No Gore in '04
The press bears a heavy burden of responsibility in the crisis now engulfing
the White House. It is imperative that we not get ahead of ourselves and that
we avoid a speculative rush to judgment ... Oh, what the hell. Let's speculate!
Suppose Clinton resigns next week, and Gore becomes president. If Chatterbox
reads the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution correctly, that means Gore can
only run for the presidency once, in 2000. (The 22nd Amendment says you can
only be elected president twice, and if you serve more than two years of a term
"to which some other person was elected" you can only be elected once.) If Gore
wants to maximize his potential years in the presidency, Clinton has to hang on
until at least Jan. 21, 1999, so Gore can serve less than two years of
Clinton's term and then two full terms of his own ... Of course, if Clinton
drags it out for another year and then quits, he'll probably be so unpopular
that he'll pull Gore down with him. And he'll deprive Gore of a crucial year in
which to build his own record of accomplishment.
Memo to Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic : You've
enthusiastically supported the ambitions of Gore, your former student--you've
said confidently that you intend to own the magazine until "the end of Al
Gore's second term" as president. You even sacked your magazine's editor,
Michael Kelly, at least in part because, in his "obsessive" (your term) attacks
on the character of the Clinton administration, Kelly ... how to put it ...
failed to completely appreciate Gore's virtues. If you've been reading the 22nd
Amendment too, it must now be tempting to use your magazine to at least help
prop Clinton up until the two-year deadline is past, so Gore can run twice. But
if the above analysis is correct, the last thing Gore needs is for Clinton to
dangle, injured, Nixon-like, for a year or two. You need to get rid of Clinton
now, even if it means Gore is a one-and-a-half-term president at best. The
obvious solution: Bring back Kelly! Go for the kill! ... Anyway, in retrospect,
hasn't Kelly's "obsessive" anti-Clintonism been a wee bit vindicated?
