When Clinton’s campaign aides were sizing up the Tennessee senator as a running mate in 1992, Gore’s friend and media consultant Bob Squier offered them this character reference: “He will not stab you in the back–even if you deserve it.” The challenge for Gore is to stand by a man he seems to genuinely like and admire while still ensuring that Clinton’s problems don’t complicate his own presidential prospects.
For the moment, Gore is unscathed by Clinton’s latest troubles. “There’s no peril associated with supporting a guy with a 60 percent approval rating,” says one Democratic consultant who used to work for Gore. Monica Lewinsky has also reintroduced voters to one of Gore’s strengths: a personal life that by nearly all accounts makes Ward Cleaver look dissolute.
Gore’s response to the crisis has been characteristically cautious and calculating. In the first frenzied days two weeks ago, word went out that there would be not so much as a hiccup of speculation about a new administration. Plans for a political-action committee were put on hold. He avoided any formal war council with his circle of advisers, but he worked the phones furiously for their counsel.
The gist of the advice: tend to business, don’t do anything that would be seen as a special attempt to either defend the president or distance yourself from him. (The Illinois rally was already on the schedule.) He’s avoided the talk shows, but vouched for Clinton’s truthfulness in several important private settings, including a caucus of 30 moderate House Democrats and a lunch with network anchors.
What Gore truly makes of Clinton and his predicament is difficult to know. But within the circles of family, friends and advisers that surround him, there has always been a quiet sense that Gore, by virtue of his pedigree and rigid discipline, will prove to be a superior president when his time comes, perhaps along the lines of a Truman or Wilson. These sentiments bubble to the surface periodically, and they sometimes carry a whiff of condescension. “Bill came up in a very provincial atmosphere,” Pauline Gore told an interviewer in 1994. “And even though he went to Yale, and he went to Oxford, you don’t undo or move out of that provincial atmosphere that has influenced you in your early life.” Still, Gore has learned much from Clinton, especially in the political arts. Given his own missteps in 1997 (the “no controlling legal authority” press conference, a shaky mission to China), he can stand to learn a good deal more. He’s not ready to lose his teacher, or his friend.
