If Gore ends up losing, he can wave goodbye to 2004

By Scot Lehigh, 12/10/2000

Even as Al Gore's desperate uphill struggle for the presidency last week produced an unexpected victory, one couldn't help but think of the ill-fated mountaineers of ''Into Thin Air.'' For the rationale that propelled them ever upward toward the summit of Mount Everest was the same that has kept Gore fighting against growing odds.

Agonizingly close to their goal, they knew that turning back meant surrendering the one opportunity they would ever have at reaching the pinnacle. There would be no second chances.

So, too, Al Gore. For all the pundit and partisan talk of a Gore-Bush rematch in 2004, Gore is smart enough to know that if he doesn't win this year, he's unlikely to have another shot.

Knowing that he's fighting for his life may have served Gore well - at least so far. It was his tenacity that produced Friday's bombshell ruling in his favor just when the world was gearing up for his concession speech.

It is also that do-or-die motivation that now threatens - much to the dismay of many weary Americans and the exhilaration of some - to push this long drama well into the holiday season, and perhaps beyond.

''The reason he's fighting so hard is that he knows there's no tomorrow,'' says Michael Goldman, a Democratic consultant and adviser to Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator who was Gore's rival this year for the Democratic nomination.

''That tenacity has given him a victory in the Florida Supreme Court that virtually no Democrat really believed he would win. But the fact remains that if he doesn't prevail, the chances of him being able to put together a viable candidacy in 2004 are almost nil. The only reason he did it this time is that he had all the advantages of heir-apparent incumbency.''

''It would be very difficult and very unlikely,'' agrees Stephen Hess, senior fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. ''The system rarely renominates a loser.''

There was a time when second chances came more easily to failed presidential candidates.

When Andrew Jackson lost the contested election of 1824 to John Quincy Adams, he roared against the ''corrupt bargain'' that had given Adams his victory in the House of Representatives - and came back to oust him in 1828. After Republican Benjamin Harrison beat incumbent Grover Cleveland in 1888, Cleveland avenged himself four years later. And other candidates have had two or more bites at the apple. Henry Clay ran three times, the first before the era of convention nominations. At the turn of the century, prairie populist William Jennings Bryan was a thrice-failed Democratic nominee.

In the modern era, comebacks have become more difficult - although New York Governor Thomas Dewey won the Republican nomination in both 1944 and 1948, Adlai Stevenson carried the Democratic banner in 1952 and 1956, and Richard Nixon was the GOP's anointed in 1960 and 1968.

But of those modern examples, only Nixon presents a possible parallel for Gore if, when all is tried and appealed, he still ends up losing: a candidate renominated despite having lost, as vice president, an eminently winnable race to a far less experienced challenger.

It took a truly unusual confluence of circumstance - a war that divided the nation, destroyed President Johnson's hopes of reelection, and hung like an albatross about the neck of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, plus the political collapse of Republican front-runner George Romney - to create the preconditions that brought Nixon back in 1968.

Those circumstances are so unusual, it's hard to imagine history repeating itself, even in rough outline, for another uncomfortable, unnatural, and unloved candidate.

In fairness, there are some who believe it could happen.

''I think he ran a strong enough campaign to give him a lot of credibility for 2004,'' says James MacGregor Burns, historian and senior scholar at the University of Maryland's Academy of Leadership. ''He won the popular vote and that is what is going to stick in people's minds.''

And certainly the Democratic Party has stayed with Gore through a month of recounts and legal wrangling. Should the manual recount the Florida Supreme Court ordered on Friday actually take place, and should it turn up enough new votes to award him this election, that forbearance will have been richly rewarded.

But if Gore loses, then tries to run again, the current party unity will count for little. Four years hence, he won't command the advantage that lent his candidacy power this time: the vice-presidency. Which means he won't all but clear the field of Democratic rivals the way he did this year.

Instead, Democratic voters would be looking over a cast of candidates that could include one or more of the men who stepped aside this year in deference to Gore's formidable institutional advantage: Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, or Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska senator who retired this year.

Sheer star power means Hillary Rodham Clinton, the senator-elect from New York, would be much talked about, as would North Carolina Senator John Edwards. And the size of his base suggests California Governor Gray Davis would find encouragement for his presidential ambitions. Joe Lieberman, having come across as a witty, likable candidate with more appeal than his ticketmate, could decide he wants to run as well. There's even talk that Delaware Senator Joe Biden would like to pursue the nomination again.

Why not Gore? Because the Democratic Party wants to win - and without the vice presidency, Gore doesn't look like a winner.

''If this last-ditch effort fails to secure this for Gore, he's a non-starter as a candidate in 2004,'' declares Lou DiNatale, a political analyst. ''He was there on the strength of having been picked as VP by Bill Clinton. But he couldn't even win his own state.''

Some Democrats would undoubtedly believe Gore was robbed of a victory that a manual recount in Florida would have confirmed.

''But others, and these tend to be the professional Democrats, say, `Hey, with prosperity and the nation at peace, we shouldn't have needed a recount. He should have won in a walk,''' Hess says.

One national Democratic consultant predicts that support for a Gore encore will fade quickly if he emerges the loser this year. ''When we get to the post-mortem phase, there will be a lot of people who say he ran a terrible campaign,'' this person says. ''A lot of smart people are going to say, `He blew Arkansas, he blew Tennessee, he blew all three of the debates, he targeted the wrong states.'''

After all, had he won his own state, a place Gore was so confident of carrying that he let precious weeks in September pass with no TV advertising, or Arkansas, where the campaign high command allowed President Clinton to appear only in the closing days, or even New Hampshire, Gore would be the president. Or West Virginia, a state where even Michael S. Dukakis triumphed in the 1988 campaign that established the Democrats' come-heck-or-high-water base.

But those agonizing if-onlys are overwhelmed by the larger picture of candidate failure that would haunt an unsuccessful Gore. Running the worst of races in the best of times, Gore surrendered a staggering 12 states (and 103 electoral votes) that Clinton won in 1992: Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

That cross-county weakness is only the geographical manifestation of Gore's problems as a candidate.

Unlike Clinton's in 1992, Gore's campaign lacked a cogent, coherent set of unifying ideas. In the end, he settled on an odd and unconvincing populism, which deconstructed this way: After eight years of Clinton-Gore leadership, our unprecedented prosperity has transported us to the very gates of Shangri-La - where we've been set upon by a ruthless cabal of special interests.

As the robot on ''Lost in Space'' used to intone: ''Warning! Warning! Does not compute.''

But the single most damning fact of his campaign is this: A supposedly accomplished debater, Gore went into the first of the three with a lead of five points or so over George W. Bush.

After facing off three times with Bush, a candidate whose record and experience as Texas governor the Gore campaign had disparaged for months, the vice president had lost his lead and, in some surveys, trailed.

Even Democrats who think Gore would have a strong claim on the nomination next time around admit that he will be subject to a strenuous critique of his 2000 campaign.

''There will be a lot of second-guessing,'' acknowledges US Representative Martin Meehan of Lowell.

Which is why Gore hasn't, can't, and won't go gently into the night. His legal appeals may have dragged this election on far longer than anyone thought. Yet Friday's decision in Florida has kept alive hopes for 2000 that Gore cannot realistically harbor for 2004.

''As long as you have a heartbeat, they aren't going to take you off life-support,'' says Goldman. ''But if you can't win with all the advantages of the vice presidency, you aren't ever going to win.''