Going After Gore

Al Gore couldn't believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes ("I invented the Internet"), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush. For the first time, Gore and his family talk about the effect of the press attacks on his campaign—and about his future plans—to the author, who finds that many in the media are re-assessing their 2000 coverage.

From Vanity Fair:

As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.

Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).

Today, by contrast, Gore is "the Goreacle," the elder statesman of global activism, and something of a media darling. He is the Bono of the environment, the Cassandra of Iraq, the star of an Oscar-winning film, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the amusement of his kids, some people now actually consider him cool. "If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over," says his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, 34, referring to the Live Earth 24-hour extravaganza in July.

What happened to Gore? The story promoted by much of the media today is that we're looking at a "new Gore," who has undergone a radical transformation since 2000—he is now passionate and honest and devoted to issues he actually cares about. If only the old Gore could have been the new Gore, the pundits say, history might have been different.

But is it really possible for a person—even a Goreacle—to transform himself so radically? There's no doubt that some things have changed about Al Gore since 2000. He has demonstrated inner strength, rising from an excruciating defeat that would have crushed many men. Beyond that, what has changed is that he now speaks directly to the public; he has neither the patience nor the need to go through the media.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."

How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore's communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren't so liberal?
Eight years later, journalists, at the prompting of Vanity Fair, are engaging in some self-examination over how they treated Gore. As for Gore himself, for the first time, in this article, he talks about the 2000 campaign and the effect the press had on him and the election. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my father, Martin Peretz, was his teacher at Harvard and is an ardent, vocal Gore backer. I contributed to his campaign in February 1999. Before reporting this article, however, I'd had maybe two passing exchanges with Gore in my life.) Gore wasn't eager to talk about this. He doesn't blame the media for his loss in 2000. Yet he does believe that his words were distorted and that certain major reporters and outlets were often unfair.

How does he feel about it all? "I feel fine," he says, "but, when I say that, I'm reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages." To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, "Isn't it true that right after the accident, you said, 'I feel fine'?" The farmer said, "Well, it's not the simple," before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, "The patrolman then came to my side and said, 'How do you feel?'… so I said, 'I feel fine.'"

The Wonk Versus the Frat Boy

The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. "Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. "Someone draws a caricature, and it's funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, 'Aw shucks, that's too simple.' In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom." He notes, "I do not except myself from this criticism."

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."

George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush's "folksy affability," "distinctive charm," "effortless banter," and the feather pillow that he traveled with.

But Gore couldn't turn on such charm on cue. "He doesn't pinch cheeks," says Tipper. "Al's not that kind of guy." With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with "the government nerd." "The reality is," says Eli Attie, who was Gore's chief speechwriter and traveled with him, "very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail."

Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn't particularly see the value in happy chitchat. "We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. "I fault myself." It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush's campaign, led by the "iron triangle" of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.

"The campaign went through several official slogans," says The New York Times's Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. "They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don't give them French fries and ice cream."

Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn't provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he'll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.

The seeds of Gore's caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal's Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time's Karen Tumulty and The New York Times's Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It's funny—he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal's Love Story, which was Jones's first film. Tumulty followed up, "Love Story was based on you and Tipper?" Gore responded, "Well, that's what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee."

As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. "The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated," Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.

In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore's part. "It's somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news—unknown even to many close friends and aides," wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?" Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. "What's bizarre," he wrote, "if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place."

Tumulty says she was stunned at seeing Gore's remark being turned into a "window onto his soul" in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere: "I'm in the middle of this gigantic media frenzy. It had truly, truly been an offhanded comment by Gore. And it suddenly turns into this big thing that probably continues to dog him for the rest of the campaign."

Caught in the Web

The Love Story distortion set the stage for the "I Invented the Internet" distortion, a devastating piece of propaganda that damaged Gore at the starting gate of his run. On March 9, 1999, CNN's Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview with Gore shortly before he officially announced his candidacy. In answer to a question about why Democrats should support him, Gore spoke about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative"—politico-speak for leadership—"in creating the Internet," he said, before going on to describe other accomplishments. It was true. In the 1970s, the Internet was a limited tool used by the Pentagon and universities for research. As a senator in the 80s, Gore sponsored two bills that turned this government program into an "information superhighway," a term Gore popularized, and made it accessible to all. Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore's leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that "Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."

The press didn't object to Gore's statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN's Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore's remark "a case study … in delusions of grandeur." A few days later the word "invented" entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet; March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he "invented the Internet." Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word "invented" was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore's word of choice. Here's how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: "A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he 'invented' the Internet, didn't help." And Newsday's Elaine Povich ridiculed "Gore's widely mocked assertion that he 'invented' the Internet." (Thanks to the Web site the Daily Howler, the creation of Bob Somerby, a college roommate of Gore's, we have a chronicle of how the Internet story spiraled out of control.)

Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he "was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder." But it was too late—the damage had been done.

The Beat Goes On

As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.

A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."
"It was like they'd been locked in a room, and they were just pumping each other up," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew.

"They just wanted to tear Gore apart," says a major network correspondent on the trail. (Both refute such characterizations of themselves. "Why would reporters [from] major news organizations confer with the competition on such a fiercely competitive story?" asks Connolly.)

Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."

The disparity between her reporting and Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. "Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing," she says, "disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations." (Seelye's and Bruni's then editors declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore's "grubbing for dollars inside a monastery," and "stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can." Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for "the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire." In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, "From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: 'Liar, Liar') to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore's credibility is resonating."

When Lehane and his communications partner, Mark Fabiani, selectively granted access, Connolly, for reasons Gore staffers say are obvious, was rarely favored and experienced it as an attack. "The 'Masters of Disaster,' as [Lehane and Fabiani] like to be called, spent an inordinate amount of time attacking various reporters and pitting journalists against each other and generally trying to steer the subject away from a troubled campaign," Connolly says today. (Lehane had no comment.)

But eventually, Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being "single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids" to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group's endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. "She goes, 'That's all you're going to say?'" recalls Eskew. "And I said, 'Yeah, that's all we're going to say.' And she goes, 'Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?' And then she threatened me, 'Well, if that's the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you'll find out the kind of relationship we're going to have'—something to that effect." ("I never threatened Carter Eskew," says Connolly. "It's possible I pressed him for something more than a 'perfunctory' answer.… It's odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.")

Toxic Coverage

On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:

"I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved."

Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, "I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say." But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn't do—"discovering" Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, "I was the one that started it all," instead of "that was the one that started it all." The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore's visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled "First 'Love Story,' Now Love Canal," she wrote:

The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story" and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Gore went on to brag about holding the "first hearing on that issue" and said "I was the one that started it all."

The story picked up steam. "I was the one that started it all" became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, "Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal." On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore's "delusionary" thinking. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.…' It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron." "It became part of the vocabulary," Matthews says today. "I don't think it had a thunderous impact on the voters." He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.

Seelye would later write a story with John Broder under the headline questions of veracity have long dogged gore and provided "familiar and fairly trivial examples," including his "taking credit for inventing the Internet or being the model for … Love Story." Asked today why those discredited allegations of misstatements were included, Seelye says, "Probably because they were ones that everyone had heard of. We did write that they were 'trivial,' but if that was the case, we should have left them out or debunked them."

Perhaps reporting in this vein was just too gratifying to the press for it to stop. As Time magazine's Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, "You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it's really easy, and it's fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was "a different kind of Republican."

At the time, the only people seeming to notice the media's missteps were journalists at the fringes or out of the mainstream, including Somerby of the Daily Howler, Robert Parry on consortiumnews.com, and Eric Boehlert on Salon, as well as mere citizens who had no outlet but the telephone. These last included the Concord High students, who were trying to correct the record on Love Canal. The footage was reviewed by a teacher, Joanne McGlynn, the day after the initial Love Canal stories ran. McGlynn spotted the discrepancy between Gore's actual words and what was being reported, and phoned the relevant news outlets to alert them. The Times and the Post printed the correction … about a week later. But by that time the story had been echoed widely and was accepted as fact.

Connolly contends that the misquote "did not dramatically change the point he was trying to make" and that "the Love Canal reference was near the end of a story that ran deep inside the paper." (Page A-10.)

At least one reporter who either made or repeated the misquote was not thrilled to have been corrected by high-school students and their teacher. Sometime after the Love Canal stories came out, Hoffman, the high-school senior, went to see Gore speak again at an event in New Hampshire. There she was introduced to one of the reporters who'd gotten it wrong. The reporter, Hoffman said, made it clear her help in fixing the misquote was not appreciated, and said that the article was written very fast, while riding in a van. "It's amazing what one word can do to a person's integrity," says Hoffman today.

Gore responded to episodes like these by distancing himself from the beat reporters, which puzzled them. "Some of these reporters would write ruthlessly unfair pieces about him and then come complain to me in private, 'Gore could've been friendlier to me at that cocktail party,'" recalls Gore speechwriter Eli Attie. To this day, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who spent time traveling with both candidates, wonders why Gore remained "secluded in the front cabin [of the plane]" and didn't engage in chitchat. "Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign," says Kurtz, "and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it's the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention. If Gore had had a lighter touch, he probably could have overcome that."

Running the Gauntlet

One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. "Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president," says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. "They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable." Chris Matthews contends that "the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators," but adds, "The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities."

Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the "pious smarty-pants" and the "amiable idler," and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. "Al Gore is desperate to get chicks," she said in her column. "Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn't stop turning off women, he'll never be president."
"I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow," she wrote in another.

Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush's intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the "bad boys," "rascals," and a "rapscallion." She shared with the world a charged moment between them. "'You're so much more mature now,' I remarked to the Texas Governor. 'So are you,' he replied saucily." And in another column: "You don't often get to see a Presidential candidate bloom right before your eyes."

As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. "Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?" … "He would have been in a suit a month ago." … "He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him." Williams's frequent guest Newsweek's Howard Fineman later chimed in: "I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire."

Maureen Dowd's June 16, 1999, New York Times column.

And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, Seelye wrote, "Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters." The Washington Post's David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he'd do as president. "But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president," wrote Broder. "I almost nodded off." As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that "Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating." In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, "I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction."

The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. "They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions," Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. "Do you think that's presidential behavior?" For the Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. "It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan," he wrote. "Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica."

As Jonathan Alter points out, "Overall, the press was harder on Gore than it was on Bush.… The consequences of [that] in such a close election were terrifying."
Gore couldn't believe his eyes when he read distortions about him printed in the country's most respected newspapers, say those in his inner circle. "It stung to have the political media, the elite political media, buy into this crap," says Roy Neel, his close friend and adviser of 30 years, about the press coverage. "But I don't recall him ever blaming the media for the problems he was having."

Indeed, Gore accepts responsibility for not being able to communicate more clearly with the public. He admits, however, that the tendency of the press to twist his words encumbered his ability to speak freely. "I tried not to let it [affect my behavior]," Gore says. "But if you know that day after day the filter is going to be so distorted, inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of messages that you try and force through the filter. Anything that involves subtlety or involves trusting the reporters in their good sense and sense of fairness in interpretation, you're just not going to take a risk with something that could be easily distorted and used against you.… You're reduced to saying, 'Today, here's the message: reduce pollution,' and not necessarily by XYZ out of fear that it will be, well, 'Today he talked about belching cows!'"

According to Gore, bringing up the Internet again in public was like stepping on a verbal land mine. "If I had tried in the wake of that to put expressions about the Internet in campaign speeches, it would have been difficult," he says. "I did, of course, from time to time. But I remember many occasions where I would say something about the Internet, and as soon as the word 'Internet' came from my lips, the press would be snickering and relishing the mention. Not everybody in the press, but the Zeitgeist was polluted, and it never dissipated, because the stream of pollution coming into it was constant, constant."

The notion that he was prickly or unpleasant to reporters doesn't jibe with what Tipper witnessed. From her viewpoint, he remained gracious with the reporters—even at an event during the campaign, when Maureen Dowd sidled up in the middle of a conversation he was having with two other reporters. "He stood up and got her a chair and said, 'Please, join us.'" After Dowd had written about him "lactating," he agreed to an interview with her, answering questions about his favorite this, his favorite that. According to his staffers, she was a fact of life that would have to be endured.

The Gores, a famously close-knit family, could laugh at the coverage some. They joked around at the nonstop talk about which president you'd want to have a beer with. The Gore's middle daughter, Kristin, pointed out, "Gee, I want the designated driver as my president." But down deep they weren't laughing. "The sighs, the sighs, the sighs," says Gore, of the debate coverage. "Within 18 hours, they had turned perception around to where the entire story was about me sighing. And that's scary. That's scary."

The Comeback

After the election the Gores, heartbroken, traveled in Europe for two months. "We were roadkill," admits Tipper. "It took a long time to pick ourselves up from what happened." Gore grew a beard while he was there. After he stepped back onto U.S. soil, the press began knocking him around again for his latest "re-invention." Ceci Connolly, who had become a contributor on Fox News in 2000, said, "Looks like he's ready to go, but go where? Back to Europe with his backpack?" Later, in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Germond wrote, "He should have shed the beard before coming back. Instead, he continues to wear it in what is being interpreted as a signal of another 'new' Gore."

Over the course of Bush's early months in office, the Gores watched in profound disappointment as Bush rolled back many important environmental regulations of the Clinton-Gore years. But, as Karenna says, "my father set the tone for our whole family in not dwelling. The way he publicly put his weight behind George Bush in the beginning, did not fan the flames, did not cause division—and there was every opportunity to do that—sent a very strong message to all of us to not be dragged down into anger and sadness about it but just to try to make the best of it." After September 11, Gore stood by Bush, saying, "George Bush is my commander in chief."

By September 2002, the country was on the march to war. Against the advice of some confidants, who suggested he might turn out to be on the wrong side of history, Gore spoke out against the invasion—fervently. On September 23, 2002, he articulated all the dangers that have now come to pass. The Washington Post's Michael Kelly wrote about the speech, "It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible." (Kelly was killed on April 3, 2003, in Iraq when his Humvee crashed while trying to evade enemy fire.) Fineman didn't hold back in describing how the "Beltway/Broadway clan" now regarded Gore: "as an annoying and ungracious bore who should have the decency to get lost."

In order to diversify and open up the messages coming out of the news media, Gore helped launch Current TV, an alternative channel that features viewer-generated content, thereby providing a dialogue with the medium. He also taught journalism, began working with Apple, and co-founded a business called Generation Investment Management. And, with the encouragement of Tipper, he dusted off the global-warming slide show in the attic of their Arlington, Virginia, home, the one that he had been delivering for 25 years to audiences as small as 10 and as large as 10,000. The first time he showed it, at Middle Tennessee State University, the slides were in backward and upside down. It would be turned into An Inconvenient Truth, win an Oscar, and help wake up the world to a global crisis.

Over the years since 2000, some journalists have attempted to reach out to the Gores. At a pro-choice event a few years ago, Time's Karen Tumulty gave Tipper her card and asked her if she would ever want to talk. "When I saw her that night, she looked as though a gigantic weight had been lifted," recalls Tumulty, who'd recently seen the couple agonizing over Gore's political future. At the East Coast premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, the Gores bumped into Fineman, who recalls, "I said to [Gore], on a personal level, I want you to know that I admire you for the way you have stayed in the game and taken the mess of a few years ago and turned it around and become such a leader in this debate." At the time, Tipper just said thanks and moved on, thinking to herself, Too little, too late, buddy. In retrospect, she appreciates the gesture.

Katharine Seelye, who still writes about national politics for The New York Times, has had time to reflect on her work: "I'm sure there were times my phrasing could have been better—you're doing this on the fly. Sometimes you're just looking for a different way to describe something that you have to write about over and over again," she says. "But I think overall my coverage was tough-minded. A presidential campaign is for the most important, hardest job in the world. Shouldn't the coverage be tough?" Connolly, still a staff writer at the Post but on a leave of absence, maintains that "the Washington Post political team, myself and a dozen other journalists, approached the Gore campaign no differently than any other—with aggressive, thorough, objective reporting."

As for Dowd, a Democratic operative recalls running into her and having an argument with her about her columns on the 2000 debates, in which, he felt, she devoted as much attention to Gore's sighing as she did to Bush's not knowing that Social Security was a federal program. "I basically said, 'How could you equate the two?'" he recalls. "'How could Gore's personal tics deserve as many column inches as the other guy being an idiot?' And her defense was 'Well, I voted for Gore.' I thought, Well, that's great. But hundreds of thousands of people who read your column probably didn't." (A source close to Dowd says that she does not write a partisan column, keeps her votes private, and certainly would not have disclosed that information to a political aide.)

Thanks to his newfound status, speculation about Gore's entering the presidential race has refused to die down. Alas, he's not going to announce his candidacy in the last paragraphs of a Vanity Fair article. "Modern politics seems to require and reward some capacities that I don't think I have in abundance," says Gore, "such as a tolerance for … spin rather than an honest discussion of substance.… Apparently, it comes easily for some people, but not for me."

Tipper says he has made zero moves that would suggest a run for the presidency, but adds that if he turned to her one night and said he had to run, she'd get on board, and they'd discuss how to approach it this time around, given what they've learned.
The reporters and opinion-makers have eagerly chewed over the possibility. After all, he's now a star. In step with the new enthusiasm for Gore, Dowd, in a February 2007 column, described him as "a man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism, and Iraq," a sentiment echoed by many. The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: "But if he ran, would he revert to the 'old Gore'?" Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards's haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?