [sexual] streak, you've got to ride it out!" His father's counsel, for some reason, struck home. For a boy his age, the father must have seemed impossibly glamorous. So for a large part of his young adult life, the comedian lived just that way: irresponsible, promiscuous, chasing women at every opportunity-in other words, trouble.

His father, though, could carry it off with just enough charm to keep the sheriff at bay. His son, sadly, didn't have the right amount of twinkle in his eye to play the devilish, lovable rake. "I just looked like a jerk," he said. "A big, fat jerk."

And that, in a nutshell, is Al Gore's problem. Whether talking about Medicare in spook-the-old-folks sound bites or intoning gospel-style at the NAACP convention, he just looks, well, like a jerk. Like a salesman trying to scare Grandma out of her vote, or a white guy trying to talk black to show how cool he is. He looks like the kind of guy who commissions a focus group to edit his wardrobe. He looks like the kind of person who would use a family tragedy-the death of a sister, say, or a child's being struck by a car-in a political speech and somehow manage to cheapen both family tragedies and political speeches.