Probably nothing did more to build the national political career of Al Gore than his vote in favor of the Gulf War. By backing President George I at a time when most of the Democrats supported continued sanctions, Gore displayed the hair on his chest that showed his differences from a Democratic Party whose attitudes on war and peace had been shaped by the divisions over the Vietnam War. As such, he ultimately had the credentials to join Bill Clinton in claiming to represent a new Democratic philosophy.
The point is not, as some detractors have suggested, that Gore’s position on the war was driven by political calculation and expediency. Rather, the point is that sometimes politicians profit by doing what they believe is right. That’s why it is interesting that both Gore and his putative presidential rival for 2004 have taken the opposite course in viewing a new war in Iraq.
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt recently fell in with President George II in support of a U.S. military excursion to oust Saddam Hussein. Gephardt had opposed military action a decade earlier, which undermined his reputation as a pro-labor centrist but helped him with the party’s dominant left wing as he rose to House leadership. Now, by backing prospective war, he hopes to take the issue off the table to allow Democrats to campaign on bread-and-butter issues in the midterm elections. It should also blunt any criticisms of him as being too pacific, should he run for president.
Gore, in one of two major recent policy speeches that signaled his reentry into serious politics, criticized the U.S. rush to unilateralism while declining to offer an alternative course of action. The speech touched off paroxysms on the right. Rush Limbaugh declared himself barely able to get out of bed he was so troubled; William Bennett described it as an act of political suicide. Some of the reaction on the left wasn’t much more positive, with even his longtime cheering section at The New Republic faulting his judgment.
But Gore just can’t catch a break. Because he’s not much of a campaigner, one of the most thoughtful politicians around generally gets viewed as one of the most calculating. By stepping forward and raising necessary questions about a potential policy quagmire, Gore opened himself up to the sort of demagogy that has marked the last year of the Bush administration. But he gets no points for that.
The fact remains that even though the Bush administration may be right about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, that doesn’t mean it is right about how to deal with the problem—or even that it really knows what it is doing.
The political writer Joe Klein (who, as “Anonymous,” wrote the Clinton-era roman à clef Primary Colors) hailed Gore as being the only Democrat with the guts to attack Bush on the issue. But he noted that Gore had slipped to being such a parody of himself that the default reaction on both the left and right to anything Gore does has become ridicule. Of course, his election campaign in 2000 played a lot better with voters—who generally preferred him—than with commentators and Supreme Court justices.
Gore’s other major speech focused on economic policy, where he faulted Bush for letting the economy stagger while draining the budget surplus. The general critique on both speeches was that Gore had been long on fault-finding and short on proposing solutions. The criticism is legitimate, even while recognizing that it’s still early to be getting specific with issues in a presidential campaign that’s over two years away.
That liberal Hilleary
Republican gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary continues to blaze away at Core Knowledge, the education reform initiative launched in Nashville by his opponent Phil Bredesen during his mayoral term. The program generally reflects the ideal approach of conservative intellectuals, but intellectual honesty is usually one of the first casualties of Hilleary campaigns.
The core curriculum, Hilleary said during a recent debate, is “probably asking too much of real young children to learn all those things when they maybe should be just good in most of those resources on math and reading skills.’’
It’s easy to understand why Hilleary might have sympathy for schoolchildren faced with difficult course material, based on his own experiences. However, as anyone who listens to talk radio knows, there’s a term for the kind of people who would say a curriculum shouldn’t be too hard for the kids and that too much shouldn’t be demanded of them.
They’re called liberals.
