{"product_id":"reporting-isbn-9780307275752","title":"Reporting","description":"David Remnick is a writer with a rare gift for making readers understand the hearts and minds of our public figures. Whether it’s the decline and fall of Mike Tyson, Al Gore’s struggle to move forward after his loss in the 2000 election, or Vladimir Putin dealing with Gorbachev’s legacy, Remnick brings his subjects to life with extraordinary clarity and depth. In \u003ci\u003eReporting\u003c\/i\u003e, he gives us his best writing from the past fifteen years, ranging from American politics and culture to post-Soviet Russia to the Middle East conflict; from Tony Blair grappling with Iraq, to Philip Roth making sense of America’s past, to the rise of Hamas in Palestine. Both intimate and deeply informed by history, \u003ci\u003eReporting\u003c\/i\u003e is an exciting and panoramic portrait of our times.\u003ci\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eI.\u003cbr\u003eThe Wildnerness Campaign: Al Gore\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Graham\u003cbr\u003eThe Masochism Campaign: Tony Blair\u003cbr\u003eHigh Water\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eII.\u003cbr\u003eInto the Clear: Philip Roth\u003cbr\u003eNo Longer, Not Yet: Don DeLillo\u003cbr\u003eExit the Castle: Václav Havel\u003cbr\u003eThe Exile: Solzhenitsyn in Vermont\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIII.\u003cbr\u003eDeep in the Woods: Solzhenitsyn in Moscow\u003cbr\u003eThe Last Tsar\u003cbr\u003eThe Translations Wars\u003cbr\u003ePost-Imperial Blues: Vladimir Putin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIV.\u003cbr\u003eThe Afterlife: Natan Sharansky\u003cbr\u003eThe Outsiders: Benjamin Netanyahu\u003cbr\u003eRage and Reason: Sari Nusseibeh and the PLO\u003cbr\u003eThe Spirit Level: Amos Oz\u003cbr\u003eAfter Arafat\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eV.\u003cbr\u003eKid Dynamite Blows Up: Mike Tyson\u003cbr\u003eCornerman: Teddy Atlas\u003cbr\u003eComeback: Larry Holmes\u003cbr\u003eThe Moralist: Lennox Lewis\u003cbr\u003eTyson’s Corner\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments\u003c\/i\u003e“This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature. . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Each piece is worth reading. From the first word of the preface to the last word of the final feature story, \u003ci\u003eReporting \u003c\/i\u003eis captivating.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram\u003c\/i\u003e“A pleasure to read. The [essays] are intelligent and serious, but they're also perceptive and funny. Remnick mixes literature, politics and history and then tries to bring them all together into a meaningful whole.”—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e“The arrangement of pieces is so natural, and so symphonic, it's hard to recollect their discrete appearances: It seems as though \u003ci\u003eReporting\u003c\/i\u003e is less an amalgamation of individual articles than it is a previously serialized volume at long last published whole.”—\u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eDavid Remnick has been the editor of \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e since 1998. A staff writer for the magazine from 1992 to 1998, he was previously \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post's\u003c\/i\u003e correspondent in the Soviet Union. The author of several books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his 1994 book \u003ci\u003eLenin's Tomb\u003c\/i\u003e. Mr. Remnick served as an Olympic Correspondent and Commentator for NBC during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.He lives in New York with his wife and children.\u003c\/p\u003eThe Wilderness Campaign:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Al Gore\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hey, Dwayne? . . . Dwayne?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e        “Yes, Mr. Vice-President?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Could I have some more coffee?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yes, Mr. Vice-President. Coming . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Thanks, Dwayne.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was ten in the morning in Nashville, a quiet weekday, with most   of the neighbors off to work, and Albert Gore, Jr., sat at the head of his  dining-room table eating breakfast. His plate was crowded with scrambled  eggs, bacon, toast. His pond-size mug had, in a flash, been refilled by  Dwayne Kemp, his cook, a skilled and graceful man who had been employed by  the Gores when, as his boss often puts it, “we were still working in the  White House.” Freshly showered and shaved, Gore was wearing a  midnight-blue shirt and gray wool trousers. In the months after losing the  battle for Florida’s electoral votes and conceding the Presidency to  George W. Bush, on December 13, 2000, Gore seemed to let himself go,  dropping out of sight, traveling around Spain, Italy, and Greece for six  weeks with his wife, Tipper. He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap  tugged down low. He grew a mountain-man beard and gained weight. When he  began appearing in public again, mainly in classrooms, he took to  introducing himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next  President of the United States.” People looked at this rather bulky and  hirsute man—a politician who had only recently won 50,999,897 votes for  the Presidency, more than any Democrat in history, more than any candidate  in history except Ronald Reagan in 1984, and more than half a million more  votes than the man who assumed the office—and did not know quite what to  feel or how to behave, and so they cooperated in his elaborate  self-deprecations. They laughed at his jokes, as if to help him erase what  everyone understood to be a disappointment of historic proportions—“the  heartbreak of a lifetime,” as Karenna, the eldest of his four children,  put it.  “You know the old saying,” Gore told one audience after another. “You win  some, you lose some—and then there’s that little-known third category.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore has since dispensed with the beard but not the weight. He is still  thick around the middle. He eats quickly and thoroughly, and with a  determined relish, precisely like a man who no longer has to care that he  might look heavy on Larry King Live. “You want some eggs?” he asked.  “Dwayne’s the best.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This has been the first election season in a generation in which Al Gore  has not pursued national office. He ran for President in 1988, when he was  thirty-nine; for Vice-President, on Bill Clinton’s ticket, in 1992 and  1996; and then again for President in 2000. Having decided that a rematch  against Bush would be too divisive (or, perhaps, too difficult), Gore has  made an effort not to brood on the sidelines. Instead, he used words like  “liberated” and “free” with a determined conviction to describe his inner  condition. He was free of the burden, free of the pressure, free of the  camera’s eye. At home in Nashville, the phone barely rang. There were no  advance people at the door, no aides at his shoulder. He could say what he  wanted and it hardly made a ripple in the media. If he felt like calling  George Bush a “moral coward,” if he felt like comparing Guantánamo and Abu  Ghraib to islands in an “American gulag” or the President’s media  operatives to “digital Brown Shirts,” well, he just went ahead and did it.  No worries, no hesitation. True, at noon at the Belcourt Theatre, he was  to deliver a speech to a group called the Music Row Democrats, but the  only cameras were likely to be local. He jokingly outlined the speech on a  small notepad with just two words: “war” and “economy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Al and Tipper Gore had recovered from the initial shock of the 2000  election, they spent $2.3 million on the house they live in now: a  hundred-year-old colonial on Lynwood Boulevard, in the Belle Meade section  of Nashville. They still own a place in Arlington, Virginia—a house that  was built by Tipper’s grandfather—and a ninety-acre cattle farm in the  Gore family seat of Carthage, Tennessee; but Arlington was perilously  close to Washington, and Carthage was too remote for a full-time  residence, especially for Tipper. Belle Meade, which resembles Buckhead,  in Atlanta, or Mountain Brook, near Birmingham, is a prosperous redoubt  for businessmen and country-music stars; it encompasses a neighborhood of  broad, sloping lawns, and houses with magnolia trees and “estate”  driveways up front and glassy modern additions and swimming pools out  back. Chet Atkins used to be a neighbor; Leon Russell still is. Some of  the features of the house, which the couple expanded with the help of an  architect, are distinctly Gore-ish: Tipper’s full drum set, in the living  room (complete with congas); Al’s grip-and-grin photographs with the  Clintons and world leaders, along the walls. There are fewer books and  more televisions than you might expect. When the architect was designing  the rear addition to the house, Gore asked him to curve the walls inward  in two places in order to save several trees. “The trees weren’t anything  special, nothing rare or anything,” he said. “I just couldn’t bear to  bring ’em down.” In the backyard, around the patio and the extra-long  pool, where Al and Tipper do laps, Gore also installed an anti-bug system  that sprays a fine mist of ground chrysanthemums from various discreet  sources: a tree trunk, a patio wall. “The mosquitoes just hate it,” he  said. Other features of the house are less environmentally correct. A 2004  black Cadillac, which Gore drives, was parked in the driveway. A ’65  Mustang—a Valentine’s Day gift from Al to Tipper—was parked in the garage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore finished his eggs. He walked to a covered patio on the side of the  house and settled into a soft chair. Dwayne brought his coffee cup and  refilled it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore has hardly been a recluse since deciding, in late 2002, not to run  again. In the past year, he has delivered a series of speeches in New York  and Washington sharply criticizing the Bush Administration, but he has  answered few questions. “It’s better that way for a while,” he said. He  has given speeches for money all around the world. And he is teaching  courses, mainly about the intersection of community and the American  family, at Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, and Fisk  University, in Nashville.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’ve got about forty hours of lectures and classes on tape,” Gore said,  deadpan. “Now’s your chance to watch them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore is beginning to make serious money. He is a board member for Apple  and a senior adviser to Google, which just went through its IPO. He has  also been working on creating a cable-television station and developing a  financial enterprise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m having a blast,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In a parliamentary system, a candidate for Prime Minister, after losing an  election, often returns to the party leadership or at least to a prominent  seat in parliament. It doesn’t work that way in the United States. Here,  you make your own way: you give speeches, write memoirs, accumulate a  fortune, find a righteous cause. Sometimes a reporter might come calling,  but not often. In any case, Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager in  2000, said, “When it was over, the Democratic Party kicked him to the  curb,” preferring to forget not only the Florida catastrophe but also  Gore’s own misplays: his mutating personality in the three debates with  Bush; his reliance on political consultants; his inability to exploit Bill  Clinton’s enduring popularity and his failure to win Clinton’s Arkansas,  much less Tennessee; his decision not to press immediately for a statewide  recount in Florida. Now, everywhere he goes, Gore is faced with crowds who  despair of the Bush Administration and see in him all that might have  been, all the what-ifs. The heartbreak of a lifetime. Sometimes people  approach him and address him as “Mr. President.” Some try to cheer him up  and tell him, “We know you really won.” Some tilt their heads, affecting a  look of grave sympathy, as if he had just lost a family member. He has to  face not only his own regrets; he is forever the mirror of others’. A  lesser man would have done far worse than grow a beard and put on a few  pounds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Consider the expectations: more than Franklin Roosevelt, or even John F.  Kennedy, Gore was raised to be President. His father, Albert Gore, Sr., a  senator who was known to look as noble as a Roman statesman, expected it  of him. When Gore’s mother was pregnant with Al, Gore Senior told the  editors of the Nashville Tennessean that if his wife gave birth to a boy  he didn’t want to see the story tucked deep in the paper. After Al was  born, the headline read, well, mr. gore, here he is, on page 1. Six years  later, the Senator planted a story in the Knoxville News Sentinel about  how young Al had coaxed his father into buying him a more expensive  bow-and-arrow set than they had planned to get. “There may be another Gore  on the way toward the political pinnacle,” the story said. “He’s just six  years old now. But with his experiences to date, who knows what may  happen.” By the time Gore made it to Harvard (the only school he applied  to), he was informing his class of his ultimate ambition. His first run,  in 1988, after he   had spent just a few years in the Senate, was less an act of youthful  presumption than a hurried attempt to win the White House in his father’s  lifetime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore is fifty-six years old. After the 2000 race was finally resolved,  some of the people around him consoled him by telling him to “remember  Richard Nixon,” how Nixon lost the Presidential race in 1960, lost the  California governorship in 1962—informing the press that it would no  longer have him to “kick around anymore”—and then came back to win the  White House in 1968. Somehow, when that advice is mentioned to Gore today,  it is neither consoling nor enticing. If John Kerry wins in November, that  would likely spell the end of Gore’s career in national politics; if Kerry  loses, there would still be strong figures in a prospective field for  2008, not least John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Basically, the answer is, I do not expect to ever be a candidate again,”  Gore said. “I really don’t. The second part of the answer is, I haven’t  ruled it out completely. And the third qualifier is, I don’t add the  second part as a way of signaling coyness. It’s merely to complete an  honest answer to the question and it in no way changes the principal part  of the answer. Which is, I really do not expect that I will be a  candidate. If I did expect to be a candidate again, I would probably not  feel the same freedom to let it rip in these speeches the way I am. And I  enjoy that. It feels”—and there was that word again—“it feels liberating  to me.” Running again for the Senate or accepting a Cabinet position, he  said, was also out of the question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore, along with no small part of the country, is convinced that had  things turned out differently in Florida in 2000, had the conservatives on  the Supreme Court not outnumbered the liberals by a single vote, the  United States would not be in the condition it’s in: the front page would  not be describing chaos in Iraq, record budget deficits, the rollback of  numerous environmental initiatives, a diminishment of civil liberties, a  curtailment of stem-cell research, an erosion of American prestige abroad.  Gore does not admit to any bitterness, but it is plain   in nearly every speech he gives; and while the feeling may be partly   personal—who could blame him?—it runs to a deeper, more public-minded  sentiment than the disappointment of his own, or his father’s, ambitions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Here you have a guy who worked all his life to achieve the one thing he  wanted—to be President of the United States—and it was there, in his  grasp,” Tony Coelho, Gore’s campaign chairman in 2000, said. “He felt  Clinton hurt him, but nevertheless he worked his butt off and brought it  off. He won the most votes, by half a million, but then the Supreme Court  steps in and it’s gone. It is hard for any of us to understand what that  means or how it feels. The truth is that Gore is really a policy guy, not  a political guy, and for him to feel that he was on the cusp of the  ultimate policy job, that he could affect policy and the world like no one  else, and then nothing—well, imagine that!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      In a little while, a new friend of Gore’s, an eccentric musician and  visual artist named Robert Ellis Orrall, was going to swing by to take him  and Tipper to the Belcourt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’ll like Bob,” Gore said, smiling. “But I’m warning you: he does his  own thing. He’s a crazy kinda guy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore delivered that last sentence in what I came to think of as his Mr.  Goofy voice. When he wants to undercut something he is saying, to indicate  that he knows he is speaking in a cliché or taking on a stentorian or  pompous tone, he uses the Mr. Goofy voice, stretching his face into a kind  of clownish expression and affecting a tone more suited to a television  dinosaur. Then, there is the Herr Professor voice, Gore as lecturer. Gore  didn’t really want to talk politics at first, but when the subject of the  press came up he seized on it and gave, at my best estimation, a  twenty-minute discourse on the degradation of “the public sphere,” a  phrase coined by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the  nineteen-sixties. (One tries, and fails, to imagine the current President  alluding to the author of Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.)  “He’s a ve-rrry interesting guy,” Gore said. “Why am I just finding out  about him?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It’s easy to see that Gore, lacking public office, likes to teach. In his  uninterrupted answer, he mentioned the brain-imaging center at New York  University; The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain; Broca’s  Brain, by Carl Sagan; an Op-Ed piece in the Times about   the decline of reading in America, by Andrew Solomon; the lack of research  on the relation between the brain and television—“There is just nothing on  the dendrite level about watching television”; Gutenberg and the rise of  print; the sovereign rule of reason in the Enlightenment; individualism—“a  term first used by de Tocqueville to describe America in the  eighteen-thirties”; Thomas Paine; Benjamin Franklin. “O.K., now  fast-forward through the telegraph, the phonograph.” O.K., but we didn’t  fast-forward: first, there was Samuel Morse, who failed to hear the news  of his wife’s dying while he was painting a portrait—“You know, he has a  painting in the White House, if I remember correctly”—and therefore went  out and invented a faster means of communication. “Now fast-forward again  to Marconi . . . now that’s an interesting story”; the sinking of the  Titanic; David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term “broadcast”;  moving right along to “the nineteen visual centers of the brain”; an  article on “flow” in Scientific American; the “orienting reflex” in  vertebrates; the poignancy and “ultimate failure” of political  demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public sphere—“I  mean, what do you really have? A crowd of people holding posters with five  words on them at most hoping for a TV camera to come along for a few  seconds of airtime?”—and, finally, Gore’s own 1969 Harvard thesis, on the  effect of television on the Presidency and the rise, at about that time,  of image over print as a means of transmitting news. This was all a way to  talk about the cable-television station that he is developing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What kind of station will it be?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, I really can’t talk about it,” he said. “Not yet.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What Gore does care to talk about, and what he has talked about openly and  in language shocking in its contrast with his old stilted caution, are the  failures of the man who prevailed in 2000.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’re free to speak clearly,” I offered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m unplugged,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A few minutes later, Robert Ellis Orrall arrived. A charming man in his  late forties with close-cropped hair and an earring, Orrall has a vibrant  sense of performance, insofar as he is always performing. He began telling  jokes the moment he arrived, and Gore seemed to relax completely in his  presence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tipper Gore, wearing a cotton sweater and hot-pink pants, came out on the  patio to greet Orrall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How are you, Bob?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Just fine, Tipper, but a little nervous. They asked me to introduce Al at  this thing, so I’ve got this little speech . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A slight breeze of anxiety riffled Gore’s features. Orrall gave every  indication of being an unpredictable stage presence. It was one thing to  clown around on the patio, quite another when you’re introducing the  former Vice-President in front of a few hundred supporters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I hope you, um, wrote it down, Bob,” Gore said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I got it right here,” Orrall said, patting his pocket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The four of us walked out to the driveway and climbed into Orrall’s car,  an incommodious Volkswagen Golf. The former Vice-President opened the  front door, fastidiously folded in half, and inserted himself through the  narrow space available, as if through a mail slot. Once inside, he shifted  his legs, zigging them up and to the right, forming with them what seemed  to be an especially complicated letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Then he  very slowly closed the door on himself. There were no major injuries.  Tipper climbed in back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Orrall steered out of the driveway and headed toward the theater. There  were no sirens, no trail cars besides the normal run of traffic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore smiled and said, “Bob, you could pretend like you’re Secret Service,  but you’d have to be wearing an earpiece instead of an earring.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ll do my best,” Orrall said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Please do!” Mr. Goofy said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Orrall is a performer of parts, and one of them is as “Bob Something,” the  chief songwriter and singer for a farcical band called Monkey Bowl. In  northern terms, Monkey Bowl might be described as a cross between the Fugs  and Ali G.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As we drove, Orrall produced a Monkey Bowl CD titled Plastic Three-Fifty,  which listed such songs as “Stupid Man Things,” “Hip Hop the Bunny,” and  “Books Suck.” The second cut on the disk was called, simply, “Al Gore.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not long after they met, through a mutual friend, Orrall played an early  version of the song for Gore. Gore liked it so much that he added a touch  of his own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Let’s play it,” Orrall said, and he slipped it into his CD player. Af-  ter an infectious string of guitar chords and backbeat, Orrall started  singing:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Al Gore lives on my street,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Three-twenty-something, Lynwood Boulevard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And, he doesn’t know me\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    but I voted for him. Yeah, I punched the card!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t know how he lives with knowing,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That even though he won the popular vote\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He still lives on my street, right down the street\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Soon, everyone in the car started laughing, maybe Gore most of all, and  Tipper was whacking her palm against her knee in time with the drums:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One time, I had a bike\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I was a kid, and someone stole it from me\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And still I’m mad about that,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Carrying anger, I just can’t let it be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I need to be more forgiving, I know it,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ’Cause even with the popular vote,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Al Gore lives on my street, right down the street,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After another chorus comically contrasting Orrall’s childhood defeat and  self-pity to Gore’s historical disappointment and recovery, the chorus  takes its climactic turn:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Life isn’t fair, don’t tell me, I know it\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ’Cause even with the popular vote,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Al Gore lives on my street, right down the street from me [repeats]\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    President Gore lives on my street, right down the street from me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Finally, the song seemed to be ending, but then came the voice of Gore  himself: “Hey, man, I like your song, but you need to get over all that  stuff. Hey, this is a great neighborhood!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Everyone applauded, and Orrall kept driving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After a while, we started talking about Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit  9\/11, and the opening scenes, which show perhaps the most painful scene in  Gore’s political life—the day he had to preside over a joint session of  Congress in his role as President of the Senate as it certified the votes  of the Electoral College, a process that was repeatedly interrupted by  various African-American members of the House who tried, and failed, to  gain the floor and object to the proceedings. It was Gore, of course, who  had to follow the rules of order and send them to their seats, all the  while knowing that his defense of decorum and law would be seen as a kind  of self-flagellation, a defense of a man he disdained, or would come to  disdain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s unbelievable, that scene,” Orrall said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was a long pause, and then Gore said, “We haven’t had a chance to  see it yet. We were on vacation when it came out.” Gore made it sound as  if he had missed an opportunity to see Harold \u0026amp; Kumar Go to White Castle,  but Tipper said, “I’m not sure I could watch it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore remarked that he had been on Al Franken’s radio show not long ago. “I  called in from Nashville,” he said. The guest was Michael Moore. Franken  went into his New Age therapist Stuart Smalley routine, and, with both  Gore and Moore on the line, said, “Now, Michael, is there something you’d  like to say to the Vice-President?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 2000, Moore and others on the left gave support to the third-party  candidacy of Ralph Nader, who was campaigning on the notion that there was  no difference between Gore and Bush. Without Nader in   the race, Gore would likely have won the Presidency, even excluding  Florida.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’re really sorry, Al,” Moore said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gore laughed as he recalled the story: “I gave it a big pause and said,  ‘For what, Michael?’ And then he gave a whole complicated explanation  about how he was voting in New York State, which wasn’t in play, and how  Nader had promised not to campaign in any swing states, and  blah-blah-blah. So I said, ‘That sounds aw-fully complicated, Michael.’ ”  (Afterward, I listened to the exchange on the Internet. Franken remarked  that it was really “not a full-on apology” and Moore made sure to tell  Gore, “You’re more liberal than you were four years ago.”) Later, Gore  told me, “I did see Bowling for Columbine. I really appreciate what he’s  trying to do, but I wouldn’t have thought before seeing   the movie that anyone could have aroused any sympathy in me for Charlton  Heston. And yet he did. . . . I’m sure there is some of that in Fahrenheit  9\/11.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Orrall pulled the VW into the parking lot of the Belcourt Theatre. Someone  pointed him in the direction of a space that had been saved with an orange  traffic cone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hey!” Gore said. “We’ve got an orange cone!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As the Gores went through a side door, they met Bob Titley, one of the  co-founders of the Music Row Democrats. Nashville is a center of the music  industry, and the area around Sixteenth Avenue, where all the main  recording and publishing companies have their offices, is called Music  Row. For the most part, the country-music business is Republican. But  there have always been exceptions, as when one of the Dixie Chicks said,  last year, that she was ashamed of having Bush as President. When the  Dixie Chicks were roundly denounced, a number of executives and  songwriters in Nashville decided to start the new group.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Is there any reason you haven’t invited me to one of your Kerry-oke  nights?” Gore asked Titley.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We were saving you for a really big night,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Orrall took the stage, plugged a performance he was making that evening at  a local club, the Bluebird Café, and efficiently introduced the day’s  speaker. “He won the popular vote . . . and he lives down the street from  me!” Gore, who was now wearing a jacket and tie, came out to a standing  ovation, and he was smiling broadly and waving and doing that  mouthing-gratitude-delightedly-pointing-out-friends-in-the-crowd thing  that politicians do. He had torn into the Bush Administration quite often  lately, and he knew well the particulars of his indictment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the crowd finally quieted down, he thanked a few people and said,  “Hello. I’m Al Gore, and I used to be the next President of the United  States.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Everyone laughed. He kept his practiced deadpan. “I don’t find that  particularly funny,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Everyone laughed again. “Put yourself in my position. I flew on Air Force  Two for eight years. Now I have to take off my shoes to get on an airplane.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not long ago, I was on Interstate 40 going from here to Carthage. We were  driving ourselves. I looked in the rearview mirror. There was no  motorcade. You heard of phantom-limb pain?” At around dinnertime, at the  Lebanon exit, he went on, the Gores found a Shoney’s—“a low-cost family  restaurant”—and the waitress made a fuss over Tipper and then went to the  next booth and said, “He’s come down a long way, hasn’t he?” Not long  afterward, Gore said, he flew to Nigeria on a Gulfstream V to give a  speech on energy. In that speech, he told the story about what had  happened at dinner back in Tennessee, carefully explaining what a Shoney’s  was. On the way home from Africa, the plane stopped to refuel in the  Azores. While Gore was waiting on the tarmac, a man came running with an  urgent message, “Mr. Vice-President! You have to call Washington!” and  handed him some wire copy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I wondered what could be wrong in Washington,” Gore said. “Then I  realized—a whole bunch of things.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It turned out that a reporter in Lagos had mixed things up and written a  story saying that Gore had “opened a low-cost family restaurant called  Shoney’s.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Well, Gore said, “later, I got a letter from Bill Clinton saying,  ‘Congratulations on the new restaurant.’ See, we like to celebrate each  other’s successes.”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305187758309,"sku":"NP9780307275752","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307275752.jpg?v=1767735651","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/reporting-isbn-9780307275752","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}