Cheney: The Only Hope

He was right. As one who spent the summer co-authoring with Jeffrey St. Clair a book about Al Gore, I can say that the Veep's current pathetic performance is a vindication of every line in our splendid volume, Al Gore: A User's Manual. Every decent politician has a core persona that surfaces when the going gets rough. It's what people look for in these debates. How will the guy hold up under pressure? In Bill Clinton the people found and admired the tireless effrontery of a backdoor man hopping down the alley with his trousers round his ankles, shouting a sermon about the joys of wedded love over his shoulder. The man had staying power, so the people stayed with him.

Gore's never had staying power. He's a whiner. Fifty-two years old and he still doesn't know who he is. He's not a leader, because he's never truly sure?until the next focus group?where he should lead the people, or where the people want him to go. All his life Gore has been "finding" himself, pouncing hopefully upon defining moments, exploiting "epiphanies" like his sister's death or his son's accident. When he got back from his brief, safe tour in Vietnam he offered various essays in self-knowledge: that he had seen the heart of darkness, an experience so shattering that he vowed that "I'm going to divinity school to atone for my sins." To others he presented a more robust account, saying his only regret was he wasn't returning to Vietnam for a second tour. Yet another version had him acquiring post-radical enlightenment, that he had realized the greatness of America's moral mission, that there were people in South Vietnam "who desperately wanted the U.S. to win and to keep them away from this loss of freedom."

Against all this an Army colleague, Bob Delabar, offered a persuasive account of Gore and his buddies drinking Budweiser, smoking high-powered dope and playing basketball. "I think he'd say," Delabar recalls, "he had a lot of fun in Vietnam." Of course this was the one thing Gore never fessed up to.

Gore's internal radio is always on scan, searching for the right frequency. It's why he seems inert so much of the time. He's trying to figure out who he should be. Every student of Al Jr. encounters the "woodenness" factor. It's not so mysterious. Al Gore has been watching his act almost as long as he's been alive. Youthful rebellion was never a part of his psychic c.v. Even his mother described him as "fairly much a conformist." She also said, "Al was an easy child, very sensitive to our feelings. He wanted to do what we wanted him to do... Al never wanted to be the person to make an unhappy noise." To the sermons and injunctions of his father, worthy of Polonius in their earnest protraction, Al Jr. invariably lent a dutiful ear.

Listen to how his classmates at St. Albans remember Al Jr.: "a stuffed shirt, even as a kid"; "too well-behaved"; "too grown up"; "excessively competitive" with "no sense of play"; living "in a world of his own"; "not a risk taker." Pitiless as schoolboys often are, they put under Gore's entries in the yearbook "a wooden Apollo" and "Ozymandias," and the yearbook editors affixed beneath his photo a quote from Anatole France, "People without weaknesses are terrible."

Albert Sr. said in 1992 that he had carefully blended the two worlds of DC and Carthage, inculcating in Al "the rural influences and political society." Chores around the farm? It was not enough to paint a picket fence. Albert Sr. devised purgatorial tests for his son, planting tobacco, slopping hogs and forcing the poor lad to plow a hillside with a horse team. When even Pauline questioned the exhausting regime, Albert Sr. loftily replied, "I think a boy, to achieve anything he wants to achieve, which would include being president of the United States, ought to be able to run a hillside plough."

Small wonder Al is a psychic cripple.

Against him we have another basket case in the form of the moronic George W., product of God knows what WASP repressions of the George H. and Barbara household, a man for whom every glance at an atlas engenders baffled amazement at the number of unknown countries within its pages. In that encounter last Wednesday we confronted the miracle of a candidate who actually made Ronald Reagan sound fluent in his knowledge of the world, a man with a perpetual coke-sniffle breaking into that terrifying psychotic grin when he talked about men being "put to death."

Which brings us back to Cheney. At the present rate a crucial margin of the American people may vote for him, as the last and only hope. The alternative would be the man they kept out of the debates altogether and confronted with threats and menaces when, as a legitimate ticket holder, he tried to get into the debating hall in Boston, Ralph Nader. The people don't want the sanctimonious Lieberman, that's for sure. They know Cheney's been around the track, know that he was at Ford's elbow when he nominated America's greatest current Supreme Court justice (unless you count Souter), namely John Stevens. Cheney gives Bush the semblance of an historical shadow.

Gore can't even bring himself to utter Clinton's name as the Democratic president who has presided over economic boom, falling crime rates and all the other good things that supposedly should put Gore over the top. What's the attraction of a man too defensive even to capitalize on success?

Bill's Final Screw-Up Meantime, Clinton's faults are catching up with him, too, on a somewhat larger stage. He's always been one for the phony, cowardly, negotiated reconciliation, the win-win solution, the photo-op deal. The defining moment of Clinton's diplomacy was the "handshake" between Rabin and Arafat, offered to the world as the insignia of a decent deal brokered by America. Of course it was nothing of the sort. As Israel's guardian, the United States shoved down Arafat's throat a deal that was bound, in the end, to blow up. What else could one expect of arrangements that saw Israeli settlements relentlessly expand, no right of return for hundreds of thousands of evicted Palestinians, Israeli-Arabs as second-class citizens, Palestinian colonies under Israeli army supervision, no capital in Jerusalem? In the end, after years of groveling, even Arafat had to say No. Here's how the London Observer put it in an editorial ("A True Palestinian State is Essential") last Sunday, calling on Europe to break with U.S. patronage of Israel: "If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States. Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-administered 'bantustans,' with 'whites' monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs?flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending?would be recognised as scandalous too...

"The Oslo accords built in an overwhelming Israeli territorial advantage in the West Bank, and inevitably turned Arafat into a compromised leader. He is caught between an intransigent negotiating partner and a sullen, suspicious population over whom he has little direct control?a stooge created by Israeli policy and sustained by it. And all the while Israeli settlers extend their settlements in the West Bank.

"There is and never can be any long-term legitimacy for the Israeli state in the Middle East as long as this process continues?and it is this that threatens Israel's long-term survival. It was not Mr. Sharon's visit to the al-Aqsa compound on 28 September that triggered the current mayhem; it was Israeli soldiers killing seven Palestinians and wounding 220 others the following day, a calculated act of oppression for which the 'peace-making' Mr. Barak must accept responsibility."

There'll probably be another phony patch-up in Cairo, amid calls for even-handedness and concessions "on both sides." The actual balance in concessions is reflected rather more accurately in the recent death rate, nearly a hundred Palestinians, two Israelis.

Your Lovely Fingertips I'm not sure William Monahan quite caught the full flavor of fin-de-siecle decadence in his piece on the poet Dowson last week. A bit like England's soccer rowdies today, visiting teams of decadents crossing the channel to Normandy were eager to show the Frogs that when it came to what Rimbaud called the "dereglement de tous les sens," they weren't going to be caught short. There's a very funny entry in the Goncourts' journal where they record a visit to Swinburne, who was summering somewhere along the coast of Normandy. They knocked on the door and were ushered into the poet's presence. He was shouting out passages from Aeschylus while occasionally brushing his lips against a severed human hand he pulled from a pickling jar on his desk. The Goncourts fled.