Not even warm as to why Al lost the election.
Via Daily Mail:
Al Gore never forgave Bill Clinton for ‘betraying’ him over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and costing him the 2000 election, a new book reveals.
A new book claims that Gore felt Clinton’s ‘impeachment cast a permanent shadow on their joint accomplishments’ and ruined his chance of succeeding him as president.
Gore’s camp thought that Clinton ‘did not want Gore to succeed’ against George W Bush after he was impeached following his affair with Lewinsky.
First In Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents and the Pursuit of Power gives fresh insight into the dark tensions at the heart of the relationship between Gore and Clinton.
The two men were like ‘brothers’ but their friendship turned to animosity in part due to Hillary Clinton clashing with Gore as she built her own power base in the White House.
As Gore sees it there has been ‘no closure’ on the feud and he only endorsed Hillary in a Tweet four months before the 2016 election amid panic from Democrats.
Clinton’s legacy as president is being re-examined in the #MeToo era, and earlier this week he was challenged about the Lewinsky affair on NBC’s Today show.
First in Line, by New York Times bestselling author Kate Andersen Brower, takes a different track and looks again at his relationship with Gore.
The book, published by HarperCollins, says that Clinton chose Gore as his vice president because he ‘reminded him of Hillary: strong, organized, smart, and loyal’.
During their first term Clinton, the former Arkansas governor, and Gore, a Senator from the neighboring state of Tennessee, formed a telegenic foursome with Hillary and Gore’s wife Tipper.
Clinton was 45 years old and Gore was 44 years old at the time, and the two men shared Southern roots; they also shared problems with their weight and their love of donuts.
Elaine Kamarck, who worked in the White House from 1993 to 1997, said that you ‘couldn’t get at the donuts for Clinton and Gore stuffing their faces’.
She said: ‘They both were like little porkers who ate too much and then tried to jog to get rid of the pounds.’
Gore was perceived by many as being incredibly dull but he was good at getting Clinton – who is famously easily distracted and disorganized – to focus, and the president liked his dry sense of humor.
Gore was to say in his own book: ‘For almost all those eight years the relationship was one between brothers – that may be a cliché and I run the risk of overstatement, but really we became extremely close.’
First In Line suggests that Gore is overstating their closeness – and the reality is that their relationship began to go ‘Shakespearean’ as the presidency went on, in no small part due to Hillary.
Gore found himself facing off with ‘the most powerful first lady in American history’, who did not want to play second fiddle to him in the West Wing.
Even in 1992, when Clinton and Gore and their wives went on a campaign bus trip, Hillary’s close friend and scheduler Susan Thomases tried to kick the Gores off the bus.