Can This Marriage Be Saved?

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Maybe it was just a little misunderstanding, a thing that happens from time to time in every family. Maybe Al Gore really had someplace better to be at the moment Bill Clinton arrived on the South Lawn last Monday morning to announce that the gods had bestowed an extra trillion--with a t--dollars on the U.S. Treasury. Maybe Gore, a serious man who worries about serious things, had to polish the speech he was making that afternoon in Philadelphia on the war against cancer. Maybe the White House had pressed him to try to make the event, and Gore had politely stepped aside so Clinton could take all the credit. If the Vice President really wanted to be part of it, a White House official mused later, "he can come to any event he wants to."

Maybe. But maybe Al Gore can't compartmentalize as neatly as his boss. How can he share in Clinton's public successes when he's been busy denouncing the President's personal failings, staking his claim as a family man and promising to protect the dignity of the office? The stories about a Clinton-Gore feud have been circulating for more than two weeks, to the point that the President had to spend the better part of his press conference last week denying them. To students of royal families, all the signs of marital strain are there. The couple manage to make a pretty picture when together in public, but they are together less and less. Away from each other, they are unable to do anything but complain about their mate. Whether they patch it back together, and quickly, could go a long way toward determining who will be the next President--or at least the Democratic nominee.

From the first moment stories leaked that Clinton was angry at Gore for the way he was running his campaign, Washington has tied itself in knots trying to figure out whether the feud is real or imagined, manufactured to shove Gore out from Clinton's shadow. "We have to talk about the future," a Gore aide says. "The Vice President has to define himself, and he can't do it by standing behind the President." Gore made the first move during his announcement tour 2 1/2 weeks ago, when he seemed so enthusiastic about calling Clinton's conduct in the Monica Lewinsky scandal "inexcusable" to one interviewer after another. The President, at dinners with friends, insisted he was not upset by what Gore had said about the Monica matter, only a little sore that he had said it so much.

But there is also a second, more private Clinton, who has been uncorking a different riff late at night, between 11 and 2, when he checks in with his closest friends, some of whom are dismayed by Gore. "People wind him up," a Clinton aide says. In those conversations the President starts feeling sorry for himself and lets it rip, saying he brought Gore to the dance, plucked him from certain obscurity and lifted him up. These are nasty venting sessions, done and forgotten by the next day, but they have occurred often enough so that they leaked to the New York Times.

For his part, Clinton pleads a blackout. "I have been frankly bewildered by those reports," he protested last week. "I honestly do not know what the sources of those stories are, but they are not in my heart or in my mind." But the denials don't quite work, given all the other slings and arrows. No sooner had Gore begun his cancer speech than Administration aides were leaking their own big medical news--the boss's plans for Medicare reform--thereby stepping on Gore's headlines. The President is less cavalier about Hillary's priorities. He rearranged his schedule so that a Capitol Hill Medicare event would not distract from the First Lady's photo op at the National Archives. He went to New York to start raising $125 million for his presidential library. Not much in that for Al, especially at a time when Hillary was also scavenging around New York, looking for $20 million that might otherwise go Gore's way. Things have reached the point where Tipper Gore, asked by Larry King whether she would be campaigning for Hillary in New York, could do no more than be emphatically noncommittal.

Publicly, Clinton still seems to comment on the race as if he were doing analysis for MSNBC. He can admiringly quote George W. Bush's exact fund-raising totals by state--though he told USA Today that he could have done better. Asked last week whether Gore or Bill Bradley is more qualified to be President, the current holder of the job parsed Gore's resume, not his leadership abilities. As a bemused Bradley backer noted last week, "It almost makes you wonder whether Clinton really wants Gore to win."

Of course, ever since Adams and Jefferson, there has been a tradition of father-son rivalry in the White House. Eisenhower helpfully told reporters he couldn't think of a single idea Nixon contributed during their eight-year tenure together. Hubert Humphrey died politically in Lyndon Johnson's war. When George Bush promised a "kinder, gentler nation" in 1988, he meant kinder and gentler than Ronald Reagan's.