What Would Gore Have
Done?
Given
the Bush administrations
spectacular record of across-the-board bungling in nearly everything
it does, its tempting to think we might have been better off if Al
Gore had won the presidency in 2000. Try as I
may, I
can hardly imagine Gore being
worse than the dubious victor, if only because he would probably have been
more cautious, or at least more constrained.
For one
thing, President Gore would have been checked by the Republican Congress
that has loyally backed Bush in his worst excesses. We can assume that Gore
would have felt forced to react strongly to the 9/11 attacks, and Vice
President Joe Lieberman might have been as hawkish as Dick Cheney; but
Lieberman wouldnt have dominated his bosss thinking as
Cheney has.
In his new
book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind notes that
Cheney was nicknamed Edgar within the CIA, in allusion to the
old radio-era ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, implying that Bush was the dummy.
So in thrall to his neocon advisors was Bush that important information and
documents were often withheld from him; he did as he was told, or
advised, keeping his own plausible deniability as
his War on Terror quickly became the misconceived war on Iraq.
Ironically, a
Gore presidency might have been more like the first Bush administration
than the sons. Gore shared the imperial premise of every
administration since World War II, that the United States
must keep hegemony in the Middle East (have to control that oil, you know),
but hed probably have stopped short of trying to topple regimes and
spread democracy all over the place. Gore would have bungled too, no doubt,
but differently, and less disastrously.
For better
or worse, Gore is a more moderate personality than Bush, less inclined to
swagger and defiance. Hes a Beltway guy, not a bring-it-on Yosemite
Sam. But its more than a difference of temperament; again, the
slight Republican majority would have hedged him in, as it did Bill Clinton after
1994.
Under
Bush, the Republicans have gone liberal, breaking all records for Federal
spending and deficits. Its safe to say they would have insisted on
some restraint with Gore in the White House.
![[Breaker quote for What Would Gore Have Done?: If only ...]](2006breakers/060620.gif) Still,
we can only guess at what might have
been. The natural tendency of government is to grow, and when one party
dominates it during wartime, with the wonderful excuse of national security,
there are few limits. Suskind reports that in early 2003 al-Qaeda planned,
but canceled, a poison-gas attack in New Yorks subways; even if this
had failed, the reaction would have made the panic after 9/11 seem like a
drowsy yawn.
The real
story of the Bush years, as Suskinds account tends to confirm in its
way, has been the continued expansion of executive power, trenchantly
described from another angle by Elizabeth Drew in The New York
Review of Books. Not that you can call Bush a mastermind of this
expansion, which he hardly comprehends; he hasnt vetoed a spending
bill yet, but he claims the right to decide which laws he will enforce, which
pretty much makes the other branches of government superfluous.
It has
taken this conservative president to give liberals second
thoughts about their long adulation of executive power; and if they want to
call the Constitution a living document, whose meaning
depends on the whims of those interpreting it at the moment, well, he has
shown them that two can play that game too. But this is a pretty costly way
to give liberals elementary civics lessons.
Even now,
they havent learned the lesson. They dont really want to
control executive power or prevent its abuse; they just want to win it back.
If only Gore had won in 2000! Or Kerry in 2004! Can we have Hillary in 2008?
For them, the only problem of power is a personnel problem: somehow the
wrong people have gotten hold of it.
The
Republicans hold a mirror image of the same view, feeling that power is in the
hands of the right people. As long as Congress stays firmly in
Republican hands, Andrew Bacevich writes, executive
responsibility will remain a theoretical proposition. One result of this
monopoly of power, he concludes, is a war that may yet beggar the
debacle of Vietnam.
Whatever
harm President Gore might have done, he could hardly have surpassed the
mess made by Bushs maladroit Machiavels.
Joseph Sobran
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