If Vice President Al Gore secretly fears some Election Day avalanche, it was fitting that he was staring out at Mt. Rainier.
We were somewhere between Portland, Ore., and Everett, Wash., with that morning’s group of pool reporters sitting like mini-moguls in cushy, first class-like gray leather seats at the back of the vice presidential jet.
We had been offered orange juice in real glasses and food by a dark-jacketed steward. Covering a presidential campaign is fatiguing but short of working a coal mine. Travel, accommodations and ample supplies of food and alcohol are taken care of by others (though, of course, there’s a hefty price tag) and even luggage magically surfaces in your hotel room at each stop.
Gore, looking bright-eyed and quite buff in his tight-fitting, French-blue dress shirt, surfaced from the front and sought–a bit too hard, as is often the case–to be an informal, heartfelt Regular Guy.
He noted that if we looked out the windows on the right, we could see the genuinely lovely, snow-capped sight of 14,411-foot Rainier, which Gore climbed last year with his son, Albert.
He talked briefly about the trek before segueing into the essentials of his stump speech (“We need to balance the budget and give a middle-class tax cut and not squander the surplus on the top 1 percent . . . “). There were longtime Gore campaign reporters on the plane who repeat these essentials in their sleep, awaking in cold sweats inside dark hotel rooms and shouting, “I WANT TO FIGHT FOR YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Before us, resting a hand on a headrest as he stood ramrod straight was the unavoidable Gore: hard to penetrate, reflexively unnatural, so often conveying a lack of ease.
And, yet the connection to Rainier not only was not an accident, it also has inspired one of the kookiest sideshows–or maybe I should say slide-shows–in the history of presidential politics.
It all stems from the grand trek, which was replete with helmets and miner’s lamps for the final, post-midnight ascent.
Amid much secrecy Gore climbed the mountain with the substantial assistance of Jim Frush, an attorney-climber who heads the American Alpine Club in Seattle. There was also, as this was the second-ranking elected official for the Last Remaining Superpower, the Secret Service guys, who presumably boned up for this duty by reading back issues of Outside magazine and watching the Weather Channel with their fingers crossed.
Frush looks like a well-heeled Baby Boomer outdoorsman: tall, lanky and with brown hair a couple of inches longer than today’s fashion. You would expect him to ask if you have two tickets to a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion concert.
He is also an unbridled Gore partisan, which explains not only his presence on Air Force Two but also his accompanying Gore to several campaign spots with a slide projector in tow.
To understand the true oddity of this, be informed that the Gore climbing trek was a rather tightly held matter for many months. When word did leak of its having taken place, Gore was in no hurry to give details.
The man who had no second thoughts at the 1996 Democratic National Convention of exploiting his own sister’s passing due to lung cancer and bashing the tobacco industry while doing it, felt constrained about disclosing his impressive physical feat.
Then again, the fact that the Secret Service advance cadre turned back, amid awful weather high on the mountain, while Gore continued could be interpreted different ways. Some might see him as fearless, others as reckless.
Now, as his most fateful hour approaches, Gore last week brought along Frush. He was clearly desirous of telling all or at least a fair amount through Frush. That explained a world political first as the press plied its trade in a filing center following an airport rally in Everett.
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Gore aides began inviting reporters to a Frush slide show about the Gore trek. Most of the hard-bitten newsies looked as if they had been asked to drop their laptops and their critically important accounts of a B-plus stump speech inside an airplane hangar to see a Disney short subject.
There were few takers due to deadline pressures and what appeared to be modest interest. Frush himself popped into the filing center to make announcements about the imminent start of the show.
Ten minutes after his last appearance, the show was put off an hour. Genteel arm-twisting mixed with a certain sympathy felt by a few journalists for the 20-something campaign aides who were playing low-decibel carnival barkers. About 15 decided to exit the filing center and walk the 15 feet to the adjacent classroom.
I arrived very late, for the last image, one of Gore and son on the mountaintop. But that did not stop me from tracking down Frush during a Gore stop at a rally inside a college gym in Spokane, Wash., and wondering what in the world was the point.
“I had heard in ’98 that he had interest in doing this,” said Frush. “I asked why do you want to climb? He said `something inside me’ wanted to climb it. That made sense to me.”
Being a product of a New York City highrise, I could make so sense of this. But I listened for what in Frush’s mind, at least, is the link between Gore’s exploit and his being qualified to run the country.
Tipper Gore, Frush explained, had given Al a book on Mt. Rainier. He asked Frush about the difficulty of climbing it and the training regimen that would be needed. Making clear he wanted to keep the expedition private, Gore got Frush’s counsel about doings lot of aerobics, running and placing weights in a pack and climbing stairs.
“He asked what equipment was the most important, and I told him the mind. I’ve seen guys in tremendous shape but without the guts to deal with potentially dangerous, hostile environments,” Frush said.
The climb took three days and, Frush said, the weather was awful, with two big storms and whiteout conditions. A Secret Service advance team turned back and two Frush chums “were not positive” about the chances of making the top.
Gore said that if it could be done safely, he wanted to continue on what Frush, who has climbed Rainier about 20 times on six varied routes, called an extremely hard climb. “It was less a matter of being dangerous than miserable, with 20-degree temperature and bad winds.
Now to the alleged point.
“Being president of the U.S. is the most challenging job,” Frush said. “Climbing Mt. Rainier brings out the traits you need: perseverance, strength of character, grace under pressure, raw physical courage and teamwork.”
“I think there’s a direct correlation.” Frush said, clearly going beyond the theories of leadership from Plato, Nietzsche and dozens of historians such as Henry Steele Commager.
“It is an indicator of what kind of president he would be. It’s why I put my law practice on hold,” said Frush, who was initially drawn to Gore because of his environmental tract, “Earth in the Balance.”
“I don’t think there’s a better environmentalist. I have seen first hand how he relates to the environment. He sees it on a more spiritual level.
“George Bush is the Antichrist on environmental matters,” he said, as if one had any remaining doubt about Frush’s preferred candidate. “The guy wants to drill the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!”
Well, this environmental aside was complicating matters. I was more intrigued by the vision of Al Gore showing up at the inauguration on Jan. 20 wearing crampons.
Forget Social Security, taxes or education. When you go to vote, remember that Gore is the only candidate to scale Mt. Rainier–something that Sunday’s Tribune presidential endorsement of Bush surely kept from you.
Of course, Bush still has time to match Gore by Election Day.
The only problem is that, given his reputation for soft schedules, I assume he had to be tucked into his Neiman-Marcus tent each night at 9.