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If those words gave the listeners the impression that the Gore presidency would begin
an Era of Good Feeling, they were badly mistaken.

The Republican fury ranged freely in all directions. Some of it was aimed at the man
who had directed George W. Bush’s campaign and who had directed Bush’s political ascent
for years. The recriminations aimed at Karl Rove had begun even before the Bush camp
finally conceded.

“What kind of idiot spends millions of dollars in California and New Jersey?” thundered
Bill O’Reilly. “That pinhead Rove gave us four years of Al Gore!”

The Weekly Standard’
s lead editorial that week, “How to Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory,” also
assailed Rove’s strategy, as well as his decision to conceal Bush’s youthful drunk-driving
arrest.

“Any Republican who hires Karl Rove to run any campaign again,” the magazine wrote,
“will prove that Rove has a fool for a client.” (Rove soon announced that he would
retire from politics to pursue a doctorate in American political history at Rice University,
where he then began a distinguished teaching career.) The
Standard
also asked rhetorically, “Does anyone doubt for a moment that John McCain would have
beaten Gore like a rented mule?”

These shots signaled the beginning of a low-grade civil war—some bemoaning the party’s
failure to choose its most electable candidate, others welcoming the chance, as House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay put it, “to apply some much-needed chemotherapy to the malignant
liberalism that infects our ranks.” Ex-speaker Newt Gingrich, in a speech to the employees
of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac, declared, “Frankly, as a historian, I am unaware
of any presidential campaign mismanaged in so stunningly stupid a manner, nor one
so fundamentally inept.”

The heaviest Republican fire, though, was aimed at the incoming president and the
Democrats.

A Stolen Election?
was the title of a one-hour Fox News special; the broadcasts of Bill O’Reilly and
Sean Hannity and the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and company dispensed with the question
mark.

Moreover, there was something deeply personal about the GOP’s disdain for Al Gore.

“A lot of us kind of liked Clinton,” outgoing Florida senator Connie Mack said. “He
could see your point of view, he knew our states and districts better than we did
sometimes, and he was comfortable with the give-and-take of politics. But Gore? Pompous,
self-righteous—and absolutely convinced that he was the smartest guy in the room,
and would be pleased to prove it you. And by the way,” he added, “there were a
hell
of a lot of Democrats who thought the same thing.”

Most important was the stark political threat to the GOP’s future. As longtime Washington
scholar Norm Ornstein noted just before the inauguration, “if Al Gore succeeds, that
will mean twelve consecutive years of a Democratic president presiding over an increasingly
satisfied electorate. And this time, there won’t be a scandal to mar the record. I
mean, can you imagine Al Gore being accused of sexual misconduct? The Republicans
could find themselves wandering in the political desert for twenty years, as they
did all through the Thirties and Forties. So there’s no way they can afford to let
Gore succeed.” Rush Limbaugh underlined that point when he said, the day before the
inauguration, “I want him to fail—nothing less than the future of America depends
on it.” The sentiment of most Republicans was made clear when Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott reportedly told the Senate GOP caucus, “Our biggest priority is to make
Al Gore a one-term president.“

There were more early storm clouds for Gore, however, in the form of difficulties
within Democratic Party ranks. For one thing, there was Bill Clinton. Gore never got
over the feeling that Clinton’s behavior had nearly cost him the presidency, something
he made abundantly clear in a one-on-one meeting with the outgoing president just
before Thanksgiving. While no one else was present, reports from intimates told pretty
much the same story: Gore confronted Clinton with the consequences of his behavior.
“Your hormones damn near cost me the White House!” he snapped. “And don’t talk to
me about ‘private behavior.’ Donna Shalala was right when she said if you’d been a
teacher at any university in America, they’d have fired your ass!” Clinton, for his
part, was dumbfounded that Gore did not have the political smarts to use the administration’s
economic record or deploy him effectively in the closing days of the campaign. “Did
it ever occur to you,” Clinton reportedly asked Gore, “to turn to Bush just once and
say, ‘What is it about eight years of peace and prosperity you don’t like?’ ”

As one Clinton friend quipped, “what he was really asking Gore was why he never thought
to ask the voters to weigh one blow job against twenty million new jobs.”

Gore had a deeper dilemma with his base in the Democratic Party, who were anxious
for a president who would deliver on some of their fondest wishes: universal health
care, a major increase in funds for child care and education, and legislation to make
it easier for unions to organize and to reverse the long-term decline in union membership.
And with the prospect of massive surpluses for years to come—$3 trillion over the
next decade!—there was plenty of money to be spent.

Gore, however, had a very different agenda.

“He knows he just won one of the closest elections in history,” his longtime aide
Ron Klain said. “There obviously has to be a good deal of bipartisanship in governing.”
And with a Republican House and an evenly divided Senate, there was no chance of passing
any kind of ambitious liberal program anyway. And if he ruffled the feathers of some
of his fellow Democrats, well, hadn’t Clinton shown how politically potent the “different
kind of Democrat” message could be? It was a tightrope walk, but President-elect Gore
was determined to walk it, balancing his own preferences with enough gestures to the
Democratic base to avoid an open revolt.

He knew, for example, that when he picked Richard Holbrooke as his secretary of state,
he would bend a lot of senatorial noses out of shape: Joe Biden and John Kerry both
coveted that slot, and he had bypassed both when he had selected Lieberman as his
running mate. “I know Dick can be a royal pain in the ass,” he said to his top foreign-policy
aide, Leon Fuerth, about Holbrooke, “but you saw what he did at Dayton—how many lives
were saved when the Bosnian War stopped? Besides, you’ll be at the NSC if he starts
going off the deep end.”

So he had the Senate’s self-esteem very much in mind when, in a private conversation
that his aides made sure did not remain private, he invited Senator John McCain to
the vice president’s official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, which until
1974 had been the residence of the chief of naval operations.

“My father and grandfather knew this place well,” McCain said. “And there was a time
I thought I might find myself here one day.”

“I have something different in mind,” Gore said. “Secretary of defense.”

McCain shook his head.

“I’m not denying it’s tempting,” he said plainly. “I’d love to see the look on the
faces of those goldbricks when they found out I was coming. But Al—Mr. President—would
you walk away from another shot at the White House if you were in my position?”

Of course I wouldn’t,
Gore thought.
But it’s not going to hurt when the public find out I asked the most popular Republican
in the country to work with me. Besides, Sam Nunn will be a far more popular choice
on Capitol Hill to run the Pentagon.

Gore followed a familiar path in choosing a card-carrying Republican as secretary
of the treasury, but this particular selection also fulfilled a political imperative:
making sure that one of the Big Four cabinet posts was not a white male. As president
of Time Warner, and with a solid banking past, Richard Parsons was a reassuring figure
on Wall Street; the fact that he would be the first African American ever appointed
to one of the Big Four was a bonus.

“You’re out of your mind!” Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin told Parsons when he declared
he was leaving. “Once the AOL merger is done, do you have any idea how much money
you’ll be leaving on the table? You’re walking away from a gold mine!”

Apart from staffing, the president-elect and his aides drafted a first-year agenda
aimed at winning over skeptics.

“Remember,” said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime close aide, “this is the man who wanted
to be known for ‘reinventing government.’ One of the first things he asked me to work
on the day after Election Night was to find some government agency we could abolish.”

It was an approach calculated to appeal to the broad middle of the American electorate,
to convince them that Gore, like his predecessor, was a “different kind of Democrat,”
one in touch with the voters.

And it was an approach the new president managed to throw overboard even before he
was sworn in—by reaching back to one of his most authentic, deep-seated convictions.

Al Gore wrote
Earth in the Balance
in 1992, the same year Bill Clinton chose him as his running mate. It was a cry from
the heart, written in near-apocalyptic tones, warning that “we must take bold and
unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing
principle for civilization.” He called for “the elimination of the internal combustion
engine in my lifetime” and for a “Global Marshall Plan” to save the planet. The book
became a bestseller—and a cudgel gleefully wielded by Republicans to paint the Tennessee
senator as an elitist who cared more about snail darters and herons than jobs for
working Americans.

“Ozone Man!” President Bush had called him back in ’92—a label that most voters found
puzzling if not indecipherable—but it was during the 2000 campaign that Gore’s passionate
environmentalism almost proved to be his undoing. On Election Night, coal miners in
West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee had helped deliver those states to George W.
Bush, while loggers in Oregon and factory workers in Michigan and Pennsylvania had
almost put those states in Bush’s column.

The incoming president, however, came away from his election with a very different
conclusion:
You know why a lot of voters thought I was a candidate without convictions? Because
I let my hired guns talk me out of speaking about my most passionate belief: that
the survival of the planet is in danger. When I speak as president, and when I run
for reelection, I am going to speak from the heart.

And so he did—at an informal gathering of longtime associates at the vice president’s
residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory just days before the inauguration. It was,
the guests were told, “strictly off the record.” So when a member of the president-elect’s
senior staff clicked on her digital recorder, she reasoned that she was simply keeping
a record for posterity, and for the memoir she was determined to write after her years
as a soon-to-be top White House aide were done.

It was quite an evening. Liberated by his victory, by his determination to speak his
mind—and liberated as well, perhaps, by several glasses of a fine Pomerol—Gore spoke
expansively about pushing the government to think and act outside the box.

Why couldn’t autos run on new forms of energy, perhaps even gathering power through
solar panels on car roofs? Why couldn’t federal money encourage cities to turn garbage
into fuel? And why couldn’t federal policy, in the form of business loans and subsidized
mortgages, be aimed at drawing Americans back to city centers instead of fueling wasteful,
ugly suburban sprawl?

And there was more: A stiff carbon tax would prod Americans out of their cars and
onto mass transit or bicycles, or onto their feet.

“Maybe,” Gore added, “that’d be one way to whip the country into shape. And if we
pushed a few million people to drop some of the lard, we’d save a fortune in health
care while we were at it. If you don’t believe we’ve got an obesity epidemic, just
spend a day shaking hands at a supermarket with me.”

Two weeks later, the staffer with the digital recorder learned that she had been denied
the White House job she had coveted for years, victimized by one of the ferocious
turf wars that break out in every transition. (“Like James Carville always says,”
a friend commiserated, “in an election, you screw your enemies; in a transition, you
screw your friends.”). An hour later, she was e-mailing that recording of Gore’s comments
to a friend at the
Washington Post
.

GORE CHIDES LAZY AMERICANS
, the next day’s Post headline read.
SAYS WE’RE EATING, DRIVING OURSELVES TO DEATH
. The
New York Post
was less restrained:
GORE: GET THE LARD OUT!

As Gore and his inner circle dealt with the storm of outrage and the jabs from the
late-night comics—“Gore plans to offer vouchers to any American who wants to go to
Times Square and get whipped into shape,” Jay Leno said in his monologue—the last
thing he needed was another headache from his soon-to-be predecessor. And that’s exactly
what he got.

On his last day in office, Clinton issued presidential pardons to a number of suspect
figures, including longtime fugitive Marc Rich, the ex-husband of a major donor to
the Clinton Library. Gore made no public comment, but he was privately furious—a fact
his aides were at pains to reveal to the media. An equally furious Clinton told Hillary,
“He’s going to pay for that temper tantrum.”

And he extracted that payment on President Gore’s very first day in office.

January 20, 2001, was a miserable day, with temperatures barely above freezing and
a steady rain that left the grounds of the Mall that faced the Capitol’s West Front
sodden and muddy. Moreover, the chill in the air was matched by the distinct lack
of festiveness surrounding the event. For the first time, the Secret Service had designated
a presidential inauguration a National Special Security Event. That meant everyone
heading to the Mall had to pass through metal detectors; all handbags, backpacks,
and shopping bags were subjected to searches, causing hourlong waits and chilled,
wet spectators. (“You’d think there was an enemy heading right for the Capitol!” one
frustrated spectator groused.) The chill was just as obvious on the inaugural platform,
where President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton exchanged the briefest of
greetings with Al and Tipper Gore as they took their places.