In Helping Gore, Clinton Seeks to Cement Legacy

President Clinton locked Vice President Al Gore in a $250,000 political bear-hug Saturday night, moving more aggressively than any of his modern predecessors into an internal party battle to choose a successor.

For more than 150 years, retiring presidents generally have done as little as possible to help their vice presidents succeed them, particularly during the initial stages of a campaign. At the least, they have avoided injecting themselves into the nomination battle. At most, they have actively, if quietly, undermined their own vice presidents.

But Clinton is going to the other extreme: Despite a live battle between Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton is embarking on a fund-raising campaign for his vice president, adhering to an unprecedented political course that, if successful, could be a major step toward cementing his own legacy.

Given the public’s love-hate relationship with the president, it is uncertain whether he offers Gore welcome coattails or weighty baggage.

The first stop in the massing of White House influence was here in Little Rock, the president’s political base, where Clinton and Gore appeared together at a Gore campaign event for the first time. Campaign officials expected it to bring as much as $250,000 to the vice president’s less-than-full political treasury. They plan a second fund-raiser, in Washington, later this week.

In a reversal of protocol Saturday night, Clinton introduced his vice president and said that his thoughts could be summed up this way: “Thank you for everything. Here’s Al.”

Comparing the current economic improvements of 1999 with the conditions the country faced in 1993 when he took office, the president said: “I could not have achieved any of those things without the leadership and the support and the aggressive efforts of Vice President Al Gore.”

Turning the podium over to Gore, the president gave the vice president an enveloping, extended hug, and Gore said: “Now there’s a real friend for you.”

Before the fund-raiser, the president and Gore met with African American ministers, politicians and other community leaders. Speaking of the vice president, Clinton told them: “For a long time now, he’s been at my back, and I intend to be [at] his.”

On the day the House voted to impeach Clinton, Gore stood at his side in a White House garden behind the Oval Office and led a crowd of cheering Democrats in proclaiming that Clinton would “be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.”

It was a far cry from what happened the last time a vice president campaigned for the presidency.

When George Bush sought the job in 1988, the president he served for two terms, Ronald Reagan, instructed his staff to be scrupulously neutral in the doggedly partisan battle for the Republican presidential nomination.

Indeed, after Bush, taking advantage of a vice presidential prerogative, spoke with reporters in the White House press briefing room, one of his rivals, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), called Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, furious that he did not have access to the same platform.

“The next time he was at the White House, we let him use the briefing room to show we were being evenhanded,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, the senior aide who had received Dole’s angry telephone call.

Then there was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous response in 1960 when, in the heat of the campaign to succeed him, he was asked for an example of “a major idea” from Vice President Richard Nixon that his administration had adopted.

“If you give me a week, I might think of one,” the president replied.

Or consider this even more extreme example of the peculiar twists imposed by presidential politics: Lyndon B. Johnson so distrusted his own vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, that he had the FBI tap the vice president’s telephones when Humphrey ran for the presidency in 1968, historian Robert Dallek discovered.

Though Clinton and Gore have their differences, no one would suggest such abject ill-will.

On Saturday, Clinton worked a crowd with the vice president in the River Market food court on the banks of the Arkansas River, much as the two did in 1992 campaign appearances when they were two baby boomer politicians out to remake the political landscape. But Gore may still need some lessons from Clinton.

Asked whether it felt like old times, the loquacious president replied: “It does. It does. You know this is my new neighborhood. My library is going to be two blocks from here, and I’m getting used to it. I love this place.”

To the same question--and the implied opportunity to talk about his partnership with the president--Gore, said by aides to be tired from his climb Thursday and Friday on Mt. Rainier in Washington state, replied tersely: “It’s fun.”

Neither Gore’s campaign nor that of his rival Bradley is particularly strapped for cash. As of June 30, Gore reported that he had $9.4 million on hand, out of $17.5 million raised, and Bradley said he had $7.5 million from the $11.8 million he had raised.

If Clinton’s embrace of Gore upsets Bradley, the former senator from New Jersey has given no hint that he is about to demand the same sort of evenhandedness Dole sought, and his spokesman shrugged off the matter.

“We don’t give it a great deal of thought,” said Eric Hauser, Bradley’s press secretary. Besides, he added, when it comes to the president, “we don’t have any say on what his actions might be.”

As for taking sides at the outset of the race, when the party’s nomination is undecided, White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said last week: “The president believes that’s appropriate, and he looks forward to doing it.”

In the end, the effect Clinton can have may be limited. Certainly, public reaction to him remains so mixed that it brings to mind the political saw about a leader of such limited popularity that he can do more for the candidates he favors by campaigning against them.

While the president’s job approval rating stood at 64% in late July, as measured in the Gallup Poll, the public’s opinion of his character is much lower: Only 30% said they had a favorable impression of him as a person in a survey taken in March for ABC News, several weeks after the close of impeachment proceedings.

As for the Democratic candidates, a recent CBS News poll found that voters, by a 3-2 ratio, had an unfavorable impression of the vice president and, by a 2-1 ratio, a favorable impression of Bradley.

Clinton thinks that his support “is a major leg up for Al Gore. There is no understanding that he brings a hell of a lot of baggage,” Duberstein said. “Bill Clinton’s offer is the equivalent of the IRS coming in and saying, ‘Hey, we’re here to help you.’ Clinton has this blind spot, that wherever he goes, he thinks he helps. He doesn’t.”

Still, said Stephen Hess, a scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank in Washington and a close observer of the presidency since he served in the Eisenhower administration: “I don’t think there has ever been a relationship between a president and a vice president that is this truly cordial. I don’t believe there has ever been a president who so sincerely wishes his vice president to succeed him.”

Thus, said Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, a more neutral stance by Clinton would be “a virtually unfriendly act.”

And an apt motto for the wall of the Gore headquarters, he said, would be: “It’s the legacy, stupid.”

But presidential legacies are often hard to nail down. “He wants to fix his place in history, and one part of that is to be succeeded by the guy he picks,” said historian Stephen Ambrose.

To find a role parallel to Clinton’s, one would have to go back to 1840 and Andrew Jackson’s efforts on behalf of his vice president, Martin Van Buren. Jackson too was driven by the desire to cement his legacy--in his case that of Democratic Party reforms. Indeed, before Bush was elected in 1988, no incumbent vice president had been elected to the presidency since Van Buren--who, like Bush, served only one term, dogged in the end by the fallout of his predecessor’s economic policies.