L.A. Proved too Much for the Man

But I did see a half-dozen old friends (or, as they'd say in California, "really close personal friends"), including one I hadn't seen since college who produces Popular, my daughter's favorite tv show. I drove around with the radio blasting 97.9 ("La Ley!"), America's finest Mexican radio station, stuffed myself with kimchi in Soot Bul Zeep in Koreatown, and was seated at the next table over from Dolly Parton in a Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood Hills. (My alpha-male dinner companion worried me a bit when he said, a bit louder than I'd've liked, "Think about it! That's probably the...most...famous...chest...in the world over there!")

Al Gore had a rougher time of it. How long his "bump" in the polls will last is unclear. A Battleground tracking poll even showed Bush widening his lead during Gore's own party convention. To blame for that was the selection of hacks, has-beens and mediocrities who were summoned to the dais to rally the party leftward. Particularly on Tuesday, when Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford Jr., at 30, became the youngest fellow ever to give a keynote address to a convention. They picked a young guy because he was supposed to talk about "the future," you see. But Democrats bought his youth at the price of brains and eloquence. Ford gets up there and rattles off a list of out-of-date policy prescriptions?more Medicare, more environmental regulations, more Social Security, more government everywhere, in fact?as if Bill Clinton had never existed. Only on Larry King Live did Ford get specific about what his generation had to offer America. "The future," said this visionary, "is really where America's growth and prosperity will come from." Got that?

That same night Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League launched into a harangue about America being two justices away from overturning Roe v. Wade. There's no nonsense sheerer than this. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, then laws permitting abortion would be passed before you could say "the women's vote." (Only partial-birth abortion would be affected?well, that and Democratic fundraising. But if Democrats think the public backs them in battling for that, they're out of their minds.)

Somehow, the most offensive speech of Tuesday evening was the one in which Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg said, "Now it is our turn to prove that the New Frontier was not as much a place in time, but a timeless call." With due respect to the way Mrs. Schlossberg lost her father, he was a politician, and not a religious figure. But the distinction between politics and religion is one that Democrats have never made. That's why Democrats can profess alarm about Republicans "bringing religion into politics"; Democrats don't have to do that, because it's already there. And that's why Democratic Party conventions are so depressingly full of talk about "leadership." The Staples Center during convention hours was about evenly split between people who want to lead others and people who want to be led.

Yes, all these speeches came on Tuesday night, which was to be the hard left's moment in the sun. But this convention reminded one of the old saying about every day being children's day: every night was left-wing night. Robert Menendez of New Jersey spoke on Wednesday, yet he offered up a stream of rhetorical dogshit to match anything heard the night before. Atlanta Congressman John Lewis followed Menendez, and introduced Hadassah Lieberman. So?literally apropos of nothing?he quoted "an old Yiddish expression," which he rendered as "From my mouth to God's ear." Of course, this should be "From your mouth to God's ear." It's an expression of modesty, of the ability to greet good luck or good news without arrogantly thinking oneself in control of one's own destiny; it's what a colleague of mine replied recently when I told him that an article of his could land him a book contract. From your mouth to God's ear is among the most beautiful of Jewish expressions. But From my mouth to God's ear sounds like one of the greatest of Jewish blasphemies.

Goretext In a place that has been described as 50 suburbs in search of a city, Al Gore gave a speech that was a hundred policy prescriptions in search of a philosophy. It was by no means a great speech. Yet Gore is getting easier to like, both as a person and as a politician. No dismissal of Gore as an amoral automaton can survive a reading of Bill Turque's splendid Inventing Al Gore. Here's why I have some sympathy for Gore as a person: His problem is that his inclinations are more intellectual than political. As the loyal son of one of the most loathsome Southern liberal senators of the 1950s and 1960s, he got stuck in the family business. The family business happened to be politics, but his predicament was really no different from that of the only son who wanted to be a poet but got stuck running his father's button factory. "They fuck you up, your mom and dad," as Philip Larkin used to say. They fuck you up in different ways. Gore's deprivation growing up was not monetary or nutritional but moral. He's not a slippery fellow by temperament, but in calling his father one of his "greatest heroes," he's taken a slippery fellow for a role model. Hence the lies in last week's speech, such as that, if he hadn't enlisted for Vietnam, "someone else in the small town of Carthage [Tennessee] would have to go in my place." But Gore isn't from Carthage, TN. He only summered there. Gore is from the Fairfax Hotel in Northwest Washington. What's more, he enlisted not in Tennessee but in New Jersey, which was nearer to where the journalistic billets were assigned. For a Harvard kid to enlist at that time was rare and honorable enough?why embroider it? Gore's overriding political problem is that he's got two electoral holes he needs to plug?one on the hard left of his party and one in the middle of the electorate. Filling both holes at the same time takes some ingenuity, and Gore has shown little of it. After picking Joe Lieberman to appeal to centrist voters, he allowed Lieberman to be bullied out of all the New Democrat positions?on school vouchers, affirmative action and privatization of Social Security?that might have made a Republican suburbanite take a second look at the ticket.

But as an orator, Gore can be very crafty. The craftiest passage in his speech was the one where he put his support for gay rights in the starkest terms. "And hear me well: We will pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we will honor the memory of Matthew Shepard, and Joseph Ileto, and James Byrd, whose families all joined us this week, by passing a law against hate crimes. They are different. We need to embody our values in that new law. It's time." The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is legislation that would make gays a protected class under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Matthew Shepard, murdered in Wyoming in 1998, is the most unfortunate victim of gay bashing our country has produced in recent times. (Ileto was the Filipino postman killed in the Jewish community center attack in Los Angeles last year, Byrd the black man dragged behind a truck in Jasper, TX.) All gays know this, but practically no one else does. Gore was thus able to reach out to gays without mentioning the word "gay," which would have alarmed those liberal Republican mothers in Westchester. Beautiful! Reagan used to do this all the time: appeal to the Christian right without anyone else in the country knowing what he was talking about.

Gore wasn't going for the pollsters' longball that would close up the gap between himself and Bush overnight. That Gore wrote his own speech was admirable, that he delivered it awkwardly, even professorially, was endearing, and may be helpful down the line. Because, in giving a laundry list of proposals, he was trying to drag the campaign onto his home court: policy, issues, intellect. The awkwardest moment came when he thanked his wife and then talked over her applause. Gore's family is the greatest indication that he's a decent man. They love him and he loves them, which is rare enough in politics. I was also glad to see that Tipper Gore, who's been looking strangely anguished these last few weeks, got off the best line of the convention, if only vicariously. Her daughter Kristin, who mentioned that a reporter had once asked Tipper whether she had a model first lady. To which Tipper replied: "I have lots of models about this big, and I play with them every morning."

Gore was helped by the beauty of his daughter Karenna. It's help he richly deserved, since he made her just as welcome at his rallies back in 1988, when she was a gangly, disobedient, slouched-over, teenage punk. When Gore ran out to embrace her after her speech on Wednesday night, Karenna presented it as a totally spontaneous act. "I was very surprised," she said later. "I heard this thunderous applause all of a sudden and I thought, 'That's nice, but my speech wasn't that good,' and I turned around and there he was." Yeah, sure. Journalists had known for about 24 hours that this "moment" was on the schedule. Yet I don't know anyone who saw it who wasn't a bit moved.

Why was this act of sheer campaign bogosity so believable as a spontaneous act? Because, as a colleague put it, "Hell, I'd've run out and hugged her myself."