Article - William Saletan's review in Slate.com of Al Gore's NY Times Op Ed
One Line Summary - "Al Gore's bogus defense of his populist message"
Primary Weakness - Forgets that Al ran in 2000, not 1992
Critique - Saletan's opening line is "When a vice president backed by a roaring economy runs a class-warfare presidential campaign and loses, most people would call the experiment a failure." But why would most people call it a failure? My memory is that Bush lead Gore in every early poll. According to the Daily Howler, "Gore’s first campaign trip—to New Hampshire—occurred on March 15, 1999. The next day, CNN/Gallup/USA Today released its new national poll: Bush 56, Gore 41." So, once Al Gore started running his "class-warfare" political campaign, he gained 15 points in 8 months. His acceptance speech was strong on "people vs. powerful" rhetoric and it gave him his first lead in the polls. If a pundit is going to call a message "lousy politics" and that "it illustrates his ineptitude as a candidate", he needs some strong facts to back them up like Gore losing a big lead, lots of voters saying they decided against voting against Gore because of his message, or Gore losing voters that a democratic candidate should expect to have. Instead, all Saletan offers it some poll that I think lacks true relevance - the poll is all voters, not swing voters and the reasons give for doing something are rarely the reasons for why the actually do something.
Saletan thinks that Gore' populism should have been like Bill Clinton's. However, the environment in 1992 was much different than the environment in 2000. In 1992, the unemployment ran from 7.3% to 7.8%, the country had just gone through a recession, there had been major deficits for many years and no end to the deficits in sight. His opponent's biggest weakness was that he didn't seem to understand people's plight in a down economy. So Clinton's statements of "One sentence in the platform we built says it all: 'The most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy and foreign policy America can have is an expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-skill, high-wage jobs'" and "We don't have a person to waste. There is no them; there is only us" are very apropos for a down economy and high unemployment, but they don't fit the environment in 2000. In 2000, unemployment ranged from 4.1% to 3.9%. Millions of people were moving off of welfare and into real jobs. The government was projecting a huge surplus and the biggest question was "How is the surplus going to be divided?".
Saletan also ignores that Gore was running not against a moderate Republican like Clinton had but against an ultra conservative who was trying to hide the lopsided nature of his policies. Dubya's answer to "How is that surplus going to be divided?" was mainly to the richest 1%, but he tried to hide that fact by calling his tax a "middle class tax cut". Gore's "people vs. powerful" theme emphasized that Dubya had long favored rolling back regulations to aid corporations to a degree that would make voters uncomfortable if they fully understood. As the press showed no interest in telling voters what Bush's policies really were, it was up to the Gore campaign to educate the voters on how extreme they were. Bush made his policies sound like everyone would be better off ("Every day is Earth Day when you own your own property") and Gore had to make the case that Bush was really talking about helping "Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, [and] the HMOs."
But Saletan really undermines his argument by viciously attacking Gore when no such attack is warranted. Gore wrote an Op Ed that said I told you that if Bush was president that the powerful would benefit and the average joe would get stiffed. Saletan ignores completely whether Gore is right. Saletan seems much more interested in calling Gore and his campaign "a failure", "inauthentic and grating", inept, pious and that "his driving imperative is to prove that he's right and his opponents are wrong." Saletan calls Gore's populism "class-warfare" for no reason (Bush's policies are really class-warfare - by the rich). I read some of Saletan's other articles and there was none of that ad hominem attack even though I feel the subjects are far more worthy (Daschle's inability to wound Bush, Bush's stonewalling on scandals).
The big story of the 2000 election wasn't Gore's populist theme, but the media's constant attacks on Gore while giving Bush a free ride. It seems that some things never change.
10:15:01 PM 
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