Democrats better off without 2000 baggage Gore no more

Speaking in the congenial confines of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s current-affairs program 60 Minutes, Albert Gore Jr. has stated he won’t be a candidate for the presidency of the United States in 2004.

“Never say never,” he cautioned, and we realize that’s good advice, bearing in mind the admonition (which we credit to reporter Peter Worthington) that you should believe a lifelong politician is out of politics only when you see a wooden stake through his heart. But No Gore on the Floor in ’04 seems a reasonable prediction after he publicly renounced his candidacy.

It is all about the future, of course. “I think that a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush,” he says, “would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would in some measure distract from the focus on the future.” Yes, that inconvenient past with its dangling chads, innumeracy, and inattention to electoral law might get in the way, all right.

Races against a sitting United States president are normally won or lost by the incumbent, as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute points out in a recent Financial Times column. (Yes, we know about the characterization of the Institute as a “right-wing think-tank,” which sets us to wondering how much thinking goes on in left-wing tanks.) Gore, perhaps sensing that the current administration remains popular, may not want to set himself up to become another Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Dewey, or William Jennings Bryan — electoral politics is unkind to two-time (and in Bryan’s case, three-time) losers.

More probably, Gore sounded out the powerful of the Democratic party and found he was now counted a liability. Unless you are one of the astute political observers for the major television networks or certain large-circulation broadsheets, there’s little mistaking the signs — Gore made himself readily available to stump for Democrats in the recent elections, but the party kept him well away from many close races where his appearance could have hurt, rather than helped. Whatever naivet the Democrats may display in world affairs, they have perfect realpolitik instincts and a useful streak of functional nastiness when election day looms.

Thus we are forced to the conclusion that Gore has been effectively warned off by the Democratic establishment, to make room for someone that might trip up Bush in 2004, or to allow the electorate to forget in preparation for 2008. Even if a week is a long time in politics, six years is not too far for the Dems to plan ahead.

Gore’s absence from the fray is, on the face of it, good for industry in general and the resource industries in particular. His animus against the extractive industries was never much disguised, and if the author of Earth in the Balance is off the screen, that’s one less highly-placed opponent of mining.

Gore was indeed a visible and highly-placed mouthpiece for preservationist cant. But he did not lead the phalanx of anti-development ideologues whose power reached its apex during the William Clinton presidency, except from behind. And those ideologues have fixed on the Democratic Party as their passport to power as surely as Texas oilmen and Eastern bankers support the Republicans. Out of power, they change their tactics, seeking through administrative remedies and the courts what they cannot get through politics.

Control of the White House is still the vital matter: recall how the Clinton Administration ran end-around plays past unambiguous Congressional resolutions on environmental matters. If the Republicans maintain control of the White House through 2008, look for official friendliness toward mining, but the anti-mining agenda will still be pursued through the approvals process and the courts.

Not that having a more pro-development administration is no better than an anti-development one. There is a world of difference between having to fight the anti-mining movement in the courts, regulatory hearings and land use tribunals, and having to fight entrenched policies and top-down mandates. But either way there is a fight, and the foes of mining projects are determined, difficult and organized.

Mining’s advocates in the United States, however often they are portrayed as capitalist city-slickers by preservationists, are most often ordinary working people with better things to do than lobby, obstruct, demonstrate, and bankroll court challenges. Therein lies a disadvantage, as anti-development groups have the time and resources to play the political and judicial systems to get what they want. But there is also an advantage, in that an ordinary Nevadan gold miner can speak to other ordinary Americans in ways that transcend the appeals of the ideologues. Find a way for that voice to make itself heard over the heads of politicians and pressure groups, and all the Al Gores and Bruce Babbitts of the world won’t make a dent.