Worse, he must move left (and right) at the same time. The Lieberman pick has only highlighted and exacerbated the weakness of Gore's appeal to the Democratic base. (It was no accident that in praising Gore at the convention, Clinton omitted his most significant political achievement -- defeating Ross Perot in a debate over NAFTA and helping the administration pass the Republican Congress' legislation on free trade.) In hindsight, Gore probably should have picked a vice presidential nominee with appeal to the left (Kerry or Gephardt), and then moved to the right himself. But he did not do this, and that means that he is the one who will have to move left in order to pacify and then energize his base, alienating the center in the process. This is the circle he cannot square between now and November.

Although character seems to be Gore's primary problem, it is unfair to see it entirely as a personal matter. For underlying and amplifying Gore's character problem is the character problem of the Democratic Party itself.

Ever since the McGovern campaign, the Democratic Party has been both in its heart and its organizational structure a party of the left. The McGovern reforms, for example, created the appalling quota system for convention delegates that ensures the party will overrepresent certain designated victim groups and, of course, the political left. Nothing could more perfectly encapsulate the party's reactionary attachment to the racial and political past than these quotas. They express an attachment to group identities, group politics and group rights that is strangely 19th century in its atmospherics, and that was roundly rejected by the American majority in the 1960s in the very cause of "civil rights" that party leftists never cease to invoke.

It is striking in this regard that Lieberman has been forced by party radicals to defend his support of a California initiative that outlaws government discrimination on the basis of race in order to win the imprimatur of the faithful.

For eight years, President Clinton was able to contain the problem posed by the Democratic Party's reactionary left by the sheer force of his mendacity and charm. He originally won the (misplaced) confidence of independents by a sharp attack on black racism and a public humiliation of Jesse Jackson, who at the time was the undisputed leader of this political faction. Once in office, he was able to humiliate family friend and African-American "civil rights" advocate Lani Guinier, and yet go on to win 90 percent support among African-Americans -- even being dubbed the "first black President" by Nobel Prize-winning author and leftist Toni Morrison.

But Al Gore doesn't come near having the personal skills to accomplish such unlikely feats. So Gore is in a box. If he moves left, he will alienate the crucial center. If he moves right, he will alienate the crucial base. His opponent, on the other hand, has already energized his base not least by showing them politically how to be invulnerable to the demonizing smears of their "liberal" antagonists. Better, he has captured the political center in the same way, by showing that Republicans are compassionate human beings, too.

All Bush has to do now to win is keep Al Gore in that box -- and he'll no doubt have Gore's help as he endeavors to do that.

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