New blood and Gore

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent

Could it have been just four years ago that Al Gore was a contender? Hard to believe, after the thwarted President's performance last week, when the most star-crossed candidate ever to stand on an American stump finally put his bitterness and frustration on display.

But it's easy enough to check by visiting the Museum of Television and Radio on West 52nd St and calling up the old news footage. Watch it again at a distance of years and there is no room for doubt.

There he is at Harlem's Apollo theatre on the evening of February 21, 2000, giving primary rival Bill Bradley a lesson in campaigning.

Take the jacket routine, for instance. Watch the footage closely and take note whenever it comes unobtrusively unbuttoned, then you know a "spontaneous" arm gesture is coming.

Captured on film, the move is clockwork, pure pro, slick as a conjurer's sleight-of-hand. Gore didn't need to think about the mechanics of keeping himself photogenically unrumpled before a fist shot up in protest or for emphasis. The skill was consummate and hard-wired. Then, the gesture executed, the arm drops, the hand flashes, the button closes - and the candidate rolls unruffled into the next soapboxset-piece.

Later on in the campaign, as one by one Gore blew what should have been a sitting vice-President's host of incalculable advantages, pundits laid the blame in part on that same robotic precision. The more Gore packaged himself, the more false and forced he came across.

Long before makeup artists slathered him with an ill-advised coat of orange foundation for a nationally televised debate, Harlem's inevitable stump artist had become Wooden Al, the Stepford Candidate, butt of television's late-night comics.

Last week, the man many Americans still see as their real President was something else entirely. Spontaneous? He was that in spades - and even though he is not running, the contrast between the Gore of then and the Gore of now must have come as a powerful pick-me-up to George Bush, whose poll numbers have gone into a major dip.

Gore erupted in Tennessee, the home state that rejected him four years ago. His audience, like the crowd in Harlem, consisted of party stalwarts, folks who fervently believe that their man was cheated of that four-year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The faithful wanted to celebrate their long-simmering anger. Gore obliged - and then some.

"He betrayed this country," Gore screamed at one point during a speech that was one long howl of outrage. Bush "played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventurepreordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place". With eyes narrowed to angry slits, the spittle flew as he likened Bush to Nixon and the crowd lapped up every furious word.

Gore had ventured back to Tennessee, where he had learned the requisite campaign tricks at the feet of his senator dad, to hail Howard Dean, whom he endorsed in early December, when the Vermont governor was still riding high. To judge by the crowd's reaction, Gore's help gave Dean some hope of finally carrying a primary.

There was wild cheering and prolonged foot-stomping as Gore went to town for his friend, and when he had finished, fans mobbed him like a pop star.

Then, just two days later, the polls opened, the votes were cast - and John Kerry emerged once again the victor.

The analysts noted that it was an inevitable result. After flirting with the incendiary Dean, voters have put prudence over passion and switched to a candidate they believe might have a chance in November.

The composed and ever more confident Kerry wasn't there to catch Gore's Tennessee harangue; insiders explain that he is loathe to share a stage with the symbol of his party's anger. It might rub off, they say. Nothing to be gained by sharing spotlights with a bellicose loser.

So now, ironically, Kerry is reading from Gore's former script - the stock lines of a sober, take-me-seriously contender punching the populist buttons.

And that may be why, four years from now, it could just be that John Kerry finds himself as bitter and unelected as the failed presidential predecessor he now goes out of his way to avoid.

Think of it as a party suffering from bi-polar disorder: Gore and the fading Dean at one extreme, voicing the fury that has gnawed at many Democrats since the Supreme Court awarded the 2000 race to Bush. At the other pole, Kerry - best by default of an unsatisfying lot.

The Republicans have yet to make a big deal of old photos showing the newly returned Vietnam vet protesting the war with "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. Nor have they pointed to his claim that United States atrocities made former GI comrades the heirs to Ghengis Khan's rapists and pillagers. No word yet, either, about the many favours Kerry has done for campaign contributors, or that his voting record puts him even further to the left than Ted Kennedy, dean of American liberalism and senior senator from "Taxachusetts".

Trouble is, even before those attacks begin in earnest, Kerry isn't putting ballots in boxes. Yes, he's winning primaries. But look at the actual numbers, and Republican confidence becomes much easier to fathom.

In Tennessee, fewer than 20 per cent of eligible voters bothered going to the polls. In Virginia, which last week also gave the bulk of its convention delegates to Kerry, just 9 per cent of registered voters turned out. Of those, barely half backed the winner.

So there is the Democrats' quandary in a nutshell. To win in November, to mobilise the rank and file and capitalise on Bush's increasingly apparent weaknesses, the party needs a candidate who can incite passion without going all the way over the top.

Instead, like the old Gore of 2000, Kerry is the standard-bearer it is likely to get, just one more collection of weaknesses and liabilities in a neatly buttoned suit.