LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Al Gore : The Democratic Candidate on Roosevelt, Clinton and Ecology

More than one person in the crowd asks why Al Gore, the apparently flawless candidate, isn’t at the head of the ticket. The son of a famous senator, of the same name, from Tennessee, the younger Gore, at 44, has already served 13 circumspect years in the House and Senate. The ever-so-slight drawl may suggest backwoods Tennessee, but he spent his childhood living at the Fairfax Hotel only blocks from the White House. He exudes an insider’s savvy, yet receives high marks, from both sides of the legislative aisle, for integrity. He is so straight that the campaign joke is “How do you distinguish the candidate from the Secret Service escorts?”

He is also bright, handsome, experienced, moderate, well-educated and politically correct on family values--why shouldn’t he be President? That was his goal in an abortive bid back in 1988, only he proved too lackluster and conservative for the rough and tumble of the Democratic Party primaries. Now he seems perfectly suited to doggedly carrying the centrist banner of a recast Democratic Party.

This is one baby boomer who skirted the land mines of his generation with the aplomb of a ballet dancer--a Vietnam veteran who opposed the war, a “strongly pro-choice” candidate who once helped block federal funding for abortions and still might if we don’t get national health insurance, a sponsor of the Brady Bill on gun control who had previously voted against a ban on handguns, a lover of rock whose wife, Tipper, campaigned to get lyrics controlled--voluntarily.

Quite a package and, opportunistic or not, it seems to meet the needs of the times as demonstrated by Gore being suddenly anointed with the key ingredient he was missing four years ago--the elusive magic of charisma. Large crowds now seem to just love his style. Even when he occasionally wanders off into the minutiae of legislation, his true passion, rhetoric-weary fans take it as a mark that he is serious of purpose. And he is. Gore may not be a bold innovator, but he is knowledgeable about the nuances of the legislative process, including the substantive details of a wide range of subjects from cable-TV franchising to the desirable throw weight of nuclear missiles.

He is the rare candidate who can brief himself and is obviously unafraid of intellectual jousting. This interview began in the back of a campaign limo in Seattle and ended with a follow-up call, two days later, from a campaign plane. Gore was talking about the proposal in his book of a Marshall Plan for world ecology. His answer was so precise and detailed that it got lost to the elements as the cellular phone lifted out of range. But one can rest assured that Gore does have an answer. One that is informed and not likely dichotomous.

Question: At the University of Washington, you mentioned Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Do you think we’re headed for a depression?

Answer: No, my reference to Herbert Hoover was in comparison to the economic performance of every President since Hoover, and every presidential term since Hoover. This past four-year term under Bush and Quayle has been, by all odds, the worst economic performance since the Great Depression, and that is not to equate what we’re in now with the economic circumstances we were in under Hoover. I didn’t mean that.

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Q: But are we headed in that direction?

A: No, I don’t--well, eh, I don’t believe that is a principal risk we face in our economy; I think the principal risk we face is continued stagnation with mounting debts and a continuing loss of jobs, a continuing decline in our relative ability to compete in a dynamic global marketplace. That is the thread proposed by a continuation of the Bush-Quayle policy.

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Q: Both the Democratic and Republican candidates have cited the model of Harry Truman. How come no one’s referring to FDR ? Don’t we need a little Keynesian pump-priming here to get the economy moving?

A: Well, first of all, I can’t resist noting the sense of absurdity with which mostpeople react to the attempt by George Bush to portray himself as another Harry Truman. Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel, probably said it best when she wrote her father would not be flattered, but he would be flabbergasted. George Bush has fought against everything that Harry Truman stood for, and has been in favor of everything Harry Truman fought against.

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Q: What I was referring to is Roosevelt’s view of what the government should do for people during hard times. If the private sector’s not doing it, the government has got to prime the pump.

A: Well, Bill Clinton and I represent a different approach. We have both fought for change within the Democratic Party, as well as within the country.

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Q: A different approach than FDR?

A: Than what has been viewed as a tax-and-spend approach. Franklin Roosevelt’s approach was not only appropriate but necessary for the circumstances in which the country found itself when he was elected President. These circumstances are different. We have a $400- billion budget deficit. We are borrowing more than a billion dollars a day. We don’t want to go back to a tax-and-spend approach, but we want to abandon the borrow-and-spend approach of Bush and Quayle.

We believe that the role of government should be defined with much more emphasis on the task of facilitating growth, empowering people to make the choices in their own lives that result in a better quality of life. We believe in government investment in things like infrastructure, and we’ve called for a new, more expansive definition of infrastructure to encompass information infrastructure, a nationwide-network of information super-highways . . . .

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Q: What’s wrong with FDR as a role model? Wasn’t he a great American, and didn’t he do what had to be done at that time?

A: Sure, sure.

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Q: And if we get into that pickle again, don’t we need to do something like FDR did to jump-start the economy?

A: Well, yes, and some of the approaches that FDR took are ones that, in modified form, we are proposing. Let me give you an example. We proposed a $20-billion-a-year investment fund in infrastructure for this country. That will create a great many jobs. But we also are in favor of encouraging private-sector solutions, where a change in the incentives that drive the private sector can produce a favorable response . . . .

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Q: I’m going to shift quickly: You supported the war in Iraq. There’s been a great deal of reporting--in The Times and elsewhere--since indicating that President Bush had cozy relations with Saddam Hussein before the war. Has this caused you to re-evaluate your original support?

A: No, I think he allowed the development of circumstances that made the war inevitable. Once Saddam made his miscalculation and invaded Kuwait, we could not stand by and allow him to continue marching toward Saudi Arabia, because if Saddam Hussein controlled the oil of the entire Arabian peninsula, he could accelerate his acquisition of nuclear weapons.

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Q: Do you think the President sent him the wrong signal?

A: There’s no question he sent him the wrong signal. For two years prior to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, George Bush gave him every possible reason to believe that George Bush would do nothing in response to an invasion of Kuwait.

In fact, on the eve of the invasion, he sent our ambassador in there to tell him that we had no interest in protecting the borders of Kuwait. . . . This was at a time when troops were massing on the border.

The poor judgment and the moral blindness that informed a policy that coddled Saddam Hussein for many years, even though Saddam was sponsoring terrorism, even though the President had reports delivered to him from the CIA that he was on a crash program to get nuclear weapons, even though the President had evidence that Saddam was using our tax dollars to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Still, he coddled him at every possible turn and sent him the clear signal that no matter what Saddam did, George Bush wouldn’t react. I think that was an extremely serious mistake, an historic error in judgment on the part of a President in foreign policy that led directly to a war that didn’t have to take place.

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Q: Do you think Dan Quayle’s just as competent to be President? Do you think he’d make as good a President as Bush?

A: Well, I don’t know, I hope he never gets the chance. . . . I certainly don’t think that he ought to be either President or vice president. But I will make my case on the basis of his positions and his recommendations.

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Q: How do you and Bill Clinton complement each other?

A: Well, I think we have broad, different work experiences in the partnership. While he is extremely well-versed in national-security policy, he respects the experience I have had there and doesn’t hesitate to ask me for advice. And I think that I have been able to give some good advice, occasionally.

Similarly, while I have had experience in economic development, I know that I can certainly learn a great deal from his record of leading the nation two years in a row in the creation of jobs in the private sector.

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Q: Do you think you’ll play the active role on the environment?

A: He has asked me to do so, but I have no illusions about the fact that all of the decisions will be his and my role will be that of giving advice and helping him implement policy.

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Q: In your book, you talk about a dysfunctional civilization, the problem of freezers and air-conditioners for the ozone and so forth. Yet, you come from the South and some people have said the new South is different from the old South only in air-conditioning. Given that the U.S. has consumed such a large percentage of the world’s resources, can we now properly say to the rest of the world you cannot have the private auto and the freezer?

A: Our moral authority to lead the world toward a sounder environmental approach depends upon our willingness to make changes here at home, there’s no question about it. And our willingness to make changes in our domestic policies depends, in turn, on our willingness as individuals to confront these issues as they arise in our personal lives. Now, you ask specifically about air-conditioning, I’m sure you use it only as an example, but let me use it also as an example of how companies are looking for profits in the marketing of new air-conditioning technologies that do NOT harm the environment. The country that comes to those technologies first is going to profit enormously in the world marketplace.

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Q: Do you and Clinton intend to keep William Reilly as head of the EPA if you’re elected? Would you change the EPA?

A: I have a great deal of respect for Bill Reilly, but Gov. Clinton and I have consistently declined to speculate on any personalities where any appointed positions are concerned, and we are going to maintain that policy.

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Q: Would you distinguish his performance from the Bush Administration’s?

A: Sure, sure. He’s a good person. He knows the right thing to do, and he tries hard to do it. But, unfortunately, he has lost almost all of the important battles in the last few years. . . . He was publicly embarrassed by Bush at Rio (at the Earth Summit), and on a number of other occasions was overruled rather visibly by the White House.

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Q: Do you think Bush’s record has been worse than the Reagan Administration?

A: Well, they are marginally better than Reagan’s first couple of years on the environment, which couldn’t have been any worse. But even Reagan began to moderate a little bit when he realized the political damage he was doing, and Bush has gone in the opposite direction--Bush has steadily gotten worse. His failures in some ways are even more serious than those of Reagan, because they have come at a time when the rest of the world is urgently seeking U.S. leadership on the environment. Their performance at the Earth Summit was disgraceful, and Reilly tried to prevent that from happening and told Bush how it could be prevented, but Bush was captive to the ultra-right wing and was not willing to do the right thing.