Authors: Jeff Greenfield
43*
When Gore Beat Bush—A Political Fable
By Jeff Greenfield
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Copyright © 2012 by Jeff Greenfield
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
November 25, 1999: Thanksgiving Day
Afterword: How the Facts Shape Speculation
Byliner Recommends ... The Selling of the President
Byliner Recommends ... One Way Forward
Byliner Recommends ... I Hope Like Heck
In the many-mansioned house of Alternate History, I occupy a small corner. The trio
of what-ifs I chronicled in
Then Everything Changed
all begin with tiny, highly plausible twists of fate that lead to hugely consequential
shifts in history:
- Jacqueline Kennedy does
not
come to the door on a December Sunday in 1960 to see her husband off to church, so
the suicide bomber parked outside the Kennedy home triggers his dynamite and John
Kennedy is killed before ever assuming office; and Lyndon Johnson, with his very different
understanding of foreign policy and power diplomacy, is in command during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. - Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law enters the ballroom of a Los Angeles hotel on primary
night in 1968 a few minutes early, and so is between Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan in
that kitchen pantry; and Kennedy and his presidential campaign survive—and triumph. - In a key debate moment in 1976, President Gerald Ford realizes that he misspoke about
the Soviet Union’s domination of Poland and spares his campaign a crucial week of
pain, thus changing the outcome of the Carter-Ford election.
It’s the “butterfly effect,” as first portrayed in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,”
where one dead butterfly millions of years ago leads to a contemporary world immeasurably
more coarse, less kind. It’s the notion of the old nursery rhyme: “For want of a nail
the kingdom was lost.”
When the book was published, I was asked countless questions about other scenarios,
via e-mail and during my talks about the book. There are bookshelves of such works,
of course, including several volumes of essays by historians under the what-if heading,
and novels by the score. Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America,
recounting the election of Charles Lindbergh as president, is the most literary of
such works; Robert Harris’s
Fatherland
and Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
both deal with a Nazi Germany victory in World War II.
The question I was asked most—by far—was
What would have happened if Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush in 2000?
Unsurprisingly, the question came overwhelmingly from disappointed Democrats, convinced
that (a) the Republicans had stolen the election and (b) things would have gone a
lot better with Gore in the Oval Office.
The assumption behind most of these questions was that the events of the Florida recount
would somehow have played out differently: The Supreme Court would have let the vote
counting continue; the count would have shown Gore winning; neither the governor,
the legislature, nor the Supreme Court would have stepped in.
For me, this assumption was misplaced.
Among other things, the Republican-dominated Florida legislature had already indicated
its readiness to use its power and assign the state’s electoral votes to Bush—a power
that would have triggered a Constitutional battle royal. The Supreme Court, in my
view, would have been fully prepared to resolve such a dispute in favor of Bush, either
out of political motives or out of the more defensible notion that finality was essential,
to avoid political chaos. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the
ultimate arbiter of the electoral-vote count, would never have sanctioned a Gore win
in Florida based on a recount.
No, the only way to present a Gore victory was to use the same approach I had in
Then Everything Changed
: find a tiny, plausible twist of fate that would have led to an unquestioned Gore
victory.
With that small alteration of reality, this work puts Al Gore in the White House in
January 2001.
And then … the law of unintended consequences goes to work.
There wasn’t a whole lot Al Gore was thankful for this day.
Here he was, the sitting vice president, seeking the presidency with assets that most
candidates would have killed for. The country was at peace, the Cold War a decade
in the past, with no credible threat to the nation’s security anywhere on the horizon.
The economy? Too good to believe: a jobless rate under 4 percent, no inflation to
speak of, twenty million new jobs in the past eight years, real incomes rising for
the average American after decades of stagnation, and a budget surplus—a surplus—of
$250 billion a year, a number so big that the pencil pushers were debating not if
we could wipe out the national debt but whether we
should
.
And was there any presidential candidate better prepared than Gore? Elected to the
House of Representatives before he was thirty, a U.S. senator at thirty-five, vice
president by his mid-forties, with a grasp of public policy that was staggering. An
interviewer would ask about, say, Africa, and Gore would respond, “The problem areas
are Congo-Kinshasa, where the civil war has mutated into eight or nine simultaneous
subregional civil wars. The movement toward stability in the Great Lakes region is
proceeding very slowly, with Burundi making some progress in the wake of the Clinton-Mandela
intervention. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kugame, is beginning to play a more constructive
role.” Ask him why the stock market dropped 85 points yesterday and he’d interject,
“88.75.”
And yet his run for the White House—a run he had been on almost from birth—was snarled
by a host of troubles, some of his own making, some beyond his control. Despite the
peace, despite an economy almost too good to believe, the country seemed to be saying,
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Part of it was that Gore was burdened by what every vice president suffers from: the
sense that he had been more like a manservant to the president than a strong, independent
political figure. Part of it was personal. That same grasp of detail could strike
audiences as “wooden” and—more worrisome—a shade smug, as if he were determined always
to prove himself the smartest guy in the room. There was the hangover from the fundraising
at a Buddhist monastery back in 1996, an event he had tried to define by robotically
insisting that “no controlling legal authority” barred it. There was the repeated
refrain of “inauthenticity,” the idea that Gore would shift his words and beliefs
to fit the political winds—maybe even alter his wardrobe. (Was the noted feminist
Naomi Wolf really on his campaign payroll at $15,000 a month, advising him to wear
“earth tones”? No, not really, but it was the kind of half-truth that stuck.)
But more than anything else, there was Bubba.
Bill Clinton had survived a midterm political disaster in 1994, losing both houses
of Congress to the Republicans while enduring chronic inquiries into his financial
dealings and endless whispers—often shouts—about his extracurricular appetites. After
his reelection, in 1996, Clinton had been caught, literally, with his pants down with
an intern half his age and somehow survived impeachment—mostly because the country
seemed to say, “We don’t trust you with our daughters, but we trust you with our money.”
But Al Gore could not seem to find the zone in which to distance himself from Clinton’s
misbehavior while embracing the record. As columnist Mark Shields wrote, “if Bill
Clinton drove through a car wash in a convertible with the top down, Al Gore would
get wet.” In fact, he was drowning.
The governor from Texas, George W. Bush, long dismissed as the lightweight older brother
of Jeb, was running far ahead of Gore in the polls and—what really caught the eye
of the political world—Bush had
doubled
Gore’s fundraising in the first half of the year. Just as bad, his one rival for
the Democratic nomination, former senator Bill Bradley, had topped Gore’s fundraising
numbers, was running even with him in Iowa polls, and had passed him in New Hampshire.
And if voters doubted the Texas governor’s gravitas, they seemed to be even more put
off by Gore’s presumed condescension. (As a much quoted line had it, “Bush speaks
as if English were his second language; Gore speaks as if English were your second
language.”)
By November Gore had shaken up his campaign staff, jettisoning longtime loyal colleagues,
moving the campaign out of Washington to Nashville, and cutting the payroll by 40
percent—all steps guaranteed to drive the political press to find new synonyms for
“faltering campaign.”
So it was not a particularly festive mood in the vice president’s household this Thanksgiving
morning. But Al Gore was about to get the biggest break of his political life—nine
hundred miles away.
They thought it was a doll at first.
Sam Ciancio was out on his cabin cruiser, along with his cousin Donato Dalrymple,
spending Thanksgiving morning off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they spotted a large
black inner tube with what looked like a doll inside. When they got closer, they saw
that it was a child, tied to the inner tube. Local police took the boy to Joe DiMaggio
Children’s Hospital, in Hollywood, Florida, where he told them his name and age—Elián
González, six years old—and gave them the address and phone number of his father.
He was from Cuba, he said, and had set out with his mother and a dozen others a few
days earlier in a small boat. He added, “My mama got lost in the sea.”
But he was wrong.
On that same Thanksgiving morning, thirty miles south of Fort Lauderdale, Juan Ruiz
and Reniel Carmenate were coming back to Key Biscayne after a night of fishing when
they saw a man and woman huddling for warmth by the water’s edge. The two men brought
the couple blankets and learned that they had set out, with thirteen others, from
Cárdenas, Cuba, three nights earlier on a rusty fifteen-foot aluminum boat. The two
were lovers seeking a new life in America; they had paid the boat owner for passage.
A series of storms had finally capsized the vessel, sweeping away their food and water
and shredding one of the huge tires they had brought to serve as lifeboats. One by
one, the passengers had slipped into the sea; the couple had no idea whether anyone
else had survived.
As the two men wrapped them in blankets—they were blistered, shivering, covered with
bite marks from fish—they saw sprawled out on the beach a young woman, slipping in
and out of consciousness, repeating one word over and over:
“Elián … Elián … Elián … ”
It had all the makings of a major international incident—for thirty-six hours. Juan
Miguel González, the father of Elián, had no idea that his ex-wife, Elizabet Broton,
had left Cuba with their son. (Juan Miguel had remarried but was a strong presence
in Elián’s life.) She had left, he was told, not out of politics but out of love;
Rafa Munero, the owner of the boat, was her lover, and she wanted to be with him in
America. Juan Miguel had family in Miami—uncles, aunts, a great-uncle Lázaro—and he
called them from Cuba, alerting them to the flight of his ex-wife and son, as soon
as the hospital called him. He assumed they would work quickly to return Elián to
him in Cuba.