Last Saturday I was at the Step It Up 2007 rally in Boston carrying a sign that said
Draft Al Gore
in 2007.
Accept no
substitutes.
When I showed it to Congressman Ed Markey after he spoke to the crowd, he raised his eyebrows and said "It could happen."
He was off to another event and didn't have time to discuss it, but here's what I think a draft would mean....
A draft is when a large number of citizens organize so effectively that they convince a reluctant candidate to enter an electoral contest.
Before the primaries in 1952, people across the country organized to persuade General Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Henry Cabot Lodge placed Eisenhower's name on the New Hampshire primary ballot and non-candidate Eisenhower beat Senator Taft. Ike then entered the presidential race, won the Republican nomination and went on to become President.
There are many more primaries now than there were then, and many more delegates are elected in primaries, so the nomination process is very different.
Much more recently, in 2004, there was a draft campaign for General Wesley Clark that persuaded him to get into the race in time to place himself on the primary ballots and campaign in the primary elections. Of course, General Clark won neither the nomination nor the presidency but he did help to keep alive the idea of a draft.
So there are two ways to go about drafting Al Gore. A Clark-style draft to convince Gore to run, and an Eisenhower-style draft to actually win delegates to go to the convention to support Gore in the Democratic Convention in Denver.
A Clark-style draft would need to convince Gore to enter the race in time to get on the ballot in the states with early primaries, by October or November. It would need to be organized state by state and would need to gather enough pledges of support to establish Gore as a favorite in each primary. The exact numbers needed would depend on the size of the state and on the expected numbers of voters in the Democratic primary, probably tens of thousands even in a small state like New Hampshire and several hundred thousand or a million in a large state like California.
An Eisenhower-style draft would be more ambitious and much more innovative. This would also need to be organized at the state level and to collect pledges of support. But in this kind of draft each state, or at least the states with early primaries, would find "favorite son" candidates to run in Gore's place. These candidates would pledge that the delegates they won would vote for Al Gore in the National Convention. The candidates would campaign for Gore's nomination based on his extensive record of speeches, statements and writings, including the book he has coming out next month, The Assault on Reason.
Before 1972, when the McGovern Commission reforms greatly increased the number of binding primaries, political leaders, governors and mayors frequently ran as "favorite sons." However these delegates' votes were pledged to the "favorite sons" and only moved to a national candidate as the result of negotiations before or at the convention.
There are good reasons to favor a "favorite son" draft for Gore.
- It would allow him to campaign for action on the climate crisis (and the Nobel Peace Prize) beyond the fall filing deadlines for primaries.
- It would put pressure on the declared candidates to take global warming and other issues that are attracting people to Gore much more seriously.
- Even if Gore decides not to run, a large contingent of Gore delegates at the convention would have negotiating power to influence the party platform and the nominee.
One type of draft could lead to the other. A strong "Favorite Son" candidate in one state could inspire candidates in other states where there are Gore for President pledge drives. And of course there would be nothing to prevent Gore from entering the race himself, as Eisenhower did, if the "Favorite Son" candidates do well enough in the early primaries.
But could it happen?
It is certainly not unrealistic to think that a well organized Draft Gore "Favorite Son" candidates could win large numbers of delegates. Without any kind of campaign, Gore was already favored by 25 percent of Democrats in California (in second place) in a recent poll and is polling second or third in several other states.
Nor is it far-fetched to think that courageous leaders who know and like Al Gore would step forward to campaign as "Favorite Sons" for Gore. Consider this statement from Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA, who, by the way, backed Bill Bradley in 2000):
"My horse is Al Gore. He was flat-footedly against the Iraq war from the beginning, advocates universal health insurance and was ahead of everybody on global warming. I think those issues are a winning platform."
I have no idea if Jim McDermott would run as a Gore surrogate in Washington, but he could certainly be asked, as could Congresspeople in other states, as could a few Senators. Would Russ Feingold run in Wisconsin? Harry Byrd in West Virginia? If not, there are State Senators and statewide office-holders who might step forward.
As Congressman Markey said, "It could happen."