Gore revving up for 2004 election with anti-war rhetoric?
by Stephen F. Hayes
08/18/2003, Volume 008, Issue 46
New York City
FOR AT LEAST a few minutes last Thursday, everything about Manhattan's Washington Square, home to New York University, was a political cliché. The socialists were protesting. "LaRouche in 2004" supporters, that distant look in their eyes, were shouting down their former allies. Activists were fighting with "fascist" police about where they could stand. Eager students were distributing flyers and holding up signs--"Draft Clark" and "Draft Gore" and "Bush planned 9/11 as a pretext for Afghan/Iraq invasion and war against the Bill of Rights."
Inside, the 500 spectators chatted in anticipation. The stage was empty but for a navy blue curtain and 12 American flags behind a handsome wooden lectern. Security officers scurried around looking for something to be nervous about. Folksy-jazz pre-concert music filled the room. And journalists complained about lighting, camera angles, and seating. (USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro, who walked into the packed house shortly after the event was scheduled to begin, threatened a powerless press officer: "I'm a columnist for America's most prominent newspaper, and I promise you if I don't get a chair, I will not mention NYU as the site of the speech.") Speakers saluted their host and one another. And the featured guest, a prominent politician dressed in a navy suit with a starched white shirt and a red tie, strode to the lectern to a loud ovation.
All of this is standard fare for a political event at a prestigious university, where radical activism is as much a part of the modern student experience as random hook-ups and booze. What made this event different was the speech that followed.
In a broad, rambling lecture that began with and returned many times to Iraq, former Vice President Al Gore toyed with some of the very same conspiracy theories peddled by the crazies outside. In 35 minutes, he managed to squeeze in several bizarre and acidic accusations directed at the Bush administration--recycling the blood-for-oil claim, suggesting the Iraq war was conceived and conducted to "benefit friends and supporters," labeling the administration "totalistic," and, in a reprise of an argument he made last fall, claiming that the Iraq debate had been cooked up to get Republicans elected.
At one point, Gore even seemed to suggest that the Bush administration itself might have been behind the forged Niger documents. "And on the nuclear issue of course, it turned out that those documents were actually forged by somebody--though we don't know who," he said, drawing out the last phrase for dramatic effect. The audience of activists from MoveOn.org laughed loudly and traded knowing looks.
Gore's speech came two weeks after former President Clinton, speaking to CNN's Larry King, suggested that mistakes in intelligence matters are understandable. Clinton also said, "The most important thing is, we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea? We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way."
In an interview before Gore spoke, one of his advisers said: "We heard President Clinton's take on this a couple weeks ago. Now we'll hear Gore's." And Gore's views couldn't be more different from Clinton's. The Bush administration, Gore said, is engaged in "a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty." Such deception, he says, is "dangerous" on domestic matters and potentially deadly in foreign affairs.
If the other Democratic presidential candidates have thus far avoided Gore's term-paper rhetoric, they clearly agree with his message. Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman were the first to issue statements praising Gore's speech. And so it seems we have the Democratic party's talking points for the 2004 election: President Bush and his advisers are not only wrong, they're dishonest. They're dangerous. They're virtually un-American.
It's one thing for Al Gore, who insists he's not running, to make such claims. But it's startling that all of the major Democrats agree with him.
John Kerry, in his only major foreign policy address to date, worried that "the Bush administration's blustering unilateralism is wrong, and even dangerous, for our country." Howard Dean says, "We may well be less secure today than we were two and a half years ago when this administration took office," and the Iraq war "has made us, on balance, not more secure, but less." Dick Gephardt said in late July, "I'm running for president because I believe George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago." Joe Lieberman: "George W. Bush's failed leadership has left our country dangerously unprepared to defend against and defeat the threat of terrorism. "Bob Graham: "If you were to ask me the question is America more or less secure today than it was on September 11, I would say if anything, we're less secure." Although John Edwards appears to have refrained from making that claim himself, his spokesman hasn't. "Given the situations President Bush has gotten us into in the world," she said, "the unstable situations his administration helped create, do Americans actually feel more secure with him as president? We don't know that they do. This isn't going to be a commander-in-chief election; it's going to be a security election."
It's a risky line, of course, because most Americans continue to support President Bush, the war in Iraq, and the broader war on terrorism. Convincing these Americans not only that the Iraq war was a bad idea, but that they are less secure in its aftermath will be difficult--at least in the absence of another terrorist attack, something that would transform the political landscape heading into the 2004 election.
Without another attack, as Democrats become more desperate to chip away at the president's popularity, Bush's political advisers expect a campaign of finger-pointing, insinuation, overstatement, and in some cases outright lies. A few examples from Gore's speech provide a useful preview.
*For months Democrats shelved suggestions--made by Dick Gephardt and Hillary Clinton, among others--that President Bush may have ignored warnings of the September 11 attacks. Those accusations are back. Gore urged President Bush to order his appointees to cooperate with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, and insisted that Bush "let this National Commission know how he and his staff handled a highly specific warning of terrorism just 36 days before 9/11."
*Similarly, even as they have criticized many other aspects of the campaign in Iraq, Democrats have avoided repeating Tom Daschle's prewar claim that these mistakes would lead to the deaths of American soldiers. No longer. "Too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way."
*Gore wasn't always so direct, sometimes preferring the passive voice to soften his harsh attacks. Before he accused the Bush administration of deception and dishonesty, he asked his audience to leave "aside for the moment the question of how these false impressions got into the public's mind." That is, who cares if no one from the Bush administration was actually deceitful, but blame them anyway.
*Moments after Gore waxed pedantic about the "mandates of basic honesty," he blamed the Bush administration for creating the "false impression" that "Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11, 2001." But the Bush administration took pains not to make that claim. When Tim Russert asked Vice President Dick Cheney about Saddam and 9/11, Cheney said, "I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that." Russert pressed the vice president, and Cheney reiterated his answer.
"There is--again, I want to separate out 9/11 from the other relationships between Iraq and the al Qaeda organization."
*Gore also claimed, "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Leave aside for a moment that Gore's former boss warned about such collaboration. What's the evidence? Gore didn't say.
*Gore boldly demanded that the Pentagon "get rid" of the ill-conceived "Total Information Awareness" program. It was shut down months ago.
Gore concluded his remarks with praise for the Democrats who have announced their campaigns, but said he will not join them. Sure enough, he delivered his wild accusations with the sort of consequences-be-damned recklessness that would suggest he's not running. But he certainly looked like a candidate. And as the "DraftGore.com" flyer passed out at the exits reminded audience members, Gore said back in December that, while he won't be making a bid, he still has "the energy and drive and ambition" to do so.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.