Brett McNeil joins the Election 2000 fray as Al Gore's oldest hits town to stump for daddy
Young voters! Who would you rather vote for, an (alleged) recreational cocaine user or the husband of the woman who brought us warning labels on rock albums? An awkward question, maybe, considering it's the Democrat's wife who brought us the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC) and the Republican frontrunner whose youthful indiscretions sound maybe a little more like your own.
But while Election 2000 is a year away, and nobody's even yet won a party nomination, Al Gore's camp is looking to cultivate the youth vote in a big way and to that end has unleashed a "secret weapon" in his campaign for the presidency. That weapon, Karenna Gore Schiff, appeared December 6 at a fund-raiser for the local branch of Gorenet -- an awkwardly named organization that seeks to curry favor with, and take donations from, America's youngest political scenesters -- to stump for her dad and the future he intends to deliver if he ever gets a chance to move his own stuff into the Oval Office. "He basically wants to save the world, and so do we," says Karenna of her dad and her new friends.
Draped in the light of television news cameras, the eldest of three blond Gore daughters, Karenna stands in a trim gray pantsuit and black flats. She is a mother and a wife and a law student. She is a child of politics grown to sling arrows at the Dark Age Eighties, to ask women her age to consider life in an America where they'd have to rely on coat hangers for abortions, where the greedy fatheads of that long-gone Age of Reagan would once again hold the keys not only to the White House, but to the American Dream for all, as well. Pushing her bangs back behind her right ear, Karenna is smiling and articulate. She is slight and blue-eyed, and she is thanking you for your $35 donation tonight. Those who paid $100 for VIP tickets have already had a private consultation behind closed doors. The crowd is polite, though not particularly fired up. In fact, the room looks positively Reaganesque: Heineken drinkers and men in dimpled ties, women in black hose and knee-length skirts. But this is the new Democratic party, and this is a Lincoln Park nightclub (Zentra, specifically).
Karenna says her dad's run for the presidency is rooted in principle -- the same kind of principle that has always guided his career in public office (no mention, here, of Gore's megalomaniacal tendencies, though; no claims of Internet invention or of fathering the contemporary environmentalist scene or of having provided the inspiration for "Love Story"). Karenna says her dad offers young voters a man they can both trust and believe in: No coattail riding for this guy, no evasive positions on his early life as Tommy Lee Jones' college roommate -- nothing to hide for this straightest of straight arrows. Just pure beneficence and moral uprightness. And he's on speaking terms with many of the world leaders Bush still cannot identify, even in multiple choice quizzes. So what's not to like? How is Gore not a sure thing?
Well, for one, so much of what Karenna and her dad hope to pin on the Bush name has been overshadowed by the hapless and groping foolishness of the Commander in Briefs to whom Gore is so clearly wedded at the hip. ("Ladies and gentlemen," he said from Little Rock the second time around, "I give you my good friend, William Jefferson Clinton.") Karenna, the secret weapon, looks out into a room of her peers (though who else in attendance had a bridal registry like Karenna's?) and tells us we hold the future of the world in our hands. But she doesn't tell us much else. She urges us not to take up "ironic poses of detachment"; she remindes us that she, too, lived through grunge and techno pop. But she doesn't say a single thing about her dad's overly aggressive 1996 fund-raising efforts. She doesn't say anything about China or Seattle or East Timor or the Balkans or even Mumia Abu Jamal -- though she gives the briefest of passes to Medicare and the economy.
In fact, the planks of Karenna's platform for her dad are made up solely of the sort of warm and fuzzy backslapping platitudes of inclusion and women's rights and enviro-friendly policymaking that has characterized the most talked about but least acted upon points of the Clinton agenda. Karenna, friend, where's the beef?
How seriously are we supposed to take this rich Southern belle-cum-Manhattanite's calls for social change and action, particularly when she uses nouns like "Gen X" and trafficks in the sort of useless nostalgic banalities popular with her childhood-looking peers (sitcom memories, GI Joe lunch boxes) -- reinforcing that she, too, used to rollerskate in her basement to the sounds of Euro synth pop bands? So what. So we should vote for her dad? And if we are to take Karenna to heart, are we supposed to assume that her dad's vision for our future will somehow be different from the sort of hand-holding we and our parents needed when W.A.S.P and 2 Live Crew were so awfully, patently offensive? Will a Gore presidency differ from the utter hollowness of the Clinton presidency? And speaking of the Clintons, Karenna remained mute on the issue of her mom's role in any Al Gore administration. What would Tipper be, Minister of Culture?
After delivering her calls for votes and money, Karenna steps from the stage and makes her way through the room. Asked if she thinks her mom's role in organizing the PMRC is a liability for her dad among young voters, she says not, adding, "A couple people have asked me about what that was like when I was young and my mom was trying to get warning labels on very violent lyrics, and my answer is easy. When I was 14, you know, it was something that sometimes was an interesting experience because I was sort of trying to be cool, but the main thing that I took away from it was that she always fought for what she thought was right, and she didn't let anyone knock her down."
Making her way back into the crowd, Karenna, having said nothing, really, appears ready. For what? Politics, of course.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.