Let's hope Gore wins

He might not be setting any hearts on fire, but next to his Republican rival he looks very good

The US elections: special report
As the light of the world Al Gore is not much to look at. He's a poor fish, lugubrious and somnolent. His minders goad him into flapping his fins a bit but there is no spark in his fishy eye. However, physiognomy and charm aren't everything. Yet again liberal America will have to make do with an imperfect candidate. But contemplating the threat of a George W Bush victory, their man starts to seem prime presidential material. Al Gore is all there is and the fate of the world now depends on his success.

Observing him perform at close quarters, he does not, alas, improve: television soundbites flatter him. Plodding painfully in a speech to the Irish American Forum in Manhatten, he read monotonously through a respectable enough detailed commitment to the peace process - "I've been studying up on it" - and he had, he had. (He is a slow but thorough study.) European ears have to screen out the yuck in all American electioneering: it's a foreign language to us. Maybe it's to Al Gore's credit that he is so bad at it that the whole room winces when he tries the down home stuff: "Tipper and I have just become grandparents. Any other grandparents here? Let's see those hands! Great. Give me some lessons, I'm just a rookie!"

There's none of that Clinton magic, intelligence and warmth that could win over the coldest audience. But if he lacks Clinton's skills, he also lacks his faults. All his life, this senator's son has been groomed for this moment, mainly by his mother who looked just like him standing behind him on the platform as he celebrated Super Tuesday's results. He has rarely put a foot wrong, never done anything to excess, wore a tie every day as a young journalist and never drank a beer on duty. He is a manufactured man who sometimes over-boasts his achievements (no he didn't invent the internet, though he was the first senator to promote it).

Those who knew him young say all danger and therefore all character was nipped at his mother's breast. His minders try to humanise him by revealing that he doesn't wear pyjamas. Because of Clinton, this election will turn on "character": if that's just keeping his trousers on and no skeletons, Al Gore's their man. Bush tries to tar Gore with Clinton's sins. "This is the end of the Clinton/Gore era!" he keeps shouting but it won't stick. Every day that passes Al Gore looks more like his own man.

The important question is what has he learned from the Clinton era? As it draws to a close Tony Blair, who took so much from Clinton's third way, must also be asking what went wrong. How with so little achieved? Clinton, could have moved mountains with a golden economy and his powers of persuasion, but he didn't.

Long before Lewinsky, Clinton lost his daring, tenacity and vision. True the checks and balances of the US constitution stymied him at every turn, but that was only part of the story. After the great disaster of his failed health reforms, he rarely tried again to do anything bold. All was compromise. His third way meant ducking tough choices, appeasing and eschewing ideology until he was left with none. He could always spin a mean speech, but fine words were a substitute for action. Tony Blair risks the same fatal loss of momentum. Clinton's hyper-caution stopped him rushing the citadels of conservatism while the force was still with him. Has Gore learned? Might he surprise us yet with a daring belied by his stolid dullness?

It's encouraging that so far Al Gore's television ads have never trimmed to the right. Night after night he has pumped out a strong liberal message - pro choice on abortion, pro gun control, pro health care for the poor, universal health care for children. Bush is stranded too far out on the right, lost somewhere on the Bob Jones campus and he struggles to get back towards the centre. But so far the signs are that Gore will stay firmly where he is and hold to his message, which is a very good one.

With his strong pitch on radically reforming campaign finance, he takes on the McCain mantle. He's earned unusual respect in that much mocked role as vice-president by beavering away at technology, the environment, education and foreign policy (He was more in favour of intervening in the Bosnian tragedy than Clinton.) A policy wonk by nature, he likes the nitty-gritty which is no bad thing. And he assembles good advisers.

So even if he sets no hearts afire, even if his every move is stiffly calculated, he'll do. George W Bush will make this the dirtiest, most vitriolic campaign ever fought. The rest of the world will look on, as usual, aghast at the spectacle of how the world's great guarantor of democracy conducts its own elections. We will watch every twist and turn in the terrible process with bated breath because so much hangs in its balance. On the vagaries of ever-diminishing numbers of US voters dimly informed by mendacious 30-second commercials too much depends. Those who fear any move towards more global governance should consider how already the future of so many countries rests to a large degree on the outcome of something over which we outsiders have no control at all - this great rambunctious, mendacious, shameless four-yearly extravaganza in America.

In a Bush victory there is the prospect of an isolationist America, wastefully rearming with useless hi-tech weapons while reneging on international disarmament treaties and dangerously rousing the Zhirinovsky tendency in Russia. Republican refusal to play the global policeman will demolish America's new-found sense of responsibility for universal human rights. The outlook for the UN would be grim in that changed atmosphere. World free trade would become a worse battle ground for naked US interest, risking large parts of the global economy and thus ultimately America's own. An already shameful refusal to accept heavy responsibility for global warming or to make sacrifices in energy use would be even worse under a Texas oilman who uses cheap energy as one of his campaign themes.

On all these questions Al Gore says the right thing. What would or could he do? As with Clinton or with Blair, there is little doubt about where all their true convictions lie. In the end what matters is a leader's skill, bravery and determination to deliver, unknowable until too late.

It's neck and neck now with Gore in the lead but a long run-in to November. If he loses it will be the death of a key part of the Blair project too - that pivotal link between social democratic Europe and a Democrat in the White House. No more third way in foreign policy. Blair will be obliged to turn back towards a Europe that is culturally so very much more like us: America never seems more alien than at election time, fascinating but monstrous too.

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