Alexandra Starr

Experts believe that China, as a poor, labor-rich country grappling with an
official
unemployment rate of 17 percent, will
probably launch a proliferation of sweatshops as a way of
pulling the country out of its economic malaise. (Its
growth rate has declined every year for the past seven and
is expected to drop again this year.) “In economic terms,”
says Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, gaining access to the world textile market
“would be the single greatest benefit” to China.

Right now, China’s lack of WTO credentials hems in its
potential as a textile powerhouse. Look closely at your
clothing: You won’t find many “Made in China”
tags. That’s because textile trade has been governed by the
“Multi Fiber Arrangement,” a Byzantine bilateral quota
specifying which garments individual countries can export.

Ever wonder why that T-shirt bears the label “Made in
the United Arab Emirates”? Some companies set up their manufacturing
in small countries not yet subject to quotas. But once found out,
they become subject to a quota, too. According to Marcus Nolan
of the Institute for International Economics, the down vests
that were all the rage about 15 years ago (and popularized
by Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”) were the
handiwork of a Thai manufacturer who creatively circumvented
his country’s quota on nylon jackets by cutting off the
sleeves.

In 1995, with the creation of the WTO, member countries
passed an agreement on textiles and clothing that
stipulated that quotas would be phased out by 2005, although
there will still be tariffs on garments. Of course, without
WTO membership, China has been locked out of the deal
completely. And its outsider status was a distinct
disadvantage when the United States decided on China’s
garment export quota.

“China is a very dominant supplier in our market,” says an
official at the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office.
“The quotas we negotiated with them were made with an eye to
that status.”

Translation: The Chinese were screwed, because as the United
States allowed WTO countries to ship more textiles into the
United States, it compensated for the increased influx of goods by
clamping down on the Chinese. Last year, according to the
U.S. trade official, WTO members saw their quota increase
by 9 percent; China’s allowance inched up a paltry 0.9
percent.

Not surprisingly, China was anxious to get in on the Multi Fiber Arrangement
as
soon as possible. While unions pressured U.S. negotiators
to insist that the Chinese have their quotas phased out over
10 years, the Chinese held firm.

“It’s something else the U.S. caved in on,” says Mark
Levinson, policy director of the Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). “Apparently, it
was a deal breaker for the Chinese.” U.S. officials did
secure a provision, however, that would allow the United
States to impose quotas within four years of the phaseout
if there was a “surge” of Chinese garment exports.

There is every reason to think that such a surge will occur once
the Chinese officially join the WTO and thus qualify to have
their quotas phased out. The International Trade Commission
predicted last year that China’s share of the U.S. apparel
market will increase from 18 percent to 30 percent. Ann
Hoffman, legislative director at UNITE, calls that a
conservative estimate. “They always underestimate the
damage from trade agreements,” she says.

A good indicator of the growth potential for China in
textiles is the amount of toys and shoes it ships to the
United States every year. Neither of those products is
subject to quotas, and they are the country’s two leading
exports to the United States. According to the Global
Exchange, a nonprofit organization that monitors trade and
human rights, about 80 percent of all toys in this country
come from China.

One result of China’s potential growth in textiles will be
cheap T-shirts and capri pants for American consumers.
Apparel prices are already low — they fell about 1
percent a year throughout most of the ’90s, and last year the
drop was even steeper. Another consequence will be fewer
textile jobs in the United States; UNITE predicts a
loss of 15,000 jobs a year.

The specter of increased unemployment from China’s new trade status looms
much larger in Southeast
Asian countries than in the United States, however. Workers in countries
like Sri
Lanka, Malaysia and the Philippines don’t pull down hefty
paychecks, but they do earn more than Chinese laborers.

Plus, under authoritarian Chinese leadership,
businesses won’t run the risks of strikes or demands for
health insurance. As a result, companies are expected to
relocate a chunk of their business from those other
countries to China.

So while American consumers will reap the benefits of
China’s emergence as a major textile player in the form of
$4.99 T-shirts, garment workers in countries ranging from
Sri Lanka to the United States could pay a steep price.

Of course, what sounds good to Raul gives headaches to George Bush. But then, Chavez enjoys pitting himself against the current American government and specializes in gestures calculated to offend. When he received word of Fidel Castro’s illness, the Venezuelan leader was in Hanoi, one stop in a global bash-the-U.S. tour. The previous day he had commended his hosts for their 1960s war with the United States, saying their battles against “imperialism” had set “a big example for the world.” Chavez’s arrival in Vietnam was preceded by a chummy visit with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he called a “brother and trenchmate.” In 2000, Chavez became the first democratically elected head of state to visit Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War. He recently announced he’d like to pay North Korea a visit, too.

Why the urge to stick his finger in W’s eye? Chavez has always been a leftist, which guarantees a sticky relationship with the Bush administration. Things didn’t really get ugly, however, till 2002, when the Bushies broke open the champagne a bit prematurely after a coup briefly deposed Chavez from the presidency. On his return to power, the Venezuelan stepped up his attacks against the U.S. president, whom he derides as “Mr. Danger.”

Chavez has also condemned capitalism as “the road to hell” — although he hasn’t completely eschewed market economics. He does, after all, still sell petroleum to the United States (Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East). But Chavez has taken advantage of skyrocketing oil prices to try out some unusual cash-free arrangements. For example, he and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, a fellow leftist, agreed last year to barter oil in return for Argentine shipbuilding expertise and farm machinery.

The deals are part of Chavez’s larger petrodollar diplomacy, which leverages Venezuela’s oil wealth to expand his influence in Latin America and help like-minded politicians win elective office. No country has profited more from Chavez’s largess than Cuba. He provides the island with 100,000 barrels of oil and refined petroleum products a day. That subsidy will translate into $2 billion this year, according to analysts at the Cuban Transition Project at the University of Miami. The oil shipments not only meet Cuba’s immediate requirements but have also provided a surplus that Castro has sold on the open market, generating the hard cash the island economy desperately needs.

Venezuela’s generosity, plus increasing investment from countries like China and Spain, enabled Castro to dial back the economic liberalization measures he put in place in the 1990s after the fall of his former sugar daddy, the Soviet Union. And the frenzy is gone from Cuba’s desperate post-Soviet pursuit of tourist cash. When the Bush administration imposed tougher economic sanctions on Cuba two years ago, Castro could basically ignore the pressure. He reasserted his authority over the island and laid the groundwork for the posthumous continuation of his regime. In 2002, for example, Castro spearheaded a petition drive to change the Cuban constitution to declare the socialist revolution “untouchable.” He also purged pro-reform ministers from the government.

Odds are that a post-Fidel Cuba will adopt some of the trappings of a free-market economy. But Chavez will be a force for instituting as little change as possible. If the Castro brothers pass from the scene and leaders more open to economic reform take over, they may want to be circumspect about economic decentralization, lest they jeopardize the Venezuelan bonanza. “Chavez could say, ‘If you change your ways, I’ll stop delivering oil,’” says Jorge R. Piqsn, a senior research associate at the University of Miami. “That’s a trump card, because without Venezuelan oil the system would collapse.”

Some of Chavez’s eagerness to keep things as they are in Cuba is due to his strong relationship with Castro. The Venezuelan received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Havana in 1995, shortly after he had been released from jail after masterminding a failed coup in 1992. Chavez has named his own brother Adan ambassador to Havana, and he makes frequent visits to the island. Plus, the Venezuelan seems to look on Castro as a role model. He’s hoping to emulate the Cuban’s long tenure in power; Chavez recently floated the possibility of staying in office until 2031.

Still, it’s not just for sentimental reasons that Chavez would resist changes in Cuban governance. His campaign to see more leftist leaders emerge in Latin America is dependent on the Castro regime. In exchange for oil, Castro has dispatched tens of thousands of doctors to Venezuela and around Latin America to provide medical services in poor neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of patients have been shipped to Havana for eye operations as part of an “Operation Miracle” campaign. “Cuba has been providing the expertise in Chavez’s social service delivery,” says Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue. “If that is discontinued, it would undercut Chavez’s ambitions.”

The Venezuelan’s effort to see more anti-U.S. socialist leaders emerge in Latin America resembles Castro’s effort to spread the communist revolution in the 1960s. Chavez’s efforts have met with more success than his mentor’s, but there are limits to his influence. Chavez’s ally Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia last year, but the Venezuelan’s anointed candidates in Mexico and Peru came up short in their presidential bids, and they were hurt by anti-Chavez sentiment. Still, Chavez could see a boost to his image in the region if he does clash with the Bush administration over Cuba. “Chavez wants a confrontation with the United States,” says Amherst political scientist Javier Corrales. A 2005 Zogby poll found that 81 percent of Latin American elites disapprove of Bush’s job performance. A lot of Chavez’s appeal stems from whom he has fingered as his nemesis. If the Bush administration does end up very publicly intervening in Cuba, it wouldn’t just generate a storm of resentment in Latin America. It would also show, again, how lucky Chavez has been in his enemies.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

This suggests the Chinese were chumps. But while it may have
made concessions to the United States, China stands to gain
substantial economic benefits if it can swing WTO
membership. And it’s enough to make fashion behemoths like
Nike, Liz Claiborne, the Gap and the Limited salivate, as
well.

Experts believe that China, as a poor, labor-rich country grappling with an official
unemployment rate of 17 percent, will
probably launch a proliferation of sweatshops as a way of
pulling the country out of its economic malaise — its
growth rate has declined every year for the past seven and
is expected to drop again this year. “In economic terms,”
says Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, gaining access to the world textile market
“would be the single greatest benefit.”

Right now, China’s lack of WTO credentials hems in its
potential as a textile powerhouse. Look closer at your
clothing: You won’t find many with “Made in China”
tags. That’s because textile trade has been governed by the
Multi Fiber Arrangement, a Byzantine bilateral quota
specifying which garments individual countries can export.

Ever wonder why you own a T-shirt bearing the label “Made in
the United Arab Emirates”? Some companies set up their manufacturing
in small countries not yet subject to quotas. Once found out,
they are subject to a quota, too. According to Marcus Nolan
of the Institute for International Economics, the down vests
that were all the rage about 15 years ago (and popularized
by Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”) were the
handiwork of a Thai manufacturer who creatively circumvented
his country’s quota on nylon jackets … by cutting off the
sleeves.

In 1995, with the creation of the WTO, member countries
passed the agreement on textiles and clothing, which
stipulated that quotas would be phased out by 2005, although
there will still be tariffs on garments. Of course, without
WTO membership, China has been locked out of the deal
completely. And its outsider status was a distinct
disadvantage when the United States decided on China’s
garment export quota.

“China is a very dominant supplier in our market,” says an
official at the United States Trade Representative office.
“The quotas we negotiated with them were made with an eye to
that status.”

Translation: The Chinese were screwed, because as the United
States allowed WTO countries to ship more textiles into the
United States, it compensated for the influx of goods by
clamping down on the Chinese. Last year, according to the
official at USTR, WTO members saw their quota increase
by 9 percent. The Chinese allowance inched up a paltry 0.9
percent.

Not surprisingly, China was anxious to get in on the MFA as
soon as possible. While unions pressured U.S. negotiators
to insist that the Chinese have their quotas phased out over
10 years, the Chinese held firm.

“It’s something else the U.S. caved in on,” says Mark
Levinson, policy director of the Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). “Apparently, it
was a deal breaker for the Chinese.” U.S. officials did
secure a provision, however, that would allow the United
States to impose quotas within four years of the phase out,
if there is a “surge” of Chinese garment exports.

There is every reason to think such a surge will occur, once
the Chinese officially join the WTO and are allowed to have
their quotas phased out. The International Trade Commission
predicted last year that China’s share of the U.S. apparel
market would increase from 18 percent to 30 percent. Ann
Hoffman, legislative director at UNITE, calls that a
conservative estimate. “They always underestimate the
damage from trade agreements,” she says.

A good indicator of the growth potential for China in
textiles is the amount of toys and shoes it ships to the
United States every year. Neither of those products are
subject to quotas, and they are the country’s two leading
exports to the United States. According to the Global
Exchange, the nonprofit organization that monitors trade and
human rights, about 80 percent of all toys in this country
come from China.

One result of China’s potential growth in textiles will be
cheap T-shirts and Capri pants for American consumers.
Prices are already low — apparel prices have fallen about 1
percent a year throughout most of the ’90s, and last year the
drop was even steeper. Another consequence will be fewer
textile jobs in the United States — UNITE is predicting a
loss of 15,000 jobs a year.

The specter of unemployment looms much larger in Southeast
Asian countries, however. Workers in countries like Sri
Lanka, Malaysia and the Philippines don’t pull down hefty
paychecks, but they do earn more than Chinese laborers.

Plus, with the authoritarian Chinese leadership,
businesses don’t run the risks of strikes or demands for
health insurance. As a result, companies are expected to
relocate a chunk of their business from those other
countries to China.

So while American consumers will reap the benefits of
China’s emergence as a major textile player in the form of
$4.99 T-shirts, garment workers in countries ranging from
Sri Lanka to the United States could pay a steep price.

Funny lady Rosie O’Donnell emceed the rally, but the comedic mien she radiates on her television talk show was not on display Sunday. O’Donnell was all business and outrage as she described the obstacles attendees would have to overcome to see their anti-gun-violence agenda passed into law.

“The NRA [National Rifle Association] is buying votes with blood money,” O’Donnell lectured sternly. But, she added, the organization had “better get used to us. We will not go away.”

O’Donnell made gun violence a personal cause after the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., last year, when she asked female viewers to take guns from their husbands and make their homes gun-free. In doing so, she became a de facto leader of the gun control movement, a potent antidote to National Rifle Association helmsman Charlton Heston. And in Washington on Sunday, she found a receptive audience.

The march was the brainchild of Donna Dees-Thomases, a part-time public relations consultant at CBS and mother of two who was spurred to action after hearing about the nursery school shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., last year.

Dees-Thomases and the other rally coordinators say they do not advocate an outright ban on handguns. Instead, the often-repeated line of the day was “licensing and registration” — in other words, forcing gun owners to comply with the same requirements drivers do, an analogy that was evoked in many speeches. Specifically, licensing would force gun purchasers to complete a safety course and undergo a background check to ensure they didn’t have a criminal record and were of
legal age. The registration restrictions would also require a gun seller to check the purchaser’s license and register the gun’s serial number.

O’Donnell and other speakers pointed to recent examples of other activists who have successfully taken on entrenched interests. Mothers Against Drunk Driving led efforts to tighten drunken-driving laws across the country, and a series of state lawsuits extracted concessions of negligence and massive settlements from the tobacco industry. “People said tobacco was undefeatable,” said O’Donnell. “They were wrong.”

O’Donnell was joined onstage by a parade of people who had been affected by high-profile cases of gun violence. Dawn Anna, the mother of Lauren Townsend, who
was killed in the Columbine massacre, grew tearful when she addressed the crowd. “Politicians, take heed,” Anna said. “We are watching you. The hands that rock the cradle rule the world.”

Patricia McQueen, whose daughter, Kayla Rolland, was shot in February by a fellow first-grade classmate in Flint, Mich., gave a short, emotional speech. “The gun that killed my daughter in her classroom was one that could be loaded by a 6-year-old, carried by a 6-year-old and fired by a 6-year-old,” she said.

Jim Brady, former press secretary to Ronald Reagan — who along with his wife, Sarah, has been a vigorous champion of gun control since he was seriously injured in an attempt on the former president’s life in 1981 — spoke of the need to “change
the firearms laws, or the lawmakers.” Three mothers of kindergartners who were killed in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996 spoke of their successful push to pass a handgun ban in the wake of that massacre.

The march also attracted its share of celebrities and high-profile politicians. Susan Sarandon, Melissa Etheridge, Melissa Manchester, Courtney Love and Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend all took the stage.

Sarandon argued for mandatory trigger locks, noting that it is easier to operate a gun than remove a childproof top from a bottle of Tylenol. She and most of the speakers also hammered home the message that the ultimate success of the rally would depend on the action attendees took in their communities. In addition to voting, speaker after speaker urged marchers to write their representatives, help organize gun
buybacks and vote.

“I’m not going to let Jesse Helms outdo me!” Children’s
Defense Fund president Marion Wright Edelman yelled to the crowd.

Rep. Jarrold Nadler, D-N.Y., reiterated that theme when he spoke separately with reporters. The march would get congressional representatives’ attention, he said, but what would make a real difference would be the pressure attendees exerted in their home districts. And while Congress has shied away from imposing even mild gun restrictions, such as closing the
“gun show loophole” of the Brady Bill’s background checks, Nadler said he expected registration and licensing requirements would be passed within five years. “A critical mass is developing,” he said. “It’s like what MADD
did — they forced the laws to be passed. The same thing will happen with guns.”

The audience seemed hungry for this optimism. All the women I spoke to gave the same reason for turning up: They were “fed up” with gun violence that claims the lives of 12 children a day (a statistic cited often throughout the day), and they wanted to do something about it.

“I’m scared to go to work,” said Denise Loiselle of Seminole, Fla., who was accompanied by her college-age daughter. “And I’ve had enough. This is a cause that is worth driving 24 hours for.”

Other women spoke of the losses their families had suffered because of gun violence. “My four grandchildren are going to grow up without a father,” said Charlotte Gray, whose 30-year-old son was killed in a random shooting in Washington in 1999. “Something needs to be done. I don’t want another mother to go through what I’ve been through.”

Albuquerque, N.M., native Joan Shirley, whose son was shot dead along with two friends by an unknown assailant last year, said the loss galvanized her to activism. “I’m embarrassed to say I was one of those people who thought that it wouldn’t happen to me,” she said. “I’m particularly touched by those
who are here who haven’t lost anyone to violence, people who are here to help support the cause.”

Help the cause and, perhaps in a few cases, also catch 15 seconds of fame. When one mother spotted a local television camera she hissed to her daughter: “Emily, pick up your sign!”

The crowd also had its share of hecklers. A man decked out in colonial garb, who would give his name only as “Citizen,” carried a sign proclaiming “the right to keep and bear arms must never be licensed.” “What are you going to
do if he breaks down the door at night?” he yelled out to no one in particular. “Fight him off with a golf club?”

But for the most part, the tone of the rally had all the gravity of maternity. Anna Quindlen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, riffed on the mother theme in her address to the crowd. As a mother, she said, she had put latches on kitchen cabinets and had spoken to her children about how to handle the pressures to have sex and take drugs.

“We’ve worked 24/7 to keep them safe,” she said. “We want moderate, sensible laws that keep them safe.” And to those who ask why those laws are necessary, Quindlen offered the same response she said she often gives to her three children: “Because I said so.”

In one of the day’s more poignant moments, pop star Courtney Love reminded the audience that the leading cause of gun deaths is suicide, a fact that her late husband, Kurt Cobain, who killed himself with a shotgun, has come to symbolize. Choked up and holding back tears, Love called for background checks that would include the mental health of gun purchasers and expressed her sadness over the copycat deaths her husband’s suicide inspired.

Sister act

By Salon News Staff [May 14, 2000]

In the shadow of the Washington monument, just a few hundred yards from the
750,000 mothers gathered to demand stronger gun control measures, several
hundred people converged at a rambunctious counterprotest dubbed “Second
Amendment
Sisters — A Celebration of Life.” The event, the inverse of that
led by Rosie O’Donnell in front of the Capitol, offered some of
the day’s most colorful moments and signage.

Second Amendment Sisters founder Kimberly Watson said the event grew out of
postings on the Free Republic Web site by like-minded women, who were
offended at the
self-righteousness of the Million Mom March’s message and wanted to stage a
counterprotest. “Just a few weeks ago, I was a mom. Now, I’m a Second
Amendment Sister,” she told the audience.

Like Free Republic itself, the protest drew a diverse
crowd united in its distrust of government and loathing of President
Clinton, whose impeachment was regularly invoked at the event. The group
even organized its own dueling march down Constitution Avenue, which, packed
with kiddies and strollers, offered a diminutive mirror image of the day’s
bigger, better-publicized event.

Speakers included Texas State Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, who witnessed the
murder of her parents and 21 others in the 1991 massacre at Luby’s Cafeteria
in Killeen, Texas; Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, who found a way
to tie the Second Amendment to President Clinton’s sexual
improprieties by implying that
Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Gennifer Flowers and
Clinton’s other women could have
warded off his advances had they only brandished weapons; and Yale Law
School scholar and “More Guns, Less Crime” author John Lott.

Gratia Hupp recalled her parents’ murder and said that her only sorrow
was that the handgun she could have used to save them was a 100 yards away
in her car, instead of in her purse, when she needed it.

Does Gratia Hupp
harbor any contempt or hatred for George Hennard, the gunman who killed her
parents? No, she told the crowd. “You don’t get mad at a rabid dog; you
shoot it.” To Gratia Hupp, the calls by the Million Mom March organizers for
mandatory gun registration are just a precursor to outright confiscation, a
first tile in what would surely result in a domino effect. “I will not
register my gun,” she told the crowd to huge applause.

When asked by Salon how she felt about the demand of the moms on the other
side of the National Mall for mandatory child safety locks on guns, Gratia
Hupp said, “Kids jump in buckets every day and drown — why don’t we put lid
locks on them?” She also noted that “a large number of kids are killed by
dressers falling on them,” but offered no statistics to back up the
statement. She also said, “More kids are killed accidentally in cars. Why
don’t we put helmets on kids in cars?” When the reporter reminded Gratia
Hupp that many states have enacted tough seat belt laws to reduce the death
toll from automobile accidents, she got angry and, in a thick “Don’t mess
with Texas” accent, offered, “I’m not even gonna go down that road with
you.”

Judicial Watch’s Klayman provided a different take on protective armor: “If
the president wants a trigger lock, have him install it on his zipper,”
Klayman said from the stage. Evoking more illustrious times for his
organization, Klayman also suggested that “Juanita Broaddrick wouldn’t have
been raped if she had had a gun.”

As at the Million Mom March, where speeches were heavy with statistics, the
speakers at the Second Amendment Sisters event event offered a few of their
own:

But as the candidacies of both Gore and Republican front-runner George W. Bush indicate, being the annointed candidate of the establishment is no guarantee of smooth political sailing. Gore faced an early, well-financed challenge from Bill Bradley, though Gore seems to have regained momentum after victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the Bradley surge is indicative of Gore’s flaws as a candidate.

He’s had trouble connecting with voters. For most of last year his campaign was a Washington-centric operation that spent money hand over fist and seemed to regard the vice president’s ascension as a foregone conclusion. The media had a field day writing about Gore’s wooden presence and the shifting chairs on his campaign deck. As Melinda Henneberger put it in the New York Times, “Most of the press about Gore on the stump could run under the headline, ‘Stiff Man Still Stiff.’”

Gore is a scion of Washington, raised in the city’s most powerful circles. The second child and only son of Sen. Albert Gore and his wife, Pauline, he prepped at the tony St. Albans high school and soaked up the words of the Fulbrights, Cliffords and Alsops at his parents’ cocktail parties. Gore did spend time in Tennessee. Each summer he decamped to the family’s farm, where his father put him to work in the fields with the hired hands. Still, Gore was not the product of rural Tennessee life his campaign video would have you believe. As David Halberstam, who covered Gore’s father in the Senate, said, “Gore is a prince of American politics.”

Harvard came after St. Albans, and in 1969 the newly minted graduate faced a wrenching quandary over whether to serve in Vietnam to help save his father’s political career. Gore’s father, an outspoken critic of the war in a conservative state, was mired in a difficult reelection bid. Al Jr. was an entrenched opponent of the war himself, but he thought that skirting duty could tip the scales in his father’s election (not to mention hurt his prospects in his own future campaigns). Gore ultimately enlisted, and appeared in a TV commercial where his dad told him: “Son, always love your country.”

Albert Gore Sr. lost the election, and his son went off to war.

Gore was so embittered by the experience that when he returned to the United States he insisted he wanted to steer clear of politics. He enrolled in divinity school and began writing for the Nashville Tennessean. By this point he was married to his high school sweetheart, Tipper Aitcheson, and they had the first of four children in 1973. Gore has said in interviews that his days as a hack were some of the happiest of his life. But when the local congressional seat opened up in 1976, Gore jumped into the political fray. He won the election handily, as he would in his next three House bids and two Senate elections in 1984 and 1990.

From the beginning, Gore stood apart from his House colleagues. “He wasn’t intimated by the institution,” says Roy Neel, a former Gore staffer. “He hit the ground running, and that helped him make his reputation early.” While the Tennessee lawmaker was respected by his peers, he never insinuated himself into the Hill’s cliques. Rather than achieve national prominence by scaling the rungs of the Democratic leadership, Gore catapulted into the spotlight by developing an expertise in recondite, technical issues such as defense, information technology and the environment. After his years in a newsroom, Gore had a good feel for how to attract media attention to his work. His subcommittees held more hearings than anyone else’s, and he racked up press clips like few junior congressmen.

In a town where everyone is in a hurry, Gore seemed to be in overdrive. In 1988, at the age of 39, he launched his first presidential bid. It quickly became apparent that the Tennessee senator didn’t have qualms about going for the political jugular. It was Gore who first brought up Willie Horton in the Democratic primaries. Horton was a black convicted murderer who was given a furlough under a program supported by then-Massachusettes Gov. Michael Dukakis. While Horton was on furlough he raped a Maryland woman. The Republicans later wielded the racism-tinged issue against Dukakis in the general election.

Gore also hammered on Jesse Jackson’s lack of political credentials with enthusiasm. His aggressive candidacy, however, didn’t draw crowds. Despite Super Tuesday wins in the South, it became obvious Gore wasn’t going to capture the nomination. His withdrawal from the race was his first, and only, political defeat.

Gore was reportedly galled by the setback, but the real seismic shift in his life was yet to come. In 1989, Gore’s 6-year-old son Albert was hit by a car and nearly died. The accident prompted an intense period of introspection for Gore. The lifelong workaholic cleared his calendar for months to care for his son. He also embarked on one of the gutsier moves of his political career. In his parents’ Capitol Hill apartment, he penned “Earth in the Balance,” a controversial call to arms that employed his own spiritual struggle as a metaphor for man’s degradation of the environment.

Gore wasn’t conservative in his rhetoric or proposed solutions. He recommended eliminating the internal-combustion engine within 25 years and asserted that the environment should be the central organizing principle for civilization. While Republican strategists have delighted in combing Gore’s fevered prose for potentially embarrassing assertions, Gore hasn’t distanced himself from his jeremiad. “There is nothing in the book that I would write differently today,” he said in a phone interview. “Or rather, there is nothing in the book that causes me any particular discomfort. I’m sure I would write things differently because I’m older now.”

In 1991, Gore sidestepped another presidential campaign. It was too soon after Albert’s accident, he said, and his family needed him. His decision opened the door for another baby boomer Southern politician, and a year later, Gore was criss-crossing the country by bus, campaigning as Bill Clinton’s running mate.

Unlike most vice presidents, Gore has amassed a solid track record in his White House years. His first major project — reinventing government, or REGO — was one of the administration’s few successes in its first two years. Gore’s biggest REGO accomplishment was cutting the federal bureaucracy down to the smallest it’s been since the Kennedy administration.

Some critics, however, point out that most of the reductions were accomplished through voluntary buyouts. Workers were offered a chunk of cash to leave, regardless of their job performance. Obviously, more competent workers were in a better position to find work in the public sector, and they were more apt to jump ship. Critics charged that on Gore’s watch, the government became smaller without becoming any smarter. Still, after the health-care fiasco, REGO’s emphasis on a lean, more efficient government was a harbinger of the centrist tone the administration would soon adopt.

Gore also became an important voice in foreign policy, frequently urging the president to flex U.S. muscle abroad. He argued for early intervention in Bosnia and Haiti, for example. And Gore’s negotiations with former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin helped draw the Kosovo crisis to a close last year.

The vice president stayed true to his green roots in the White House, prodding the president to propose pro-environmental initiatives. Clinton was hardly known as a green champion in his five-term stint as governor of Arkansas, but environmentalists generally give the administration high marks for designating swaths of land as national monuments, instituting tougher limits on automobile pollution and placing dyed-in-the-wool greenies in top positions. Green activists also praise Gore for jetting to Kyoto, Japan, to save the fraying global climate change negotiations in 1997, even though most regard the resulting treaty as inadequate.

Gore’s first real misstep in the Clinton administration didn’t have to do with his policy role, but his overzealousness as a fund-raiser. The Republican rout of 1994 spooked the administration, and the White House fund-raising machine began operating at full throttle. The vice president was knee deep in a money-soliciting operation, an issue that haunts his presidential campaign.

Gore gave conflicting accounts about his participation in a Buddhist-temple fund-raiser where he apparently collected checks from monastics. In 1997 he defended calling donors from the White House with the infamous assertion that “no controlling legal authority” prohibited the practice. The unfortunate trope, which Gore repeated seven times in a hastily called press conference, made the vice president look like an old-style, machine-sanctioned pol.

To Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, the fall-out from Gore’s fund-raising was unsurprising, and perhaps overdue. “Gore got a pass until 1996,” he says. “He’s always had this image of a wonky idealist, or squeaky-clean Eagle Scout. But he was raising tons of money in 1988. There really was a dichotomy between his image and reality. He was always a pol.”

That characterization flies in the face of Gore’s desire to be seen as more noble, visionary and pure than other political leaders. His book is a virtual paean to idealistic, and principled, political decisionmaking. But there is an obvious tension between Gore’s idealism and political pragmatism. In his book, Gore declared he had “become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously.”

He mounts a strong case against poll- and sound bite-driven candidacies. But he is waging precisely that sort of campaign. And while most environmentalists are pleased with Gore’s green record, they note he has soft-peddled the issue on the hustings. Gore declared in his book that the environment should be the central organizing principle of civilization. He hasn’t even made it the central organizing principle of his campaign.

It’s not just the breach between his book’s lofty pronouncements and his behavior on the stump that make it hard to pinpoint where the vice president’s loyalties lie. In some of his more high-profile speeches, Gore has come off as opportunistic. For example, at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Gore spoke about his son’s accident, at one point comparing Albert’s recovery to the resurrection of the Democratic Party. Some observers accused the candidate of trading on the near-tragedy to further his political ambitions.

He attracted similar criticism in 1996 when his keynote address focused on the death of his sister Nancy from lung cancer. Gore used the story to segue into an argument for a tougher line against tobacco companies. But media types quickly pointed out that the vice president had thrown out some conciliatory lines to Big Tobacco in his 1988 presidential campaign, four years after his sister’s death. Highlighting an issue on which he had a mixed record was just another example of Gore’s political tin ear, some opined.

But if the veep can be awkward on the stump, he’s still regarded as a well-versed and competent policy maker. Gore’s occasionally flat-footed campaign and leaden public presence may push Americans into the arms of a more charismatic candidate. But if the public’s choice of its next president hinges on the candidates’ politics and record, the man who was groomed for the presidency since birth could ultimately realize the ambitions his father harbored for him.

As a presidential candidate, however, Gore has displayed little of the fervor found in “Earth.” The vice president has pounded issues like health care and education on the hustings; the environment, in contrast, has received short shrift. Instead of warning about the perils of global warming, the vice president’s green pronouncements have essentially focused on “livability” issues like urban sprawl. The idea is to reach out to suburban swing voters who are sick of brutal traffic congestion and the eyesore of strip malls.

Implicit in Gore’s strategy is that he doesn’t have to talk about environmental issues to be the environmental candidate. In fact, there is a potential downside to highlighting a green agenda. As Arlie Shardt, head of the nonprofit Environmental Media Services and a former Gore press secretary, puts it, “[Gore's advisors] don’t want him to be tagged as a one-issue politician.” Memories of Gore’s 1988 presidential run surely loom large over the 2000 campaign’s strategy. In that race, the Tennessee senator beat the drum on environmental issues — and reaped little political payoff. Columnist George Will sneered at Gore’s “consuming interest in issues that are, in the eyes of the electorate, not even peripheral.” And after Gore gave an address on ozone depletion in a presidential primary debate, Jesse Jackson turned to the audience and observed, “Sen. Gore has just explained to us why he should be our national chemist.” Why go green and risk that kind of ridicule?

But while environmentalists don’t oppose putting lighter, yuppie-centric issues like growth management on the campaign agenda, they don’t appreciate the campaign’s instinct to address green issues through the back door. Ultimately, they feel taken for granted. “We need a stronger articulation of the top line goal,” says Deb Callahan of the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). “Gore is defined by global warming and he wrote an impressive book on it. He should step forward and be a strong public proponent.”

So activists are trying their best to keep the vice president’s feet to the fire. Bill Bradley’s presence in the primaries puts the green lobby in an enviable position, because he has solid environmental bona fides, too. The League of Conservation Voters gave the former New Jersey legislator an 84 percent approval rating on his voting on environmental issues while in the Senate, compared to 64 percent for Gore. (If you factor in Gore’s absences during 1988 and 1992, however, the margin narrows considerably.)

Others simply refuse to pick a favorite. “I compare Gore and Bradley to Joe Montana and John Elway,” says Dan Weiss of the Sierra Club. “You’d want either on your team.”

Friends of the Earth (FOE) went a step further — they endorsed Bradley over Gore this fall. “Bradley had the better legislative record,” explains FOE president Brett Blackwelder. “We were also disillusioned with Gore’s failure as the environmental spokesperson of this administration.” Most green groups say FOE’s endorsement was premature, but also they see the political benefits in playing hard to get. “What the Friends of the Earth endorsement said is, ‘You cannot take this constituency for granted,’” says Deb Callahan of the LCV. “Environmentalists are notorious for not accepting half a loaf.”

You could argue that the administration’s green policy initiatives amount to more than half a loaf. Gore, for example, risked political capital when he flew to Kyoto over the howls of his political advisors to save the 1997 global climate change negotiations. The administration also helped pass the California Desert Protection Act, which covers more public land than any other conservation law.

In the wake of Friends of the Earth’s diss of the vice president, the White House and the vice president have hewed to an even greener agenda. The Forest Service proposed prohibiting road building in 40 million acres of the nation’s forests, effectively saving trees from becoming paper pulp. The Environmental Protection Agency issued rules that will require cleaner gasoline and mandate that sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) meet the same emissions standards as cars. Clinton designated three new national monuments, protecting millions of acres of land.

And Gore declared he would ban any new offshore drilling for oil and gas along the California and Florida coasts. FOE’s president Blackwelder says that pressuring Gore was a big factor behind the Bradley endorsement. “We did this at a point when it could make a difference,” he said. “It helped leverage several important announcements.”

That claim makes the administration apoplectic. The new initiatives are part of the effort to burnish Clinton’s legacy, they say, and have been in the works for a long time. “To suggest that [the two White House] actions were in some way in response to Friends of the Earth’s endorsement is laughable, if not ludicrous,” says a White House official. “They are the culmination of processes that have been under way for a long time. And they are in keeping with the substance and spirit of this administration’s policies.” Still, some green activists speculate that the timing of the initiatives was more than a coincidence.

“I think [Friends of the Earth's endorsement] has made a difference,” says Arlie Shardt. The Gore campaign is probably itching to lock up the support of environmentalists. The vice president has been identified with the movement for years, and their distance could prove an embarrassment for him. But as long as Bradley is in the race, an endorsement is unlikely to come anytime soon. By holding back, they are in a position to pressure Gore to step up his advocacy of green issues and extract more concessions from his campaign and possibly the administration.

It’s a smart strategy, because left to its own devices, the Gore campaign would probably continue to soft-peddle the vice president’s signature issue. And that could ultimately be a detriment not only for green politics, but Gore’s own presidential bid. As Callahan points out, the environment is an important issue for 18-to-25-year-olds and suburban women. “If you need to reach out and get swing votes,” she says, “this is an issue that can motivate.”

And with the economy booming, now is as good a time as ever to tackle the vexing issues of climate change and pollution. Gore wrote self-critically in “Earth in the Balance” that he was “impatient with my tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously.” Now is his chance to translate those printed words into action, and lead on the issue he’s tried to claim as his own.