I’m not sure any political piece I’ve ever written has whipped up quite the degree of feeling and emotion as the piece I wrote on Al Gore a couple days ago — at least in small world of Clintonites and Gorians. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this was because the piece itself was particularly well done, but rather because of the raw and barely healed-over wounds still lingering over that campaign which the article discussed.
As the piece described, there is really no end of the bitterness among many of the ex-staffers toward those who had what you’d call executive positions in the campaign. Particularly the marquee consultants. Whether their complaints are legitimate or not is another matter — about which I guess I’m ambivalent. But they are quite real.
That, however, only scratches the surface of all the rankled emotions swirling about among the alums of that campaign.
I spent much of the day hearing from different folks in the Gore and Clinton orbit and obviously as you might imagine lots of the people mentioned in the piece were not at all happy with it.
But one of the things that surprised me most was that one person quite close to the former vice-president actually liked the piece quite a bit, I’m told. As a friend who talked to this person today told me by email, the person in question also “believes that Gore was surrounded by the wrong people. Your piece made some pretty memorable points in that regards, stuff that only insiders know about.”
