Can Al Gore Save the Democratic Party?

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 11:44 AM on March 27, 2008.

The political world spent a fair amount of time last year mulling over whether Al Gore would run for president, who his running mate would be, whether he could win, etc. Once it became clear that Gore wouldn’t run, speculation shifted to who he’d endorse, when, and what kind of impact it might have.

Now, however, we should probably get ready for a new wave of Gore-related scuttlebutt, centered around a new idea: Al Gore, compromise candidate.

The first I heard of this was earlier this week, when Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-Fla.), considering the prospects of a brokered convention, told a Florida paper, “If it (the nomination process) goes into the convention, don’t be surprised if someone different is at the top of the ticket.”

A compromise candidate could be someone such as former vice president Al Gore, Mahoney said last week during a meeting with this news organization’s editorial board.

If either Clinton or Obama suggested to a deadlocked convention a ticket of Gore-Clinton or Gore-Obama, the Democratic Party would accept it, Mahoney said.

The comments didn’t generate much in the way of attention, in part because Mahoney isn’t an especially high profile lawmaker, and also because he made the remark to a small paper with a limited audience.

But when Time’s Joe Klein starts talking about the same idea, one gets the sense a small boomlet might be in the works.

As Klein sees it, Clinton is highly unlikely to overtake Obama before the convention, and even if she did, what she’d have to do to earn it would make it very difficult for her to win the general election. Obama, on the other hand, has been weakened, Klein argues, by Clinton’s criticisms and the coverage of the Jeremiah Wright story, the latter of which might make it tough for Obama to win support from working-class whites.

Given this, Klein has an idea.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks? What if he can’t buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses [Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana] badly and continues to lose after that? I’d guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy — and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you’re probably right. But let’s play a little. Let’s say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let’s also assume — and this may be a real stretch — that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they’d have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party — and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely … and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, “Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.” A congressional Democrat told me, “This could be our way out of a mess.”

I have nothing but enthusiastic admiration for Gore, but this scenario strikes me as wildly far-fetched — and maybe a little too deep into wishful-thinking territory.

I doubt there will be a brokered convention; I doubt Gore would demonstrate any interest in being a compromise candidate; I doubt delegates would reject a candidate who enters the convention with more delegates, states, and popular votes; I even doubt delegates would consider someone (even Gore) who hasn’t run in a single primary or caucus.

This almost certainly just won’t happen. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be hearing more about it in the coming days.

Tagged as: clinton, obama, gore, democratic party

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.