In Defense of Al Gore
The former vice president is content to shun the limelight.

By Nick Schulz, politics editor of FOXNews.com
April 24, 2001 12:15 p.m.

l Gore deserves some pity. Longtime readers of NRO may be surprised to see those words. But there they are.

After losing the 2000 election, Gore returned to private life for the time being and, unlike his old West Wing sidekick, has kept the low profile that is in keeping with the proper tradition and custom of those who depart the Executive Branch.

But Gore's reticence to venture out in public is unacceptable for lots of folks, many of whom Gore used to consider his allies. And they are letting him know it, loud and clear.

In a column titled "Calling Al Gore," Richard Cohen blasts the former vice president. "Where the Hell are you?" squeals Cohen, knocking Gore for being MIA on the environment.

Salon's Anthony York trashes Gore, too. He mocks Gore for having done little more than banter about "meta-narratives with his students at Columbia Journalism School" since leaving office.

In the New York Times, George Packer sneers at Gore: "When President Bush broke his campaign promise to cap carbon dioxide emissions and then shrugged off the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, Al Gore ... was apparently too busy mending fences in Tennessee to say one word about an issue that once inspired him to write an entire book."

And Newsweek's Howard Fineman belittles Gore as a "political afterthought" and says, uncharitably, that "he's lying fallow, like exhausted farmland."

Some have even taken to pointing out how fat the good ship Gore has become. Fineman dubs him "Taftian" (as in William Howard, not Robert). The New York Daily News titled a piece on Gore's expanding girth, "Hey, Hey Fat Albert."

Gore's gorging is now international news, as London's Daily Telegraph reports, tongue-in-cheek, that Gore is no "political lightweight."

All of this attention paid to someone who so clearly wants no attention is, at first look, peculiar. But something a little deeper is at play, here.

The problem for those partisans attacking Gore for stepping back from the political fray — for refusing to engage in incendiary rhetoric about how the Republicans "stole" the election — is that Gore seems at peace with the outcome of election 2000 and seems happy to take some time off. It is his critics who can't seem to let go, and they feel the need to question the legitimacy of Bush's presidency at every turn.

For example, Packer describes Gore to Times readers as "the candidate who won the popular vote by half a million." Fineman reminds his readers: "Gore won the popular vote by 538,000." In Cohen's tirade, he dismisses Bush as the "technical winner" of the election (as if there's some other, more meaningful kind).

Those reminders are petty and (at this point, certainly) tired barbs. But to many, they seem eminently reasonable.

In the wake of the Florida fracas, a quick look at some of the headlines of the Nation or the American Prospect or the New York Review of Books reveals just how unhinged the intellectual Left has become:

"The Road to Illegitimacy"; "How the GOP Gamed the System in Florida"; "Florida's 'Disappeared Voters"; "Deconstructing the Election"; "None Dare Call it Treason"; Disfranchised by the GOP"; "Still A Thief: Why the media recounts in Florida don't change a thing"; "The Lynching of The Black Vote"; "What Makes People Think Bush Has Won?"

During his concession, the Electoral College vote, the counting of the electoral votes in Congress (overseen by a gracious and even funny Gore), the inauguration of George Bush, and the peaceful transfer of power, Gore has been thoroughly decent, dignified, adult, thoughtful, tactful, cheerful, decorous, even patriotic. He is clearly at ease with what has transpired.

Today, many of those most frustrated with the outcome of 2000 are simply taking some of their frustrations out on a man who seems perfectly content to put it all behind him. His critics should do him a favor. Leave him be.