The New New Gore

American Prospect: The New And Improved Al Gore

(The American Prospect)  That's because Dean, in 2000, was the anti-Gore: a fiery outsider running against the equivocating Democrats — like Al Gore — of yesteryear. (Fun fact: Dean almost mounted a primary challenge against Gore in 2000). He was also running the way Gore wished he had run. The Dean campaign's architect, Joe Trippi, told me, "What I've learned from people who are close to Gore was that, had he gone in 2004, he had this vision of running a disintermediated, Internet-driven, decentralized campaign. His vision was the Dean campaign! So one of the things that attracted him to the Dean campaign was that he looked and saw that, 'Holy shit, these guys are running the campaign I wanted to run.'"

In endorsing Dean, Gore did more than signal support for the chaotic, democratized nature of the campaign. For a wonk like Gore, the endorsement of Dean — the DLC's bête noire during the 2004 primaries — was an embrace of the new "it" Democrat. If the DLC's "New Democrats," led by Clinton and Gore, were the buzzworthy wing of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the 2004 election ushered in their successors, led by Dean.

Call them the New New Democrats, MoveOn Democrats, or whatever you want. They were the liberal response to Clinton's triangulation and Bush's ascension. Gleefully pugilistic, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War, deeply distrustful of a "corporate media" they believe screwed Gore specifically and Democrats generally, and proudly unapologetic about the progressive agenda, they found their first champion in Dean and, in Gore, their most surprising convert.

Gore, after all, had been one of only a handful of House Democrats to support the first Gulf War. In 2000, he slammed Bill Bradley's expansive health-care plan from the right, spoke in dusty generalities, and reduced liberalism to a "lockbox." He was considered so mealy-mouthed and corporatized that Ralph Nader's lefty insurgency gained genuine momentum with a message based mainly around the assertion that Gore and Bush were indistinguishable.

So it was a shock when, in 2002, he dispensed with the equivocating and endorsed a full-blown single-payer solution to health care, going further than even Bradley had dared. When he unleashed a blistering assault on the proposed invasion of Iraq, decried the corporatization of American media, and endorsed Dean, it became clear that this was not the Gore of yore.

None of this has passed unnoticed. On the blogs, in the magazines, on the op-ed pages, and across the punditocracy, "Gore 2008" is simultaneously a rallying cry and a guessing game. Handicapping his rise has been one of the few unifying activities in contemporary political life, with everyone from Arianna Huffington to Tony Blankley to Dick Morris talking up his chances, and Gore asymptotically approaching, but never actually offering, a Shermanesque rejection of the enterprise.

To be clear, there is no sign that Gore is preparing for a campaign. His spokesperson, Josh Cherwin, assured me that "there is no '08 story." MoveOn's Wes Boyd notes that Gore has not parlayed his association with MoveOn into a fund-raising list. He has built no personal Web site, and Markos Moulitsas Zunigas, founder of DailyKos, the largest progressive political blog, noted in an e-mail that Gore has made no effort to engage with the netroots save for his association with MoveOn. "I'm personally focused on elections," he wrote, "and in that regard, he's yesterday's news and will remain so unless he decides to reenter electoral politics."

In past years, the moment at which Gore had to make that decision would have been rapidly approaching. When Gore decided to sit out the 2004 election, The New Republic reported that many of his associates blamed the grueling, crushing fund raising the campaign would have demanded. Not so now. Planned or not, Gore's alliance with MoveOn and Dean's army of online volunteers has ensured him unique access and affection among one of the richest, most easily activated cash sources in the Democratic Party. Trippi estimates that a well-timed entrance, under certain conditions, could raise Gore $50 million almost instantly, and hundreds of millions more if he won the nomination. "Remember," he told me, "McCain in 2000 has 40,000 people sign up on the web and raises a couple million bucks. A few years later Howard Dean raises $59 million. The next [netroot darling] is going to be as exponential as Dean was to McCain."

And it could be Gore, if he wants it. Here's the scenario: Hillary Clinton continues rolling forward, amassing establishment support and locking down the large donors. Anti-Hillary voters prove unable to coalesce around a single champion, so Clinton is able to suck up all the oxygen but, as with most faits accomplis, attracts little genuine enthusiasm. At the same time, her hawkishness and ostentatious moderation sparks widespread disillusionment among the online activist community. Inevitably, the liberal wing of the party begins calling for a Bigfoot of its own to enter the primary, and the obvious prospect is Gore. DraftGore.com, which already exists, amplifies the drumbeat, collecting pledges and holding events. The press corps, sensing a Godzilla vs. King Kong battle, begins covering the events. As Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic and a longtime friend of Gore, says, "if he were to find that there was some groundswell for him, I think it would be hard to resist."

But not impossible. Long-standing associates of Gore's say his appetite for a second campaign seems to depend, at least partially, on whether he judges it an issue-based endeavor that allows him to continue speaking out on matters of substance or just another round of dodging media-narratives and churlish characterizations. If Gore's experiments in disintermediation pan out, the 2008 campaign may prove a very different undertaking from 2000's.

The fund raising will be easier. So will the communication. Rather than speaking through the press, Gore would be able to blast out speeches on e-mail, post videos on the Internet, release statements on a blog, use online organizing tools to empower the grassroots. The question is whether those distribution channels will have matured to the point that they could serve as primary communication methods for a successful presidential campaign. Because, as Reed Hundt warns, "if you're using the new medium to get across a new message, but you believe that really the new medium is just a way to get back into the old medium, you're doomed."

It's hard to believe that Gore doesn't wish to correct the record on himself, rewrite his legacy. In a sense, that's what he's been doing since 2000. Andrei Cherny, a former close aide of Gore's interviewed for this piece, protested that "Gore was never a prototypical New Democrat. He never thought of himself that way. ... There were a lot moments of overlap, but he always had a much more populist streak than the DLC did. Partly his father's son, that old southern populist tradition."

Since his loss, that old populist tradition has burst through the membranes of caution and ambition that once constrained it, and Gore has exploded back into the Democratic consciousness. In the late 1980s, his reputation as a New Democrat propelled him to the party's vanguard; in 1992, it netted him the vice presidency. Today, his leadership as a New New Democrat, enabled by his disintermediated communication strategies, has begun restoring his reputation among liberals and allowed him to step forth from the wreckage of 2000 as a progressive statesman. The question, of course, is whether he could retain that standing in the chaos of a presidential campaign. The Internet may well have reinvented Gore, but for Gore, the issue may be whether it's done the same to politics.