Gore advisers admit opportunism

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© 2000, Human Events

It used to be that when a politician did something that appeared
opportunistic, the best you could do was speculate about his underlying
motives. But nowadays, many politicians employ highly paid campaign
consultants who are more than happy to brief reporters on the precise
reasoning behind their candidate's most crass posturings.

If conservatives accused Vice President Al Gore of doing what his own
advisers now openly admit he did last week, they would be accused of
character assassination. In this case, Gore's advisers assassinated
their own candidate's character. They demonstrated that the vice
president is willing to play politics with innocent people's lives in
order to advance his own political ambitions.

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The immediate issue in question is whether six-year-old Elian
González, the "miracle boy" who arrived in Florida from Cuba on an inner
tube on Thanksgiving Day, ought to be granted permanent U.S. residency
status, along with his father and other close relatives, so that a
Florida custody court, rather than Attorney General Janet Reno, can
decide if he should stay in the United States or be returned to Fidel
Castro's communist regime.

25 electoral votes

On Thursday, March 30, Gore issued a statement endorsing a bill
cosponsored by Senators Bob Smith, R-N.H., Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Rep.
Robert Menendez, D-N.J., that is designed to grant Elian -- as well as
his father, his stepmother, half sister and grandparents -- the
permanent U.S. residency status that would remove Elián's case from the
sole jurisdiction of Reno. If this bill were enacted, a Florida family
court would determine who had rightful custody of Elian. That person
would then decide if Elian should stay in America or go back to Cuba.

Quite possibly -- after examining real evidence in a real hearing
with the relevant parties present and testifying under oath -- the
family court might decide Elián's father should have legal custody of
the boy. At that point, the father could decide to return with his son
to Castro's Cuba, stay with his son here in the United States, or return
to Cuba himself and let the boy stay with relatives here.

If Smith-Graham-Menendez becomes law, however, one scenario would be
ruled out: Janet Reno would not be allowed to stage a Waco replay in
Dade County's Little Havana, sending armed agents to remove a boy from a
peaceful home so he could be returned by force to a communist regime.

Apparently, no one -- including Al Gore -- doubts that Reno is
morally and temperamentally capable of such an act.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has maintained since the beginning of the
Elian saga that a Florida family court should decide the case. But
Gore's position was unclear. He had said he would support a hearing in
family court -- if Elián's father could not come to the United States --
but he had not backed the bill granting Elian and his family permanent
residency, and he had not directly opposed Reno's position.

"For a long time, reported the Washington Post, "the vice president
tried to keep his position on Elian ambiguous. Pressed as far back as
January about whether he supported returning the boy to Cuba, Gore
sought to avoid making an open break with the administration. But he
said in a Jan. 17 debate in Iowa that if the father 'is not allowed to
come here and speak freely, then that matter should be addressed in our
domestic relations courts.'"

By March 30, the issue was fast approaching a crisis. Reno was
threatening to take the boy away from his Florida relatives on the
following Tuesday if they would not agree to surrender him if they lost
a plea in a federal appeals court. The appeal was aimed at forcing Reno
to grant the boy at least an asylum hearing with the Immigration and
Naturalization Service.

That morning, in a story headlined, "Boy's Case Could Sway Bush-Gore
Contest," Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times asked, "Could Vice
President Gore's fate be tied to that of a six-year-old boy from Cuba?
That is what some political analysts think as the nation waits for the
Clinton administration to take the next step in its clear effort to
eventually send Elian González back to Cuba. Cuban-Americans make up
nearly 12 percent of voters in Florida, the nation's
fourth-most-populous state, and few doubt that Gore's presidential
campaign would suffer if the government sent Elian back to his father in
Cuba."

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Later that day, Gore issued his statement endorsing the
Smith-Graham-Menendez bill. Gore's advisers then explained his rationale
to reporter John F. Harris of the Washington Post. The Post ran the
story on the front page of its Saturday edition.

Reported Harris: "Gore, according to advisers and Democratic sources
familiar with his strategy, had worried that the controversy over
Elián's fate threatened to escalate in a way that could swamp his plans
for keeping Republican-leaning Florida competitive in November."

Harris elaborated: "Gore advisers yesterday, speaking on condition of
anonymity, as well as Democratic sources, described a complicated set of
factors that went into Gore's decision to break with the administration.

"They said Gore believes that Democratic candidates can cut into the
historic advantage that Republicans have among Cuban-Americans, as Rep.
Robert Menendez has done in New Jersey. Even if Gore can't do this, his
team believes it is imperative to avoid their energetic opposition.

"Doing so, Gore's logic goes, will help keep Florida's 25 electoral
votes in play. Clinton, defying recent tradition, won the state in 1996.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, whose brother Jeb is governor, is by most
accounts the favorite. But Gore needs to prevent Bush from gaining such
a lead that he does not have to expend time and advertising resources
there."

Gore inadvertently underscored the opportunism of his move when he
appeared the following Tuesday on NBC's "Today." In a story headlined,
"Gore Speaks of Cuban Boy, Repeatedly But Not Clearly," this is how the
New York Times described the vice president's appearance: "Vice
President Al Gore made three different statements today on Elian
González, but by the end of the day it was not entirely clear what he
had meant to convey. ... Mr. Gore refused to answer directly the
question, posed three times, of whether Mr. González should be granted
custody if he comes to the United States."

The cravenness of Gore's transparent posturing was more than some
liberal Democrats could bear.

According to the Post, an unnamed administration official responded
to Gore's move by exclaiming, "Oh, my God, it's unbelievable."

Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who said he was "shocked and outraged,"
addressed a rebuke directly at the vice president: "For the sake of
votes in Florida, votes that already belong to Gov. Bush, you have
angered Latinos and African-Americans, including many members of
Congress."

"I was totally blindsided," said leftist Rep. Maxine Waters,
D-Calif., who indicated she was reconsidering her support for Gore's
candidacy. "The calculation doesn't make sense. If Gore did it because
he's trying to get the anti-Castro Cubans ... they're not going to vote
for him anyway. These are Republicans."

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who characterized the vice president's
action as "embarrassing," said, "It hurts Gore throughout the country in
terms of credibility."

What was most offensive about the vice president's action, however,
was not the craven rationale his aides gave the Washington Post, but the
rationale they did not give. They did not say: Vice President Gore is
profoundly disturbed by the actions of the attorney general in
arbitrarily depriving a little boy of his right to apply for asylum in
the United States after he arrived here on an inner tube that had tossed
for days on a shark-infested sea. He is profoundly disturbed at the
prospect that this little boy would be handed over to a totalitarian
dictator, to be indoctrinated in atheistic materialism by the
professional propagandists of a communist regime.

Gore's rationale -- as explained by his own advisers to America's
flagship liberal newspaper -- was not just opportunistic, it was devoid
of any sense of justice.

That is precisely the attribute that has been missing for too long in
the presidency Gore now, apparently, will say anything to win.

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