Dead Man Walking?
This week in politics will be very much like an early scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the baby boomer's classic comedy. In this cult-famous scene, a wretched mortician and his customer cart through a wretched, plague-stricken medieval village calling, "Bring out your dead!" Whilst being loaded on the cart of the dead, one body chirps up, "I'm not dead yet."
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
ALMOST DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
ALMOST DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Al Gore, of course, is the Almost Dead Person. There are lots of morticians and customers. Journalists and politicians will expend considerable energy making book on the when and how of Gore's political demise, while other journalists and politicians condemn us for shallow morbidity and the writing of premature obits.
At this point, few neutral legal experts think the Florida Supreme Court will reverse Judge N. Sanders Sauls' decision upon Gore's appeal. And few neutral legal experts think the lawsuit in Seminole County pertaining to hinky absentee ballots can really pluck Gore-Lieberman from the jaws of defeat. Not with a Dec. 12 deadline looming. Not with a Republican state legislature poised to strike.
Still, Joe Lieberman went to Capitol Hill to keep the troops in line behind Gore's appeal. But his words sounded resigned: "So let's end it as best we can, in the most credible way that will give the most legitimacy and authority to our next president. And then, win or lose, all of us will unite and go forward for the betterment of the country."
So the question now arises: Does it much matter when and how Al Gore "ends it"? Does it matter whether he waits for the very last note from the fat lady, or concedes before the final aria? Does it matter to his to his political future? Does it matter to a George Bush presidency?
My guess is that it doesn't matter very much, on all counts.
"There's no upside for conceding," said Paige Reffe, an extremely savvy lobbyist who served in the Clinton White House. "For them to concede now - I don't think they get a lot of credit from the American people…[it] gets nothing from his Democratic base, who believe they've had the election stolen from them."
Reffe maintained that Al Gore's political future will be little affected by the minuets of political spin he dances this week, they'll be soon forgotten. Gore's prospects, he said, "depend on what George Bush does with his presidency."
And how Gore handles himself during the end of this long end-game will have no effect on Bush's success in office. Gore has little or no influence on how congressional Democrats will treat Bush if he becomes president. They won't just deal if he tells them to deal, or sabotage if he ells them to sabotage.
Republican pollster Linda DiVall, on the other hand, believes Gore can still hurt himself more. "If he continues the combative approach," she said, "he risks looking like a sore loser and starts putting more pressure on other Democrats who have to go to the wall for him. This could be bad for him and for the party." He needs to show "graciousness."
A third perspective comes from a Democratic media consultant who is close to the Clintons: "It doesn't matter how he gets out. He ran a terrible campaign and, in some ways, the last month has been good for him. Instead of being vilified for not breezing into office on the good economy, he'll go out a martyr."
The idea that this weird loss has somehow given Gore more political longevity than a regular loss sends shivers up the spines of Democrats who fear they will be saddled with him in 2004. No matter what Gore does in the next five or six days, said one Democrat, voters are "still going to dislike him." If they liked Gore, he would have won this year, this strategist argued. Gore's been on the scene for eight years; public perception of him isn't going to change much now.
But by many accounts, Gore is in agony now. After all, the man was bred for politics from boyhood on. He went to Vietnam for political reasons - that's devotion, or something. He trained in the House, honed in the Senate, and waited for eight years in the Old Executive Office Building. And now he finds out he has to wait another four years! That's enough to drive a body over the edge. For Al Gore that would mean doing something that is against his political self-interest, which is at least conceivable now.
If Gore loses his appeal to the Florida Supreme Court and keeps fighting, or if he concedes in a blaze of righteous combativeness, the vice president might find that he has become a political comedy classic in his own right.