Gore's October Surprise

His sharp little crack was never forgotten, least of all by Al Gore. In May of 2000 the Vice President addressed the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro-Israel lobbying outfit, in these terms: "I stood against the efforts of two previous administrations to pressure Israel to take stands against its own view of what was in Israel's best interest. When a friend's survival is potentially at stake, you don't pressure that friend to take steps that it believes are clearly contrary to what is in that friend's best interest." Gore then lashed out directly at Bush. "I vividly remember standing up against a group of administration foreign policy advisers who promoted the insulting concept of linkage, which tried to use loan guarantees as a stick to bully Israel," Gore intoned. "I stood with you, and together we defeated them."

The outline of a Gore-organized October Surprise is coming into view. Al Gore has always worked by simple recipes. Back in 1992 his assigned task was to undercut President Bush's status as the Hammer of Saddam by denouncing the U.S. arming of Saddam in the mid- and late 1980s; also the failure to finish Saddam off at the end of the war. In June of Campaign 2000, Gore publicly distanced himself from President Clinton on Iraq policy, reiterating that Saddam has to fall, and pledging support to an exile group called the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. In the late 1990s Chalabi's cause was pressed by Republicans in Congress, most notably Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, and by that baleful schemer and hero of Israel's ultra-rejectionists, Richard Perle. A bizarre alliance, stretching from Helms to Perle and The New Republic to Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, pressed Chalabi's call for the U.S. to guarantee "military exclusion zones" in northern Iraq and in the south near Basra and the oil fields, to be administered by the INC. In 1998, Clinton reluctantly authorized an appropriation of $97 million from the Pentagon budget to go to Chalabi's group. But as a consequence of a fierce CIA attack on Chalabi's credentials and prowess, only a fraction was actually released, and that merely to pay for offices and some training in public relations.

So Gore's stance on the INC in early summer 2000 was clearly preemptive groundwork for a fall campaign indicting the Bush family, along with Bush's Defense Secretary Cheney, for being soft on Saddam and ratcheting up the possibility of another military strike against Iraq. Gore announced that he had differed with Clinton's refusal to release the military aid to the Iraqi opposition. These posturings remain precisely that, for the simple reason that any serious plan for full-scale war to topple Saddam would involve (a) the cooperation of Saudi Arabia and (b) a warm-up of relations with Iran, neither of which contingencies being in the least likely.

But why would Gore need Lieberman on the ticket to help in the task of smearing Bush and Cheney as Israel-hating pawns of Big Oil and the Arabs? And how many votes would it get him anyway? Besides, Lieberman certainly offers an ample target to third-party candidate Ralph Nader, whose mission is to persuade progressives to flee the Democratic Party. Lieberman is a prime flag-wagger for the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council. He has spearheaded the corporate push for tort reform and abolition of burdensome regulations.

Shabbes Goy On issues affecting Israel, even in a Congress almost entirely deferential to the demands of the Israeli lobby, Gore, among whose prime mentors is the demented Martin Peretz of The New Republic, has always stood out as fanatical in his fealty: "Israel is our strongest ally and best friend, not only in the Middle East but anywhere else in the world," he declared in 1992. But it could have been any other year. Gore has always been a steady fixture at functions of (AIPAC), whose leaders tend to be far more hawkish than the Israelis themselves. Seventy pro-Israel PACs distribute more than $4 million each election cycle. Gore has been a notable favorite for such money. Cautious after the Buddhist temple funding scandal, Gore pledged not to take PAC money directly. However, people associated with just one pro-Israeli PAC, the National Jewish Democratic Council, had given Gore $52,250 by May of 2000, making them the eighth-largest contributor to his presidential campaign.

In 1988 the columnist Mary McGrory quoted a New York politician leaving a Gore speech as saying that Gore had taken a position "to the right of Likud on Jewish settlements." Even today, when public education on issues in the Middle East and on Palestinian rights is certainly improved from the awful racism and scare-mongering of 10 years ago, Gore is as unreconstructed an errand boy of the Israeli lobby as he was in 1988, when he toured New York in the company of Mayor Ed Koch, donning a yarmulke, baiting Jesse Jackson for meeting with Yasir Arafat, haranguing blacks and making Israel the litmus-test issue in the primary. In Koch's company Gore boasted to one Hasidic family in Brooklyn that he had a 100 percent voting record for Israel, even though there wasn't one synagogue in his congressional district.

Gore's Merry Laugh The most gallant group denouncing the horrible consequences of sanctions against Iraq has been Voices in the Wilderness, based in Chicago. On June 29, 2000, news came to them that Al Gore was visiting Chicago to talk about "energy policy incentives for cities." Let Danny Muller take up the story: "Kathy [Kelly] and I decided that we could not pass up this opportunity, to at least be a presence near his speech, so I ditched her with all the mundane office tasks and last minute details and headed to Navy Pier. I entered Navy Pier, went to the Rooftop Terrace and showed my ID, which was all they asked for. I later found out it was by invitation only, supposedly, but they were letting anyone walk in who showed an ID. I passed through metal detection and made my way to the roof amidst a sea of ardent Gorettes and carefully placed Secret Service. The rooftop was filled with approximately 150 Gore supporters, Chicago's Mayor Daley, and every major media outlet.

"As Gore stepped out to a standing ovation, with a stammering introduction from the Mayor, 'These Are Days' blasted throughout the sound system. I had come not to hear the issues Gore was saying were important, but to ask him a question relating to an issue that is in the hearts and minds of 22 million people taken siege by sanctions. This question also weighs heavily on my heart and mind, since I recently returned from Iraq and witnessed the carnage so cavalierly bestowed upon the Iraqis by the U.S. government.

"As Mr. Gore began to speak about how much 'me and Tipper love the Windy City,' I raised my voice and asked, 'Mr. Gore, why should anyone vote for an administration that kills five thousand innocent children a month through sanctions in Iraq?' He stopped. And he laughed. He actually laughed. He said he would discuss this later in the day. I responded by saying that every 10 minutes a child dies in Iraq due to sanctions and we do not have the time to wait. I told him that we need to stop giving military aid to the Middle East, which works to divide and destabilize, and that the billions wasted on bombing missions and sanctions could benefit the American people. I was also able to spout off the names of Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, and Jutta Burghardt as UN officials who protested the sanctions before I was removed.

"Mr. Gore did not answer my question directly, but many people expressed support, even the sticker-wearing Gore fans..."

"The Speech Of His Life" We're at that point in the election cycle when the candidate gives "the speech of his life." In translation this means that the nominee unleashes a stultifying string of half-baked cliches and is duly hailed as being the Demosthenes of our time. There hasn't actually been a decent speech at a major convention since William Jennings Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold finale to the Democrats in 1896. Since the American political process is premised on hokum it's impossible to deliver a speech in good faith, which is why the rhetoric is always preposterous. But that doesn't impede the "hit-it-out-of-the-park" ritual. Fritz Mondale supposedly hit it out of the park and made the speech of his life in 1984. Actually, he promised to raise taxes and destroyed his candidacy by so doing. Then Dukakis gave the speech of his life in 1988 and was never heard from again. Buchanan gave the speech of his life at the Republican Convention in Houston in 1992, and so terrified the country that Bill Clinton won the election. I was there, on the convention floor, and saw how it happened. Most of the press was in the press hall adjoining the Astrodome, watching Buchanan's oration being relayed to them by CNN. True to form, the CNN cameramen picked out the faces of fanatical Buchanan supporters and the occasional uneasy black or Hispanic. This was not an accurate rendition of what was going in the Astrodome, where most delegates were snoozing, openly deriding Buchanan or watching I Love Lucy reruns on the tv sets scattered through the hall. But the press and the national audience saw the Beast Unchained, and the Bush campaign never lived it down.

The "speech of his life" given by Bob Dole duly presaged his defeat, and I thought, while listening to it, that George W.'s oration in Philadelphia had likewise doomed his candidacy. Not in the opinion of the pundits, who have been hailing it as one of the best-calculated homilies in the annals of human communication. Where I remember someone closely resembling a tailor's dummy squinting tensely into the cameras, they remember a fellow with the warmth of Danny Kaye and the political dignity of Charlemagne.

Now it will be Al Gore's turn. If they have any sense the Democrats will turn the tables on the Republicans and present their party as the true home of white suburban couples earning more than $200,000 a year and the Republican Party as the sanctuary of the "special interests," aka welfare mothers and hiphop artists. Maybe that's the meaning of the seemingly dumb Lieberman pick.

Footnote: The concept of no-strings-attached aid?Israel is, along with Egypt, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid?would have interested Winston Churchill, who knew very well that the U.S. lend-lease money, which saved the Empire, had strings attached, in the form of all-important British imperial assets transferred to the U.S. when World War II was over.

Portions of this column were written with Jeffrey St. Clair.