National Review: Live Carefree or Die - political activities of Al Gore

The rise of convenience.

Mr. Caldwell is senior writer for The Weekly Standard.

The strangest position Al Gore took in the course of his mid-June campaign launch was on the Lewinsky affair. On the one hand, he described President Clinton's sexual conduct as "inexcusable." On the other, he had no sympathy with those who thought the president should have been called to account on the matter. In fact, Gore didn't have any opinion whatsoever on the political merits of the case. No-what angered him most is that the Lewinsky affair disrupted his schedule. As he told CBS's This Morning, "What makes me the most upset about it is that we lost a lot of time." For NBC's Today, he added, "That's what angered me. And I feel an extra sense of urgency now to make up for that lost time."

"Lost a lot of time"? Time for what? It's always possible that Gore thinks the clock is ticking on some sort of vast national emergency, a 1990s equivalent of the evacuation of Dunkirk. But the closer you look at the agenda Gore hopes to ride to power, the more it appears the vice president really thinks the nation's most pressing political objective is to save time. He's against long commutes and airport delays, in favor of Internet wiring and government-subsidized Internet sites, and positively rapturous about a variety of neato ways to spend that extra time. And that's about it. Virtually every arrow in his policy quiver is a plan to make things less time-consuming, or more efficient, or more clean. It is a politics whose core principle is convenience. When Gore announced his "reinventing government" initiative in the early days of the administration, he said he wanted to reform the state along the lines of the market. It's beginning to look like he meant the supermarket.

Gore is offering Americans a host of picayune initiatives, many of which merely build on Clinton's lead. He is well disposed, for instance, to retro-fitting automobiles for lock-in car seats that will soon come onto the market. He wants to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to allow parents time off from work to attend parent-teacher conferences. Both are measures the president has test-marketed in various speeches over the last several months. "No parent," says Gore, "should have to risk losing a job to go to a parent-teacher conference at school or to drive a child or an aging parent to the doctor." This no-one-should-ever-have-to-choose formulation is of course a Clinton staple, as if hard choices violated the laws of nature.

But Gore has a more expansive idea of convenience-or, to use his pet word, "livability"-than even his boss. The centerpiece of Gore's lifestyle liberalism is "smart growth," which will give us "good, strong, livable communities with green spaces." Gore has not been more specific than that, other than to express a vague distaste for the admittedly appalling landscape of most American suburbs and an inchoate wish that we were less dependent on our automobiles. There's an irony here. For it was Gore's father, the late Tennessee senator Albert Gore Sr., who sponsored the $25 billion Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which the younger Gore has always praised for showing that government can "make a difference." It can thus be argued that Gore Senior did more than any other American this century to wreck the country's public-transportation infrastructure and render our automobile- dependence irreversible. No wonder, then, that Al Gore feels so pressed for time-there's so much of his favorite legislation to undo!

Gore has made easier access to the Internet his signature issue. His drive to wire high schools for the World Wide Web has been funded by a special FCC levy that has raised the average household phone bill by ten dollars a year. (In a corollary move, he has taken credit for a private-sector plan to equip those school computers with "firewalls" to protect the kids from all the smut to which his Internet initiative would otherwise expose them.) His Airline Passenger Fair Treatment initiative, dreamed up in tandem with transportation secretary Rodney Slater, would require airlines to give away goodies to air travelers who are delayed without explanation in airports. Then there is Triana, the much-ridiculed plan for a $32 million satellite that would take pictures of the earth from space and download them. It was shot down by Congress in late May, but not before Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner ridiculed it as a "multi-million-dollar screen-saver."

Gore calls the anti-suburban part of his platform a "livability agenda," but in fact his whole politics is a livability agenda-and has been for much of his career. Such wow-that'd-be-cool! initiatives as Triana were Gore's hallmark as a senator. The last decade of his pre- vice-presidential career was marked by such immortal legislation as the All-Terrain Vehicle Consumer Protection Act of 1988, the Fire-Safe Cigarette Implementation Act of 1988 ("to implement the recommendations of the Interagency Committee and the Technical Study Group on Cigarette and Little Cigar Fire Safety"), the Telemarketing Fraud Prevention Act of 1988, the Campus Safety and Security Act of 1989, the Clean Food Transportation Act of 1989, the State-conducted Lotteries Clarification Act of 1990, and the Tropical Forest Consumer Information and Protection Act of 1991.

Fancy food, rain-forest gewgaws, all-terrain vehicles, smoke-free environments-this is a politics of, by, and for the yuppies. The model for this type of politics is the natural-foods store Fresh Fields, which heretofore was politically instructive only in that it gave us an idea of what European supermarkets would have looked like had Germany won World War II. In pursuing a Fresh Fields politics, Gore appears to have been ahead of his time. In May, California Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo announced she would sponsor the House version of the Imported Food Safety Act of 1999. (Ted Kennedy and Barbara Mikulski are in charge of the Senate version.) And why not? In this dangerous world, "eating a South American strawberry shouldn't be a game of Russian roulette," as Ms. Eshoo puts it.

Like various Clinton-era tobacco measures, which would have allowed the president, through the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate what people smoke, the new food act would let the president use the FDA as a protectionist tool. The legislation gives an idea of how Democratic coalition-building will work if we have a Gore era. The president, while proclaiming himself a free trader, will use "health hazards" to protect American agricultural interests through de facto tariffs. While proclaiming himself a free-marketeer, the president will act under the mistaken belief that you can regulate foreign businesses without harming U.S. consumers. And while proclaiming himself a president for all Americans, the president will aim his generosity directly at the suburban yuppies whose greatest fear in life is of encountering sub-par pesto, and who now constitute the Democratic party's bedrock. Gore's livability agenda is appropriate for a party that is rejiggering itself as the party of America's new-economy elite.

There are pitfalls to an approach like Gore's. First, Gore has always operated to "enhance" people's "quality of life" through tapping the productivity of the free market. That gets expensive. For two years in a row, Gore was named the Senate's biggest spender by the National Taxpayers Union. But if there's a risk of backfire in Gore's livability agenda, it lies with a second problem. The politics of livability-or "convenience" or "lifestyle" or whatever one chooses to call it-rests on a snobbery that cannot be concealed for long. As the University of Southern California transportation scholar Peter Gordon said to The Chronicle of Higher Education last spring, "Who are the smart people who are going to direct smart growth?"

A politics based on improving lifestyle favors those who have more lifestyle to improve. We seem to be witnessing a reversal of partisan constituencies in which, under Gore's tutelage, the Democratic party becomes the party of fat cats. With only modest rhetorical changes, Gore is proposing a departure from the traditional Democratic project of softening the blows suffered by those who don't share in widespread prosperity. In its place, Gore is promising to soften the blows of prosperity itself.