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by Patrick Killough [01/12/01] Al Gore’s promise in the 2000 campaign was “I’LL FIGHT FOR YOU.” To Wilson McWilliams in Commonweal (12/01/00) this is the slogan of a “second-rate” contestant saying, “Leave the fighting to ME.” Gore “presented himself as ... an expert who will fight our battles for us, not a leader who will make us more able to fight for ourselves. (p. 11) Al Gore lives too many lives at once--not all of them conscious. One life always dominates but others are ready to leap out and bite. Grinding along in any of his lives--journalist, politician, researcher, polymath, crusader, etc.--he is easy to predict. What remains unfathomable, however, is when he will switch lives. What comes next? Look to his genes and his rearing. David Maranis's Biography of Gore In THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE: THE RISE OF AL GORE, our Vice President grows relentlessly. The book (Simon and Schuster, 2000) is by Clinton biographer David Maranis, aided by Washington Post staffer Ellen Nakashima. Maraniss makes it clear where “I’ll Fight for You!” comes from, especially the fighting. And the hatred of losing. From Sports to Politics Take sports. While his father was Senator in Washington, young Al spent nine years in St Alban’s school. He took art as an elective and was a good, imaginative painter. There he once asked a teacher, “Sir, is this the time to be rowdy?” (p. 45) Born in 1948 and for years a bit of a runt, suddenly in the summer of 1960 he became “a husky young man” (p. 52) Captain of St Alban’s football team, he felt that his lackadaisical teammates were causing him to lose. So he told the coach they were breaking training. In basketball, Gore was “an incorrigible if deadly gunner from the left corner.” A teammate remembered that “his goal seemed to be to score as many points as possible in order to get his name in the paper” (p. 56) He was a little slow and not much of a jumper, but tenacious. Relegated to the varsity bench at Harvard, on the few occasions when he did play, he was so competitive that he invariably threw elbows and was in foul trouble within minutes (p. 71). In the mid ‘70s as a freshman Congressman, Al Gore played pickup basketball in the House gym. He “fired from the corner, a long-range gunner who passed only if necessary” (p. 182). Does this help understand some of his tactics in the 2000 Presidential debates? David Maranis’s book unsparingly traces the evolution of Gore’s weaknesses: his stoic, machine-like woodenness as a speaker, mediocre grades in formal education, smoking far more dope and for more years than he ever admitted, constantly putting himself into competitions where we was good but never best (football, basketball, defense policy, Presidential campaigning) and a sad, profound loneliness and inability to make close friends. But THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE also has his strengths: discipline which gets results, passion for facts, a quick study, an inability to be bored, a passion to try to explain the complex to the uneducated--e.g. global warming, detestation of racism and a shy personal outreach to black people. He had it all from the beginning. What will Al Gore do now? He once promised
Tipper to buy and run a small country newspaper. Daughter Karenna thinks
he might become an astronaut.
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