ballot box: Politics and policy.

Gore and Bradley Debate

Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999, at 11:44 PM ET

HANOVER, N.H.--Al Gore performed this evening on a stage at Dartmouth College. He told jokes, blasted his rival's proposed health-care reform proposal as too costly, expressed "disappointment and anger" at President Clinton, and kissed up shamelessly to members of the audience. Bill Bradley was also present at the event.

Gore arrived on stage like some sort of feral animal who had been locked in a small cage and fed on nothing but focus groups for several days. Upon release, he began to scamper furiously in every direction at once. Assuming his stool 20 minutes before showtime, he volunteered to take extra questions from the audience. At the end of the hour-long non-debate, he promised to stay and answer even more. As of this writing (10:30 p.m.) he's still at it, sitting on the edge of the stage with his wife, talking about human rights in Africa and offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico with a few dozen New Hampshirites.

Gore came across as a kind of manic political vaudevillian. He oozed empathy from every pore, getting all over every questioner like a cheap suit. First he would ask the person about his circumstances, his family, or his job, in a desperate effort to bond. Then he would respond with an explosion of gesticulation, sympathy, and agreement. At the very first question, which referred to "behavior by members of your administration," Gore came out with a blast of empathy for emotions the questioner never expressed. "I understand the disappointment and anger you feel toward President Clinton," he proclaimed. "I felt it myself." In fact, the questioner didn't even mention Clinton directly. Not content with the six debates Bradley has already agreed to, Gore challenged his opponent to debate every week.

At first, you think: Hey, this new Al Gore's not such a stiff after all. Then you think: This new Gore is a bit over the top. By the end of an hour, the impression is of someone as desperate as he is unable to achieve Clintonian union with his audience. "Tell me about your family," he asked a questioner who asked him what he was going to do about school violence. "I have one daughter 17 months old and a husband," she answered. "Which one do you have the most trouble with?" Gore joked, smarmily.

A clinical psychologist who asked about the problem of HMOs limiting coverage for mental-health patients also got a full Gore-bombing. "I guarantee you I'm committed to it," Gore said. "Give me a chance to roll up my sleeves and go to work on this. This is one I want to fix for you." He then told a strained joke about managed care: An HMO employee who arrives at the pearly gates and is told by St. Peter, "You can come in, but you can only stay three days." This elicited groans in the room where several hundred reporters watched the debate on video monitors, as did Gore's fulsome expression of thanks to the people of New Hampshire for the wonderful lessons they had taught him.

Gore's problem, I think, is that he has watched Bill Clinton for seven years, so he knows just how seamlessly a politician can bond with an audience. But even as he copies the steps, he lacks the music. When he tries to emulate Clinton's audience-meld technique, he overdoes it, grossly. The problem isn't that Gore can't be personal and expressive. It's that as a performer, he has no emotional range. When he pumps up to the volume, he always turns it up to 10. This makes him seem insincere, inauthentic, and just generally fake, in a way Clinton seldom does. Television somehow heightens Gore's plasticity. I saw him in person after the debate, when he sat on the stage answering questions. He was calmer and seemed much less phony.

Bill Bradley, by contrast, makes almost no personal impression. Dowdily dressed and gravel-voiced, he is as close to affectlessness as anyone who I can remember running for high office. Aside from one direct and passionate defense of gay rights, which got the biggest applause of the night, I've already forgotten most of what he said. Challenged repeatedly by Gore on the high cost of his health proposal, he finally responded by uttering, in his unmodulated, low mumble: "I want to make one clarification. We all have our own experts. I dispute the cost figure that Al has used." Other than that, he didn't rise to Gore's bait.

But running against the world's most eager salesman, refusing to market oneself may be a plausible stance. Bill Bradley doesn't have to win you over with his charisma. He just has to wait for you to get sick to death of Al Gore.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.

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The readers respond:

Gore cannot win in a general election by acting in the semi-histrionic manner that he did last night. Although the Tin Woodsman has been called the Robo-candidate in the past, he appeared more authentic in that role than the android he played last night. Paradoxically, Gore as robo-candidate comes across as somewhat hollow--but at least he's really Gore. Much as he would like to, he ain't Bubba. The truth of it is, maybe Gore cannot win in a general election anyway, but at the very least he cannot win unless HE runs.

Bradley needs to seriously consider that running for president is not the same thing as giving a college seminar. He should understand that he needs to energize his campaign now, or it will be dead in the water. I think that this means he needs to adopt a dynamic strategy in his campaign, and not persist in sticking to last spring's plan. (He needs to emulate Roosevelt, not Stevenson.) That was the genius of the Clinton '92 campaign, its dynamism and progressive nature in successfully challenging an incumbent. As such, he SHOULD accept Gore's challenge, and debate, debate, debate. And he SHOULD insist on a genuine debate, not a format created by the corporate press.

(To reply, click here.)

Is the writer's only point of reference for a successful politician Bill Clinton? There are so few models of inspiring or winning politicians now, and I find it hard to believe that Bradley is breaking some sort of mold as the writer implies.

Gore was frantically trying to relax. I felt sorry for him. Bush '92 minus the watch. Of course Bradley didn't have to try, just sit back and let Gore's demeanor be the story.

Scorecard: Gore had to win, had to strike, but Bradley was even or somewhat better. Gore will regret demanding all these debates as he loses one after another.

P.S. Some substance: One things Bradley said, (from my memory!)(on a subject featured here a few weeks ago): Education. Bradley skillfully defended his voucher vote by equating the crisis in urban education with Great Depression. Said solutions could be experimental as were FDRs.

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Bradley says, "Let gov't do a few, big things. And do them well."

Defense, full employment, environment, infrastructure, a high minimum standard of living, safe streets, good (and more small) schools, and the best medical care for everyone. Do these well and let free people, with a job and good income, do the rest.

He did not say these were the few big things. I do. Of the candidates who have received money enough to win, Bradley is my favorite. But none of the others is that bad. I think this is to our credit as a nation. The candidates with a chance this year are more sympathetic to the needy and open to reform than any since the election of 1912.

Buchanan's concern for jobs and wages would make him attractive except for his worse-than-Archie-Bunker beliefs that brand him a dangerous political nut. He is so far his own worst enemy--a cross between Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy for those too young to have known the originals. He is hammered [in the Fray] for good reason--we just don't need a Coughlin or a McCarthy to solve problems calling for the wisdom of a Jefferson or Lincoln.

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Poor Gore! He is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. This is in part due to his upbringing: constantly hanging around the monochromatic beltway types. Methinks he did not have any life-changing experiences that mark most of us, experiences that make us choose one path in a fork in the road, experiences that have buffeted us and taken us to places that most of us never visualized of. On the contrary, Gore seems to be a person whose life journey seems to have been planned before he was even born. Consequently, when he is pushed out of his zone, he does not know how to act as a 'regular person.' His attempts to do so only make matters worse for him.

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reply to above:

From last night's debate:

"When I came back from Vietnam, I was as disillusioned as anybody you've ever met. I had watched my father be defeated for reelection in 1970 to the Senate because he fought for civil rights and was opposed to the Vietnam War. ... I thought politics would be the absolute last thing I ever did with my life."

But as a journalist he covered city hall and saw "people became heroes in the community by rolling up their sleeves and trying to make things better, and I was drawn toward that."

Bradley's life-changing experience was to shower with blacks in the New York Knick's locker room.

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(10/28)