Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [450]
“If you let the election become a referendum on [the question] ‘Do you think Bill Clinton did a good thing or not?’ that’s a hundred to nothing. I mean, I would vote against me.” Clinton chuckled at the joke. “Right? I would vote against myself.” On the other hand, if the question posed to the electorate had been, “Has this administration done a good job and no matter how bad what the president did was, is what the Republicans attempted to do in impeaching him, run him out of office, worse?” Clinton believed Al Gore would have won that question “two to one.”
To punish Gore for his boss’s mistakes, Clinton concluded, would have been “manifestly unfair” and “manifestly against [the voters’] own interests.”
Yet Gore’s closest advisers didn’t buy Clinton’s attempt at self-absolution. Said one high-ranking adviser who requested anonymity, Bill Clinton’s protestations that he didn’t adversely impact the election were delusional. “There’s about as much truth to that as his saying ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,’” quipped that adviser. The Monica scandal and impeachment maelstrom had opened up the primary for Democratic contenders like former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley; it had paved the way for Republicans like George W. Bush to line up and begin raking in campaign dollars. It had put Al Gore on the defensive from the start, creating the impression that he was floundering and forcing him to continually reestablish his identity, even moving his campaign operation from Washington to Nashville.
Charles Burson, who served as Gore’s chief of staff during the campaign, believed the facts spoke for themselves: “You have to put it in the context of the time,” he explained. “The country was on a steady course. Bush was a likable guy. Gore was losing his identity. [The scandals] enhanced the feeling of exhaustion. And voters were saying to themselves ‘why not? This [Bush] guy wouldn’t be so bad.’”
Moreover, the scandal also constituted the principal reason that Gore felt that he had to distance himself from Clinton. “Good God, why would you want to embrace him?” said one adviser. Not only had Clinton’s conduct been “unpardonable,” but it had shown a complete “lack of respect for the people of this country.” Statisticians and political pundits could debate forever whether keeping Clinton at a distance helped or hurt the campaign, said Gore’s defenders, yet the fact remained that the vice president felt he had no alternative. As a consequence of this decision, “Al gave up reminding people how far the country had come along and the Clinton administration’s accomplishments. These were his accomplishments, too.” Gore’s advisers were convinced that—although there were many additional factors in the mix—the vice president likely would have carried Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and other states sufficient to win a healthy majority of the electoral votes, if it were not for the Clinton mess.
If Bill Clinton had resigned, or if the impeachment trial had never happened in the winter of 1999, the Gore camp was certain that history would have been altered. “People forget the lessons of Watergate,” said one Gore confidant. “The country would have cooled off. There would have been less Clinton fatigue. Absolutely, Al Gore would have been president.”
Independent Counsel Robert Ray stayed safely away from all of this political debate and finger-pointing.