nature of that kind of political problem. He was a young guy. He was really casual and super savvy about it. I just thought, Wow, that guy should be president! Later on, this election, he couldn’t even be who he was. He couldn’t say, ‘I know a lot about this shit!’ Because you can’t say that you know a lot about something or people will think you’re uppity.”
This is the subtext of the Gore campaign’s press coverage. Writing about a man who knows so much and who isn’t shy about sharing his knowledge must have gotten on a lot of journalistic nerves. Recalling Gore’s press conferences, Eric Pooley of Time wrote, “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some helpless nerd.” Right after the election, a search on the Nexis journalism database for the following terms revealed these results. For “Al Gore and nerd,” 804 articles. For “Al Gore and geek,” 826 articles. For “Al Gore and dork,” 136. For “Al Gore and Poindexter,” 110. For “Al Gore and homework,” 966. Searches for “George W. Bush and” the words dumb, stupid , and idiot were unable to be completed because those queries “will return more than 1,000 documents.” All of which was distilled perfectly in the election day headline in the London Daily Mail , “The Nerd Versus the Nincompoop.”
To be clear, I believe Al Gore technically won the 2000 presidential election. What baffles me is how close an election it was considering the simple, gaping chasm between the two candidates’ qualifications. Compare their résumés. Gore served in the Congress, as both a representative and a senator, for sixteen years. As vice president, he helped mastermind the country’s most successful economic expansion. He is an expert on environmental issues, foreign policy, military technology, and the digital communications industry. Before Bush was a two-term governor, he was a late-blooming, failed oilman who lucked out owning a baseball team.
In the televised presidential debates, Bush did well enough on general questions from his platform, but on a complicated question about what the United States should do if ousted Serbian President Milosevic refused to leave office, Bush said he would ask the Russians to lead the charge. Vice President Gore replied,
Now I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved, and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize Kostunica as the lawful winner of the election, I’m not sure that it’s right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this dispute there because we might not like the result that comes out of that. They currently favor going forward with a runoff election. I think that’s the wrong thing. I think the governor’s instinct is not necessarily bad because we have worked with the Russians in a constructive way in Kosovo, for example, to end the conflict there. But I think we need to be very careful in the present situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in mediating.
B USH: Well, obviously we wouldn’t use the Russians if they didn’t agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.
G ORE: Well, they don’t.
I don’t understand why Gore didn’t secure a landslide right then and there. On knowledge alone, it was a no-brainer. So why couldn’t Gore carry his own home state of Tennessee, much less sweep the rest of the country? Clearly, it has something to do with who he is as a person, and who he is as a person is a big honking nerd. Nobody minds this in a vice president. The vice presidency is actually a nerd’s perfect job. A sidekick is supposed to be a bigger geek than the star. Like in the teen TV drama My So-Called Life , when the dreamboat boy Jordan Catalano gets the telephone number of a girl he doesn’t know in two seconds flat, the nerd Brian Krakow asks him,
This is the subtext of the Gore campaign’s press coverage. Writing about a man who knows so much and who isn’t shy about sharing his knowledge must have gotten on a lot of journalistic nerves. Recalling Gore’s press conferences, Eric Pooley of Time wrote, “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some helpless nerd.” Right after the election, a search on the Nexis journalism database for the following terms revealed these results. For “Al Gore and nerd,” 804 articles. For “Al Gore and geek,” 826 articles. For “Al Gore and dork,” 136. For “Al Gore and Poindexter,” 110. For “Al Gore and homework,” 966. Searches for “George W. Bush and” the words dumb, stupid , and idiot were unable to be completed because those queries “will return more than 1,000 documents.” All of which was distilled perfectly in the election day headline in the London Daily Mail , “The Nerd Versus the Nincompoop.”
To be clear, I believe Al Gore technically won the 2000 presidential election. What baffles me is how close an election it was considering the simple, gaping chasm between the two candidates’ qualifications. Compare their résumés. Gore served in the Congress, as both a representative and a senator, for sixteen years. As vice president, he helped mastermind the country’s most successful economic expansion. He is an expert on environmental issues, foreign policy, military technology, and the digital communications industry. Before Bush was a two-term governor, he was a late-blooming, failed oilman who lucked out owning a baseball team.
In the televised presidential debates, Bush did well enough on general questions from his platform, but on a complicated question about what the United States should do if ousted Serbian President Milosevic refused to leave office, Bush said he would ask the Russians to lead the charge. Vice President Gore replied,
Now I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved, and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize Kostunica as the lawful winner of the election, I’m not sure that it’s right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this dispute there because we might not like the result that comes out of that. They currently favor going forward with a runoff election. I think that’s the wrong thing. I think the governor’s instinct is not necessarily bad because we have worked with the Russians in a constructive way in Kosovo, for example, to end the conflict there. But I think we need to be very careful in the present situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in mediating.
B USH: Well, obviously we wouldn’t use the Russians if they didn’t agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.
G ORE: Well, they don’t.
I don’t understand why Gore didn’t secure a landslide right then and there. On knowledge alone, it was a no-brainer. So why couldn’t Gore carry his own home state of Tennessee, much less sweep the rest of the country? Clearly, it has something to do with who he is as a person, and who he is as a person is a big honking nerd. Nobody minds this in a vice president. The vice presidency is actually a nerd’s perfect job. A sidekick is supposed to be a bigger geek than the star. Like in the teen TV drama My So-Called Life , when the dreamboat boy Jordan Catalano gets the telephone number of a girl he doesn’t know in two seconds flat, the nerd Brian Krakow asks him,
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