FRANK BRUNI: Al Gore showed us how real patriots behave
Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018 -- Al Gore didn't reject the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling as partisan, rail about conspiracies or run around telling Americans that he was their rightful leader, foiled by dark forces. He felt the stability of the country hinged on the calmness of his withdrawal. He told Americans to move on. Then he did likewise, a decision that seems positively exotic in retrospect.
Posted — UpdatedTime and Donald Trump do interesting things to a man.
They make Al Gore glitter.
It’s almost impossible not to be thinking of Gore this week, with the words “Florida” and “recount” so prominent in the news, and it’s hard not to credit him with virtues absent in Trump and increasingly rare in politics these days.
Grace in defeat, for one. For another: a commitment to democracy greater than a concern for self.
Sure, the review of ballots that Gore’s campaign demanded in 2000, as he and George W. Bush waited tensely to see who would get the Sunshine State’s electoral votes and become president, was a rancorous affair lousy with recriminations.
But after the Supreme Court halted it, Gore didn’t reject that ruling as partisan, rail about conspiracies or run around telling Americans that he was their rightful leader, foiled by dark forces. He felt that the stability of the country hinged on the calmness of his withdrawal. So he told Americans to move on.
Then he did likewise, a decision that seems positively exotic in retrospect.
Gore, 70, is younger than all of them. Like Clinton, he can proudly point to having won the popular vote. But when a new try for the White House made the most sense for him, in 2004, he took a pass. There were many reasons, including this: He possessed the ability to cede the spotlight even when it was his to claim. Imagine that.
But how quaint are those quibbles in the context of Trump?
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” Shaun Bowler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, told me, adding that some politicians, especially on the right, “are drawing into question the legitimacy of the system as an election-winning tactic. They’re doing this for short-term gain without thought to long-term erosion.”
The greatest perils are a widespread loss of faith in the process and unwillingness to honor its outcomes. That was precisely what Gore sought to avoid in 2000. Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, who was one of the Gore campaign’s principal spokesmen, recalled that when the recount was stopped, Gore “emailed me on my BlackBerry: ‘Don’t trash the Supreme Court.'”
We do? Maybe we did. I thank Gore for the reminder.
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