I can remember the night in 1988 when Albert Gore Jr. was sitting around with a bunch of journalists having a serious discussion about his joke.
The joke was his standard ice-breaker for speeches to small groups of voters, and he had been telling it for most of the 1980s. The occasion was dinner with a handful of reporters at the Music City Sheraton to allow the senator to reconnect with the Tennessee press, which had largely been ignored during his presidential run that spring.
Reporters who trail around after candidates hear the same jokes over and over, just as they hear the same speeches. It’s one of the mechanics of politics, and nobody regards the repetition as phony.
Gore’s favored joke dealt with a farmer who goes to court after he’s injured when his truck is struck by another vehicle. When the opposing counsel asks the farmer why he told the trooper at the scene that he felt fine, the farmer offers this explanation: The trooper noticed that the farmer’s cow was injured in the accident and quickly dispatched it with his handgun. Having seen the trooper’s quick resort to euthanasia, the farmer thought it best to say that he felt fine. (The joke is actually passably funny when Gore tells it.)
At the hotel, we got into a discussion of the joke, mainly talking about our shared tedium from its constant repetition. When I observed that he could shorten the joke by cutting out a repetitious part of the narrative, Gore disagreed.
”It’s very important to keep that part in there because by drawing the joke out, you increase the tension so that when the punch line comes, the sense of release is that much greater,“ he said.
What is so hysterically Gore-like about this exchange is the way Gore clearly gave serious thought to the strategy of unfolding a joke for maximum effect. Indeed, it was similar to the seriousness with which he approached strategic defense policy. For him, it was no joking matter.
If Gore has shown anything in the campaign so far, it is his willingness to do whatever needs to be done to be elected, whatever the price to his dignity.
While intellectuals have always admired politicians of the Adlai Stevenson stripe who went through public agonies over their worthiness for office, the voters have generally chosen candidates who are much more straightforward in their ambitions. Gore is not a natural politician like his patron, President Clinton, but he has the same outsized ambitions and intense discipline. That is why a seemingly trivial thing like telling a joke merits his full intellectual resources.
It is the sort of thing that does much to explain the current travails of his presidential campaign. Gore has taken repeated bashing for the various ways he has recast himself to try to make himself an appealing candidate—moving the campaign to Nashville, trading his blue suits for brown suits, trying to relax his stuffy image. All of this, some commentators say, reveals Gore as a man who doesn’t know who he is.
Perhaps this is true, but it also makes clear an ugly truth about the superficiality of the political-selection process. Although campaigns are supposed to be about letting the public get to know the candidate, the reality is more like selling a packaged version of a candidate. Does anyone think the campaign process really allows them to get to truly know any candidate? Did the 1992 campaign prepare anybody for what they subsequently got to see about the inner workings of the Clinton family?
Gore’s real sin isn’t that he has tried to package himself—or that he has had to make adjustments to that packaging. His sin lies in getting caught doing it.
Politicians tend to fall into three categories as campaigners:
♦ Those who are very good at it and for whom it comes naturally. Ned McWherter is an obvious example, as is Fred Thompson. The very best on the Nashville scene was always Bill Boner.
♦ Those who lack the gift but who have managed to simulate a veneer of it by force of will: Gore is in this category. Lamar Alexander needed to walk the entire breadth of the state of Tennessee to get it.
♦ Those who lack the gift and have a hard time faking it: Richard Fulton was Nashville’s best-known reluctant warrior, and his reluctance finally caught up with him in his final campaign.
Anyone who has been around politicians much comes to understand that there is not a very close relationship between being a good campaigner and performing well in office, especially in executive branch service. Exuding warmth and ease on the stump has political value, but it is insignificant when compared to conviction and administrative ability in office.
Boner’s administration collapsed into a seven-hour conflagration, and McWherter was only modestly successful as governor. Fulton, on the other hand, was a good mayor and a genuine congressional hero.
Gore’s campaign has stumbled because of the clunkiness with which he has played the image game. While there are ample things to ponder about Gore’s twisted psyche, it is probably no more twisted than that of his rivals.
Bill Bradley, who as a basketball player made considerable effort to cultivate the image of an intellectual and then shunned his associations with the sport that got him elected to the Senate, has now reconstructed himself as a born-again jock. He even held a mass fund-raising event in Madison Square Garden where he picked up the support of numerous roundball luminaries.
On the Republican side, the only commonality between poor Steve Forbes’ campaign of 1996 and the current one is the pile of money he is throwing into the pursuit of the Republican nomination. Other than that, he’s gotten himself a whole new set of positions and a whole new morality to pursue a whole new constituency.
George W. Bush emphasizes his ordinariness as a way of deflecting attention from his campaign’s basic foundation on pedigree and not accomplishment. The campaign is now fine tuning because of growing rumblings that people are starting to believe it when Bush plays down his own intelligence.
Now there is a worse problem for Bush. Commentators are starting to make note of his ”smirk.“ When Bush smiles, he doesn’t look so much like he’s glowing with warmth as giving a mocking leer. Of course, that smirk is probably more a matter of unfortunate physiognomy than of any real smart-aleck tendency. (Indeed, given the other concerns, it might even be argued that Bush is not smart enough to be a smart aleck.)
But it is probably a mistake to blame the candidates for the silly, trivial ways they mutate themselves as part of the process of running for office. It’s not really their fault; it’s just something that gets imposed on seekers of the nation’s highest office. The real question is how much is substantive.
Gore’s petty gyrations have largely been image-related. They really don’t have much to do with his fitness for the presidency. To the degree that his adjustments have made him look false, they have raised questions about his character—asking whether he himself knows who he is and whether he is without limits in the things he’s willing to do to become president.
The more relevant questions are whether he should be disqualified from office for not being very good at the superficial things the public expects of its leaders, or if we should think less of him for trying his best in his clunky way.
Is he unfit for the presidency because he’s willing to bring the full force of his Harvard-trained intellect to the best way to tell a countrified story about a farmer and a cow?
Like most politicians, Gore waffles on sticky issues. He looks entirely too eager to show off his good points (his intellect and seriousness) to make up for the things he does less well. This is annoying, but not substantive.
In the annals of candidate lies about their real identities, probably nothing will surpass the deception of Franklin Roosevelt, who managed to convince voters that he could walk. In retrospect, it was an irrelevancy. He was probably our best 20th-century president. The magnitude of that deception makes Gore’s brown suit look blue by comparison.
