Gore Bravely Cut Off His Funding With Anti-War Stance

by Alexander Cockburn

On Sunday, Dec. 15 of this waning year, Al Gore announced that he was no longer a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2004. He'd come to that conclusion, he said, in the green room at NBC's studios in New York, waiting to go on "Saturday Night Live." Liberated from the burden of candidacy, Gore duly put on one of the better performances of his career in public life.

So why did he stand down, and what does his exit portend in the political battles ahead?

When Gore took his stance against the attack on Iraq he was parting ways with a group that has underwritten his political career these past 30 years, a group among whose prime features has been unswerving advocacy of the most hawkish Israeli positions, as expressed by Gore's tutor, Martin Peretz, Harvard fixture and sometime editor-in-chief of the New Republic.

It was Peretz who stood at Gore's elbow when the latter successfully established himself as one of the most delirious pro-Israel apologists in the U.S. Congress. It was Peretz who helped script Gore's prime-time Senate speech in 1991 announcing his defection from the Congressional Democrats in favor of Bush Sr.'s war.

Gore had to have known, when he started voicing opposition to Bush Jr.'s war plans, that his most enduring money source would dry up, that he was cutting off his own money supply.

Is the moral that no Democratic candidate can afford to take any position athwart that of Israel's hawks and their promoters here? It certainly looks like it.

Most prominent in the field as possible Democratic challengers to George Bush we now have Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Back in 1991, Kerry, a Vietnam vet, spoke strongly against war on Iraq, and in 2000, Gore discounted Kerry as a possible running mate because of that opposition. Now, Kerry favors war. Lieberman takes his cue from Ariel Sharon. Kerry has the financial advantage of being married to Teresa, formerly the wife of Senator John Heinz, who was killed in an air crash. Teresa inherited around $700 million. For his part, Lieberman rakes in cash from the corporations in whose cause he led the push to relax the accounting rules, thus prompting the corporate scandals that made 2002 such an enjoyable year.

To winch his nomination prospects out of the mud, Edwards began to pound the war drum last fall. The prospect of dropping bombs on Iraqi people enthralls the senator. On Sept. 19, Edwards rushed to be first in line among Senate Democrats to show his unflinching support for unlimited war, publishing an editorial in the Washington Post so in tune with Bush doctrine that the U.S. State Department featured it on its Web site.

Moral: As with Kerry, no Democratic candidate feels able to oppose a war on Iraq.

The same time that Gore was staking his antiwar ground, the Texan populist Ronnie Dugger wrote an impassioned article in The Nation magazine, entitled "Ralph, Don't Run," calling for unified opposition to Bush in 2004. Bush, Dugger wrote, is far worse than anyone could have imagined. There is no longer room, he concluded, for any Third Party candidate liable to take votes from the Democratic nominee.

Dugger recounted how he had vainly tried to get Ralph Nader to agree that all progressives, populists, Leftists, Greens, etc., should fall in behind the Democratic nominee. "Ralph persists in the view," Dugger wrote sadly, "that it does not matter whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in the White House."

Gore's departure hasn't made life any easier for those who would agree with Dugger. After all, here's was a Democratic politician building a campaign platform exactly along the sort of left-liberal lines Dugger has long campaigned for. Gore had come out in favor of single-payer health insurance. He'd been taking a populist line on the economy. He'd attacked the looming war. At which point he discovered that he had no future in the party as a presidential candidate and no prospect of raising any money.

There were three major issues in 2002: war with Iraq; national security and the bill of rights; and the tanking economy. The Democrats have failed on all three fronts, nowhere more dismally than on the economy, where opportunity has been ripest.

The Democrats have no plan, and much of the time manage to stand to the right of the Republicans on matters such as balancing the budget. Amid almost weekly examples of corporate looting and executive criminality unrivaled in the fragrant history of American capitalism, the Democrats have been unable to seize the initiative, which is scarcely surprising since the party has been soundly bribed into complaisance by these same corporate criminals.

When Gore took himself out of the race on Dec. 15, he proved once again Ralph Nader's point: the seamless realities of mainstream politics; the enduring need for alternative candidacies. It may not be Nader himself, but in all likelihood, there will be another Green candidate, and for those furious Democrats who think it was Nader who gave Bush the crucial edge in his dubious capture of the White House, that's grim news.