One race to watch: Clinton vs. Gore

James P. Pinkerton
May 25, 2006

Can you imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton running against Al Gore for the 2008 presidential nomination? Or do you wonder where Bill Clinton would stand in a political struggle between his wife and his ex-vice president?

Soap operas take improbable situations - and then make them more improbable. Yet, the scriptwriters at "As the World Turns" would have a hard time topping the real-life saga of "As the Clintons and Gores Turn." Let's consider some of those twists :

An Illinois-born first lady, widely reviled for being impolitic, turns into a popular and extremely political senator from New York. A president, brilliant but flawed, enjoys roller-coaster popularity as president, even as he enjoys, well, you know. Now he's a lovably roguish ex-president who has even managed to ingratiate himself with the venerated ex-president he once defeated.

Finally, as the third side of our improbable triangle, we have the ex-vice president. By all accounts, he was a straight arrow, too straight for the normal crookeries of politics - so he was first mocked, and then defeated, when he ran for the White House. But this ex-VP has been on a spiritual pilgrimage; he spent time in San Francisco, falling in with rich California environmentalists who made him the star of a Green movie.

So now, tanned, rested and ready with a new eco-agenda - and looking pretty good in contrast to the beleaguered incumbent president, who is the son of the elderly ex-president - the ex-veep is thinking about running for president himself, against the woman he once worked with in the White House. Needless to say, the ex-veep and the former first lady didn't like each other then, and they sure don't like each other now.

Yup, it would make for a heckuva soap opera. Except it can't be a TV show, because it's real. The story is already being lived out by actual people. Life has pre-empted "art."

So the storyline will have to be covered by real journalists - plus of course, pseudo-journalists - and everyone else in between who has access to a camera or a computer.

But make no mistake, the coming campaign - call it "Days of Our Clintons and Gores" - is going to be treated like a melodrama. In a profile of Gore in the current New York magazine, one source speculated that Bill might secretly help both Hillary and Al with their dueling presidential ambitions. Hard to top that.

But other outlets will try. Consider these tabloid-y words from a recent article on the Clintons' marriage: "Mr. Clinton is rarely without company in public, yet the company he keeps rarely includes his wife. Nights out find him zipping around Los Angeles with his bachelor buddy, Ronald W. Burkle, or hitting parties and fund-raisers in Manhattan." Burkle, of course, is the billionaire best known for accusing a former New York Post gossip columnist of trying to extort money from him. But where, by the way, is Sen. Clinton? The piece continues: "She is yoked to work in Washington or New York - her Senate career and political ambitions consuming her time."

Sounds like something from The National Enquirer, right? Actually, no. It was in Tuesday's New York Times, right there on the front page, above the fold. The Times story didn't dish any real dirt on the Clintons' marriage, but if that august broadsheet can lead with it, every other mainstream media outlet will feel emboldened - or challenged - to chase after tales of skirt-chasing or other foibles.

And, of course, bloggers and other new-mediators know that they can claw to prominence by hooking a scoop, or pseudo-scoop, about these bold-print names and their families. So on April 17, hotelchatter.com reported that Chelsea Clinton was checking into a hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., "with two guys."

Some will ask: Where does it end? And the answer is the whole hoped-for point about soap operas: They never end.

James P. Pinkerton's e-mail address is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.