At Last His Own Man

Lots of politicians lose elections, but few get a chance to show a truer self in the act of losing. It was not until the five weeks after Election Day that Al Gore was able to prove he was indeed what he had declared himself to be in his Democratic Convention speech: his own man.

For the first time since he began his slog for the presidency, Gore wasn't trying to convince people to like him; he was trying to persuade them he was right. And he wasn't trying to win their votes; he was claiming the votes he believed he had already won. So Gore finally lived up to his own billing: the candidate who is not afraid to choose "the hard right over the easy wrong," the fighter who doesn't shrink in the ring. The hard, joyless endeavor of winning votes had been "like crawling over broken glass," in the words of an aide. It seemed the least that fate owed him at the end was, if not a blessed victory, then a quick, clean defeat. But in the past five weeks, "the situation, the significance, the stakes all brought out the best in him," says Ron Klain, who helped lead the legal effort in Florida. Gore finally was running the campaign his way.

That meant the flaws and weaknesses of the effort were Gore's as well. For all his tenacity, Gore also flailed, fearful of closing any option as he gobbled up information and explored all his possibilities. He indulged his fascination with complexity and went in many directions at once. In retrospect, he might have been better off simply calling for a statewide recount by hand, as some of his strategists recommended in the first days after the election; instead, he picked a handful of reliably Democratic counties in which to make his stand. He might have moved more quickly to the contest phase of the election; instead, he used vast firepower on the early recounts that preceded Secretary of State Katherine Harris' certification. What Gore created was "a formless, shapeless thing," concedes an adviser. "You have to give structure to a situation like this."

And consistency as well. But just as it had been difficult to predict during his presidential campaign which Gore you might see on any given morning, his argument for winning Florida was protean. He praised the hardworking Palm Beach canvassers one day and sued them the next. He wanted to count every vote, but countenanced his supporters' efforts to get thousands thrown out. He vowed to honor voter intent, a goal that lost some of its nobility as the nation saw how many kinds of guesswork that would take. So uneven was Gore's footing in the public relations war that one often quoted adviser made a practice of instantly deleting the daily talking points the campaign would send him by e-mail.

But it would have been difficult for even the most agile politician to wage a war in such unfamiliar territory, especially on so many fronts: waging an uphill battle with the legal system, closing the ranks of a Democratic Party whose support for him had always been tenuous and quelling the perception that George W. Bush had won the election--one thing Gore's advisers blame on the television networks' erroneous declaration of Bush's win on election night. Just as difficult, Gore strategist Carter Eskew says, were "the odds of fighting a system that has a perhaps understandable desire for finality and conclusion."