Gore Once More, With Feeling

In the last couple of weeks, Al Gore has undergone yet another make-over. Now he’s a populist: bashing drug companies, oil barons and tax cuts for the wealthy, sticking up for the ordinary working American. He gave a barn-burner of a speech to the NAACP. This past week, he was rewarded by a nice bounce in the polls, putting him almost even with W.

What gives?

What gives is that nothing else worked. What gives is that Gore suffered from a passion gap, and in order to express passion, you need something to be passionate about. Reinventing government may be sensible policy, but it is not the stuff that brings a crowd to its feet.

What gives is that Gore and his handlers finally grasped that the affluent donors who increasingly dominate American politics may love a cautious center-right agenda, but it’s the voters who ultimately elect a president. What gives is that Ralph Nader was stealing the heart of the party’s most energetic wing.

Last week, Gore thundered: “For all my public service, I’ve stood up to the big drug companies, the big oil companies, the insurance companies and the HMOs. That’s what I’m doing now in this campaign--and that’s exactly what I’ll do as president of the United States.”

This make-over I could live with. Maybe it’s even real.

There’s a very interesting, broader dynamic at work here: Political experts tell Democratic presidential candidates to run as centrists and to appeal to swing voters. Yet candidates discover, intuitively, that it takes populist themes to rally dormant Democratic voters.

Democrats, traditionally, are the party of the little guy. But working-class voters tend to be cynical about politics per se. The bottom half of the electorate is not benefiting from the boom, and the bottom half is responsible for most of the decline in voting turnout. Democrats get elected, with real mandates, when they convincingly reach that electorate.