First in Line by Kate Andersen Brower

Author:Kate Andersen Brower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

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From Friendship to Betrayal: The Breakup of Al Gore and Bill Clinton

For almost all those eight years the relationship was one between brothers—that may be a cliché and I run the risk of overstatement, but really we became extremely close.

—AL GORE ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH BILL CLINTON IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Forgiveness means surrendering your anger.

—AL GORE AT A SEPTEMBER 1998 MEETING WITH CABINET MEMBERS IN THE WHITE HOUSE RESIDENCE AFTER BILL CLINTON ADMITTED HIS AFFAIR WITH MONICA LEWINSKY

He had mixed feelings about running for president. It was a monkey off his back that he lost.

—A FRIEND OF AL GORE’S ON HIS 2000 LOSS

A couple of days after the shocking results of the 2016 presidential election, a reeling Hillary Clinton received a phone call. It was from her husband’s former vice president, Al Gore. She and Gore, once rivals for power and influence inside the Clinton White House, were now in a small club of losers. They are among a handful of seemingly cursed presidential candidates who won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. Gore said he called Clinton to empathize. “She doesn’t need any advice from me,” he said. “It was commiserating and reaching out to say, in her husband’s famous phrase, ‘I feel your pain.’”

Gore and Clinton share a peculiar fate: Clinton beat Donald Trump in the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes and Trump won the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to Clinton’s 227 votes. Gore won the popular vote more narrowly, with 50.9 million votes compared to Bush’s 50.4 million, but it is still up for debate whether he won the Electoral College. After the Supreme Court decision halting the thirty-six-day recount of votes in Florida, which, if allowed to continue, might have given Gore the lead, Florida went narrowly to George W. Bush, giving him 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266. Clinton and Gore are the only living examples of candidates who won the popular vote and lost the election, but it happened three times before: in 1824 Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and lost the electoral college to John Quincy Adams; in 1876 Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost to Rutherford B. Hayes; and in 1888 Grover Cleveland was defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison, who lost the popular vote but won more votes in the Electoral College.

Ron Klain, who has the distinction of serving as chief of staff for two vice presidents, Al Gore and Joe Biden, described the Clinton call as “nice” and “courteous,” but added, “I don’t think there’s been deep bonding.” Gore’s 2000 loss has been compared to a death in the family, and for years afterward Gore disappeared from public view. Karenna Gore, the eldest of his four children, called her father’s loss “the heartbreak of a lifetime,” and aides to Gore say they’ve argued among themselves which was worse—Gore won fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton did, but he arguably won the Electoral College in the closest presidential election in the country’s history.

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