I Have A Dream

Through the 1990s, President Clinton had two powerful senior advisers: his wife, Hillary Clinton, spoke for the left of the Democratic party; his vice president, Al Gore, spoke for the right.

It was Gore for example who pressed President Clinton to emphasize budget-balancing over public spending. It was Gore too who advocated US intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo - and who supported aid to anti- Saddam dissidents in Iraq. Hillary Clinton by contrast championed a huge government health insurance program and opposed welfare reform.

GoreÕs vice presidential staff drew heavily from WashingtonÕs sober centrist think tanks. HillaryÕs staff, by contrast, were far more militant, ideological, and feminist.

But that was then! And this is now ...

On Monday, Martin Luther King Day, the former vice president delivered the latest in a series of remarkable and escalating personal attacks on the current president.

To understand what I mean by "remarkable" you need to understand something about the etiquette of American politics. For all the roughness of American political advertising, for all the ruthlessness of American political tactics, it is surprisingly unusual for a senior American politician to engage in direct personal criticism of another. There are many interesting historical and institutional reasons why this should be so - but it is so.

And in his speeches in 2001 and 2002 and even into 2003, Vice President Gore generally followed the traditional rule. He dissented from the policies of the Bush administration, he questioned individual decisions, he expressed doubts about the presidentÕs appointments - but he left the character of his former adversary alone.

Beginning with a speech at New York University in August 2003, however, Gore has shifted into a shriller gear. That NYU speech more or less accused the president of deliberate deception of Congress and the public. Then in May 2004, Gore spoke again, even more stridently. In the fourth sentence of his talk, he called Bush "the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon" - and he only intensified his rhetoric from there.

Now he has gone further still - airing "serious allegations of criminal behavior by the president." The most militant faction of the Democratic party has for some time harbored fantasies of impeaching this president: payback for last time. Al Gore has now stepped forward to head the parade - and just to underscore the point, he shared his platform on Monday with Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman who was the first political figure to call for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

GoreÕs lurch leftward probably will not much faze George Bush, but it has clearly rattled Hillary Clinton. She has worked for six years to reposition herself as a moderate and responsible Democrat - confident that the partyÕs left would understand and forgive her. Her confidence has proven misplaced. Over the past year, the party left has rumbled with discontent against the putative Democratic front- runner. Till now, they had nobody to match against her except hopelessly marginal candidates like Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold. But by definition, a former vice president of the United States is never a marginal candidate. And with Gore suddenly outflanking her on the anti-Bush left, Hillary Clinton has had to torque up the volume too.

In her Martin Luther King day speech to an African- American audience in New York City, she called the Bush administration "one of the worst in American history" and compared the Republican-majority House of Representatives to a "plantation - and you know what I am talking about": ie, a slave-owning plantation. ThatÕs exactly the kind of talk that has so often lost Democrats elections they might otherwise have won.

But then, perhaps Al Gore may not mind so much. He may still want to win the presidency. He surely yearns to lead an impeachment drive. But perhaps the thing that would most delight his soul would be to see his old rival Hillary Clinton lose her bid for the presidency as he lost his.