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Gore's shortcomings as a retail politician--emphasizing the wrong phrases in speeches, going stone-faced when he should be empathic, forgetting to work the rope line--have led him to compensate with big, attention-getting moves. He calls them "long bombs," the kind quarterbacks throw when nothing else is working. Gore planned to throw one last Sunday by flying to the 155-nation global-warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, where the U.S. finds itself scorned. Why was Gore planning to insert himself into a no-win situation?
Gore has a few long-held obsessions, that's why--and this is one of them. He started worrying about global climate change as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1960s, before almost anyone on earth had heard of the subject, and as a Senator, he wrote a rousing manifesto on the subject, Earth in the Balance. But now he must sell an Administration approach he once would have called too cautious--one that is sure to get hammered by the greener-than-thou Europeans. If he comes home without an agreement, his environmentalist allies will jeer; if the U.S. agrees to a more stringent timetable to reduce emissions, the big-money industry and labor interests he needs in 2000 will scream. Which is why Gore's political advisers tried to talk him out of going to Kyoto, cornering him in a White House hallway a week before the conference began. Gore shut the argument down. "If I weren't going to run for President, there would be no discussion of whether I should go," he said. "I'm going."
He saw what his advisers did not--that staying home would hurt him more than going, because it would further undermine a reputation for deep seriousness that's taken a beating in the windblown Clinton White House. "I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously," Gore wrote in Earth in the Balance. "When caution breeds timidity, a good politician listens to other voices."
With these words, Gore introduced the world to Bold Al--the side of Gore that Gore himself likes best, the one that sheds the chains of craven political calculation (sheds them so noisily, in fact, that every voter can hear them clanking) and becomes a gutsy leader. He wrote the passage shortly before he was tapped to be Clinton's running mate, and although the job of Vice President is not normally associated with heroic behavior (think George Bush and Walter Mondale), Gore really has been bold. Clinton "was looking for a buddy movie, a political version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," says former fcc Chairman Reed Hundt, but just to be sure, Gore took the job only after getting a guarantee of regular access to Clinton--their weekly private lunches in Clinton's study.