Gore looking good for 2008 presidential contest

An updated version of this post is available here.

According to the New York Times, Al Gore is seen as “deeply stigmatized” by Democrats on account of his 2000 loss in the Supreme Court. But the Democrats cited in the article are either favorably disposed toward Gore or are among the members of a Democratic party elite who fell far short of winning a plurality of the popular vote, as Gore did in his run*.

Still, writer Mark Leibovich takes his conversations to mean that there’s “a broad sector of Democrats who will reflexively roll their eyes at the notion of Mr. Gore in general, let alone the idea of a political comeback.”

Leibovich’s “broad sector of Democrats” is represented on the record by Bob Beckel, who piloted Walter Mondale to a landslide loss in 1984; Mondale himself; former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta; Michael Dukakis, who threw himself under a tank in the 1988 election; Mike McCurry, the former Clinton press secretary and Kerry campaign official (at present a shill for the big telecom companies); and former Gore aide Elaine Kamarck. On the anonymous front, it’s “insiders and operatives.”

None of them had anything bad to say about Gore, and only Mondale and Panetta even hinted that Gore’s 2000 loss would have serious repercussions among Democrats should he run again. Mondale said that if Gore expects to return as “the titular head of the party” — an expectation for which there’s no evidence — he’s “bound to have a bad day.” Panetta says that “[t]o come close and lose tends to magnify everything the candidate did wrong.”

The only comment that could fairly be characterized as eye-rolling is Mondale’s, and that’s based upon something that won’t happen: if Gore runs, it’ll be from the peculiar position of a former Democratic presidential candidate operating outside the party hierarchy, and it’s that party hierarchy whose eyeballs are bouncing off their skulls at the thought of his candidacy. Leibovich makes this clear:

As a general rule, it can be an unpleasant career move for a Democrat to run for president, streak to primary victories, win his party’s nomination and, ultimately, fall short. For his troubles, he will automatically be consigned by large sectors of his party to a distinctive Democratic pariah status — his campaign ridiculed, second-guessed and I-told-you-so’d endlessly by insiders and operatives who bemoan how “winnable” his election was and “unlikable” his personality is [emphasis mine].

You can add the press to that list as well; although their contempt is at present aimed mostly at Hilary Clinton, they have file cabinets full of Gore jokes waiting to be recycled.

Leibovich acknowledges that any comparison between Gore on the one hand and landslide losers Mondale, Dukakis and George McGovern (who makes a brief anecdotal appearance in the story) on the other is absurd, but qualifies the absurdity by saying that a narrow defeat such as Gore suffered “breeds frustration, much of it aimed at the near winner.”

Perhaps that’s true in some quarters — it was certainly true of Kerry in 2004 — but much of the frustration surrounding the 2000 election among what can legitimately be described as broad sectors of the Democratic party was aimed at the press and Nader supporters, either of which groups could fairly be blamed for making the election close enough to wind up in the Supreme Court.

Still, the comparison between the candidates is worth examining.

Gore won the popular vote with 48% — compared with Clinton’s 43% in 1992 and 49% in 1996 — and, on the basis of that one-time-only Supreme Court decision, lost the electoral college by five votes. Mondale won slightly more than 40% of the popular vote and lost the electoral college by 512 votes. Dukakis won 45% of the popular vote and lost the electoral college by 315 votes. McGovern, the only morally respectable candidate among the landslide loss triumverate, garnered 37% of the popular vote against Richard Nixon and lost the electoral college by 503 votes.

It’s the McGovern campaign that offers the closest historical parallels to a potential Gore candidacy, not because of Gore’s outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and McGovern’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, but because of McGovern’s successful assault on the Democratic power structure of the time. When he succeeded in establishing presidential primaries nationwide, he effectively broke the back of the national party machine and set the stage for his own candidacy and for Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 bid. He paid a steep price, literally; many of the party’s major donors withheld their support in retaliation, and some defected to the Nixon camp.

That monumental display of pique wasn’t the only reason he lost — dumping his vice-presidential candidate in the middle of the campaign didn’t help — but it loomed large and it offers some insights into the environment Gore might find should he run.

During the three decades following McGovern’s coup, power in the Democratic party has gradually accumulated outside the national party, in the hands of fundraisers, campaign consultants and logistical specialists, and in state party organizations such as those behind the conglomeration of March primaries known as Super Tuesday, a 1988 innovation aimed at producing center-right candidates by magnifying the importance of the southern state contests and blunting the influence of the early caucuses and primaries.

The tactic didn’t work in 1988, when Dukakis survived to win the nomination, but Clinton’s 1992 Super Tuesday comeback after early bruisings in New Hampshire and Iowa cemented both the importance of the clustered elections and of the fundraising and consulting industries that had grown around the primaries in general and the front-loaded ones in particular.

In 1968, the national party was dominated in large part by machine politicians. Now, it’s dominated by former political aides, such as the Democratic Leadership Council’s Al From and Bruce Reed — the former a long-time aide to Ed Muskie, one of McGovern’s primary opponents, the latter a Clinton campaign worker and administration aide — and campaign consultants such as Bob Shrum and Joe Lockhart. Lockhart is a PR specialist and “political strategist” who worked on the Carter (1980), Mondale and Dukakis campaigns and was Clinton’s press secretary during the impeachment proceedings; Shrum is the losingest presidential campaign consultant in history.

All of these people have several things in common: they’ve never held elected office; they’ve all been associated either with “liberal” Democrats who got shellacked by various species of Republican (From, Shrum, Lockhart), or with Democratic policies that were successfully torpedoed by Republicans (Reed on health care); and they’re all label-conscious, confusing identifiers with policy — rather than do a better job of explaining and selling Democratic principles, they’ve instead orchestrated a slow drift away from them and, consequently, the Democratic base. The older ones came of political age during the Nixon era; the younger ones during the Reagan years and the early days of the Clinton era, when Democrats lost control of Congress.

So what we have here are, in essence, a bunch of paranoid, issue-shy losers in control of the party’s fund raising, organizational and strategic institutions, with the associated ability to choose candidates and feed or starve them of money. And that’s where the parallel with McGovern comes in: the DLC and their Congressional allies are under assault from outsiders who, like McGovern following the 1968 convention, are threatening to wrest control of the party apparatus from the insiders and decentralize it. Howard Dean’s grass roots fund raising came as an enormous shock to the DLC and the Democratic National Committee, and the grass roots activism enabled in large part by the internet operates almost completely outside those organizations. Dean’s ascension to the DNC chair and his subsequent local party-building efforts threaten their control of candidates for national office, and his outspoken style triggers their pathological aversion to conflict.

That’s why you find self-described centrists — whose policies resemble those espoused by the moderate Republicans of three decades ago — using cute epithets like “McGoverns with modems” to characterize Democratic activists such as those supporting Ned Lamont’s bid to oust DLC poster infant Joe Lieberman, who embodies the worst self-inflicted qualities of the current Democratic leadership. And that’s why you’ll find them more willing to attack progressive Democrats than they are the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress: they live in constant fear that the Democratic party will be hijacked by Democrats, while Bush and the Republicans don’t threaten their control of the party.

Such is the dynamic Gore will face if he runs. Leibovich specifically mentions Gore’s 2004 primary endorsement of Dean as a complicating factor in a potential return, despite that Dean is now the DNC chair. But Gore, if he decides to take on the party’s power brokers, enjoys advantages McGovern didn’t, principally that most Democrats think he didn’t actually lose the 2000 election and that significant fund raising opportunities exist outside the party apparatus. Plus he’ll probably be more judicious in his choice of a running mate this time around.

In fact, things look pretty good for Gore, despite that he’s flying under the national radar and hasn’t offered much in the way of hints about whether he’ll consider running. A Fox News poll shows him polling at 36 % and 37% against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, respectively, in potential 2008 matchups. McCain holds a 12-point lead over Gore, and Giuliani 13 points. Hilary Clinton, the prematurely anointed Democratic front runner, polled slightly higher than Gore but still trailed McCain and Giuliani.

McCain and Giuliani both face the prospect of destructive primaries: Giuliani because of his relaxed views on abortion and gay rights, along with his somewhat complicated home life, and McCain because the radical right distrusts his swollen pander gland. McCain enjoys the support of smitten Democrats, but two years of running to the hard right may take some of the shine off.

Candidate Gore would also enjoy genuinely enthusiastic support from both progressive Democrats and party centrists this time around (the real ones, not the ones who continually allow radical Republicans to redefine the political center) — he’s perhaps the only prospective Democratic candidate other than Russ Feingold who ccould claim both the liberals and any significant portion of the moderates at this moment — and from many of the liberals who defected to Ralph Nader and the Green Party in 2000. It isn’t just the Democratic left who don’t want to settle for the least annoying candidate anymore.

The press are once again poised to savage Gore while offering complimentary tongue baths to McCain and probably any other Republican candidate with an ounce of charm, but this time Gore supporters are both prepared to push back and in a position to do so, and Gore himself seems more relaxed, self-assured, focused and outspoken than he appeared to be during his 2000 run. If he does run he stands a good chance of winning despite the inevitable shrieking from press and party.

Oh … and Dukakis’s contribution to the debate? “He says the experience of being a party nominee has afforded him chances that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, such as speaking to college students across the country.”

*Updated to clarify poor wording that could be taken (and was) as saying that Gore won a majority of the popular vote.