From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
The Leader Who Never Led
If Al Gore could admit defeat, he might deserve to win.
The pontification has been relentless. From the moment we learned for the third time that the vote in Florida was "too close to call," we have been in the suffocating smother of windbags.
Every pointy-headed pundit, and every partisan politician, has heaped his conclusions upon us. TV anchors and their sidekicks have also played their perverse role to perfection, feeding the beast of public opinion with a blend of legal pap and political speculation, and encouraging that same beast to call back with views or, worse still, to send thoughts in by e-mail. (So late at night, when I want proper news, I'm told by Bill Press--on CNN's unwaveringly vulgar program, "The Spin Room"--that Shirley from Arkansas thinks "it all stinks," or that Myron from New Jersey believes that "the world regards America as a joke.")
Amid the whirring of all this instant wisdom and vox populi, the two candidates have said little themselves. Instead, they have spoken by proxy through their emissaries, sent to join the melee in Florida. And these emissaries--in particular William Daley, Al Gore's hit man--have not so much overseen the recount as sought to second-guess it. Mr. Daley, in fact, has gone further. His blustering, menacing invocation of the popular will has effectively subverted the recount, altering its mechanical and arithmetical nature, and imparting to the process a contentious and polemical odor.
What we have now is not a constitutional crisis. Nor is it, as yet, a political crisis--for which credit is due to the American people, who have reacted neither hysterically nor histrionically. What we have, however, is a crisis of civic process, a near-paralysis of that civic system which ensures an orderly transition of power in America (and which, with each transition, ensures also a renewal of public faith in America's political system).
Mr. Gore is a poor leader, a bad leader. In fact, he has never really led, never really been his own man. All his life he has played No. 2, acting in ways dictated to him by more powerful men. The first of these was his father, to whom he was--painfully, perhaps excessively--the dutiful son. In his period of filial piety, Mr. Gore did nothing that his father would have disapproved of, nothing that his father did not want. I am not blaming him for this (in fact, rare is the son who does not strive to please his pater), I'm merely stating the facts.
The second seminal figure, to whom he was not son but Sancho Panza, is Bill Clinton, in whose irrefutable shadow he has stood for eight long years. In his Clinton period, Mr. Gore embarked on projects that were designed to help him shake off the appearance of a cipher, the most notorious of which were his dealings, as vice president, with Russia.
His book on the environment, the Russian dealings, the early enlistment of campaign help from Naomi Wolf, the constant embellishments to his life-story, the aggressiveness at the first presidential debate, the preposterous meekness at the second, the physical hectoring in the third--these were all products of Mr. Gore's deep-seated insecurities. And his behavior at the debates, in particular, laid bare his profound anxiety in the face of (possibly imminent) presidential status. These are examples of his incapacity to lead--his fear, even, of leadership.
Now, we have harder evidence of this incapacity. Frozen in the headlamps of history, Mr. Gore--panic-stricken, immobilized, a hostage to meager-minded satraps like Mr. Daley--is unable to slacken his grip on the prize.
And this grip, if not slackened soon, will damage that prize--not irreparably, because nothing, ultimately, is irreparable in America, but grievously enough to cause the eventual victor to question its public worth, its civic value.
That will certainly be true if Mr. Bush is declared winner. But it will be truer still--hauntingly so--if Mr. Gore ekes out a way to the White House.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays.
