WASHINGTON-Is Vice President Gore-paralyzed by prolonged industry confrontations and walloped by worsening Clinton-administration scandals-at risk of becoming a marginal player in a myriad of high-stakes, high-tech policy debates central to U.S. global competitiveness and national security in the next century?
Any diminished influence and leadership on U.S. high-tech policy, while potentially harmful to Gore and industry alike, is the least of the vice president’s problems right now.
Image concerns
Besides the “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky, which has Gore in the awkward position of having to support his boss without looking like he condones the president’s behavior, a more immediate and pressing concern for the vice president is a new investigation into possible campaign fund-raising violations that Attorney General Janet Reno launched last week.
The Clinton-Lewinsky matter presents a separate kind of challenge for Gore, a high-tech heavyweight with limited public agility who has long sported a clean-cut, Boy-Scout image. Indeed, it will be a high-wire act for Gore, given that the two Southern pols-he and Clinton-are professionally and personally close.
“I am proud of him because he is a great president” and “am honored to have him as a friend,” Gore declared following Clinton’s Lewinsky speech from some 5,000 miles away on a previously scheduled vacation with wife, Tipper, in Hawaii.
Yet Gore, too, is under the microscope. It has not helped the vice president that various investigations have surrounded personal and political friends, like ’96 re-election campaign manager Peter Knight and Tennessee developer Franklin Haney-both key figures under investigation in the Portals lease probe.
Knight, reportedly now on fund-raising damage control for Gore, has been tied to two other Justice Department probes.
High-tech focus fading
Opinions differ over why Gore’s visibility on high-tech has seemingly faded in recent years.
“He’s not going to be engaging in FCC rule makings,” said Greg Simon, a telecom lobbyist and former domestic policy adviser to Gore.
Simon said Gore’s job early on was to lay out a national vision and the intellectual predicate for telecom reform, encryption and other pressing high-tech issues and then let others write and enforce the rules.
Many of today’s high-tech issues, according to Simon, do not lend themselves to the kind of weekly meetings Gore had with Baby Bell and long-distance executives during the telecom debate in 1995.
Like other Gore associates, Simon got pulled into controversy as a result of allegations-now under an independent counsel investigation-that former White House aide Alexis Herman, before becoming labor secretary, cashed in on influence peddling that helped Mobile Communications Holdings Inc. secure a global satellite phone license from the Federal Communications Commission last year. Simon, Herman and MCHI have denied any wrongdoing.
For sure, Gore’s portfolio has expanded since 1993 to include government reform, international monetary policy, environmental protection, job training and other programs. The major responsibilities given by Clinton to Gore have had the added benefit of grooming him for president
As such, it is likely that-by design-Gore will speak increasingly on issues important to the everyday lives of citizens, and less on high-tech, as the 2000 presidential campaign approaches.
“I think the vice president’s [high-tech] visibility has been the same,” said Christopher Lehane, a Gore spokesman. “It’s important to him, important to America and important to America’s future.”
Jeffrey Eisenach, president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank closely aligned with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), said Gore’s high-tech vision is all well and good, but at some point, specifics become important.
“Certainly, in the industry at large, his influence has waned,” said Eisenach from the group’s Aspen, Colo., conference last week, “because he’s wrong on the issues.” Gore, according to Eisenach, has put too much emphasis on government oversight and too little faith in the free market.
Despite what some see as his lower public profile on high-tech matters, Gore came forward in the past 12 months with pronouncements on Y2K, online privacy, Internet safe havens for children and digital TV public-interest obligations.
What Gore’s defenders do not volunteer is that the rollout of next-generation TV, which is still somewhat iffy, was made possible by the give-away of spectrum valued at as much as $70 billion. The administration, to its credit, tried to make broadcasters pay for the airwaves just as the wireless industry was forced to buy digital spectrum.
But the mighty broadcasters, aided by cowed lawmakers, bested the administration. Now the best Gore can do is hope DTV is something more than a vast digital wasteland.
So, in reality, Gore is not completely out of the high-tech picture.
Delegated authority
Yet on many other mettlesome, high-tech issues gridlocked in controversy, delegated authority seems to be the order of the day.
Ira Magaziner, who with Hillary Rodham Clinton, is credited with the disastrous health-care reform initiative that nearly sunk Clinton in his first term, is the White House point man on electronic commerce.
Simon said it would be nice if Magaziner gave Gore a bit more credit for Internet policy.
Gore’s once-solid Silicon Valley base, in electoral-vote-rich (54) California, reportedly is eroding because of differences between the administration and the computer industry on encryption, antitrust and immigration policies.
White-House encryption policy, under fire by Congress and still a mess after all these years, is largely the domain of the Commerce Department-which unsurprisingly is more sympathetic to industry than others in the administration. Gore’s voice in the encryption debate seems to have been lost.
High-tech backlash
Given the scandal-racked Democratic White House and the mighty thunderbolts coming from Republicans and the Justice Department, Gore is at once a Clinton resignation (or impeachment) away from the Oval Office and a campaign fund-raising probe away from being in political no-man’s land.
It’s a political paradox of presidential magnitude. The nation and world are watching. U.S. high-tech policy, meantime, seems to have wandered wayward, deferred to a handful of government officials lacking cohesive direction from the top.
Time was when Gore commanded large audiences and flashy headlines with a mere utterance about the “digital revolution.” Now, with all the distractions, Gore increasingly has the appearance of being on the shoulder of the information superhighway-a virtual outsider in cyberspace.
Worse yet, high-tech issues like year-2000 computer readiness and school Internet connections-which Gore might like to exploit in a presidential run-are working against him.
Witness the infamous “Gore tax” that Republicans have hung on the vice president as a result of FCC implementation of the universal-service mandate in the telecom act the GOP Congress overwhelmingly passed in 1996.
Wireless carriers welcome the universal-service controversy, hoping their concerns about payment obligations will be heard above the din of congressional criticism.
FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, for his part, has become a big casualty of the schools and libraries Internet fiasco. When Congress and others accused Kennard of putting schools and libraries ahead of poor and rural citizens, Gore-who has long promised to wire every school, library and hospital to the Internet by 2000-provided next to no political cover for his fellow Democrat.
Overall, the silence from the White house has been deafening i
n response to the sound and fury from Congress over the FCC’s management of the ’96 telecom law.
Then there is the Y2K doomsday prophetized by nays
ayers and lawmakers alike. Gore is said to be taking a keen interest behind the scenes in Y2K. Little wonder, some say; there is a presidential race that year. Taking a low profile is probably wise, given that Y2K could cut either way politically for the president-in-waiting.
“I think what he’s found some of these issues bite hard when you get into them,” said former Senate Commerce Committee chairman Larry Pressler (R-S.D.).
Moreover, Pressler, now a telecom lobbyist, said it’s hard to parlay telecom issues into votes. Pressler knows. He lost his re-election bid the same year Clinton signed the 1996 telecom bill.
3G debate
On third-generation wireless technology, a huge global telecom issue with billions upon billions of dollars at stake, Gore’s staff has shown increased interest as of late.
The vice president’s domestic policy adviser, David Beier, continues to meet with wireless lobbyists on 3G.
Beier has brought in the National Economic Council’s Tom Khalil and Dorothy Robyn to mull over the 3G issue.
At the end of the day, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and State Department global telecom head Vonya McCann, not the vice president, will be speaking the loudest on U.S. 3G policy.
“I think he is in a cautious stage of his political career,” said Pressler, who said he counts Gore-a former colleague in Congress-as a friend.
Some suggest Gore’s high-tech retreat has less to do with the vice president and more to do with his staff. Beier, though well schooled in health care, high-tech and law-enforcement policies, is said to be less of an activist on telecom issues than former Gore aides Simon, Michael Nelson and Donald Gips.
Background work
Nearly four years since the enactment of digital wiretap act, the administration finds itself disorganized and on the defensive in a battle with telecom carriers and manufacturers that rages on inside the Beltway, while law enforcement fights a new breed of terrorist who is highly mobile, technologically savvy and globally networked.
There, too, Gore is in the background, allowing Attorney General Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh to stumble along through one misstep after another.
As a backdrop to all this is the Clinton China policy, which Justice and congressional officials are probing to determine whether Communist China tried to influence U.S. elections and trade policy though illegal campaign contributions in the 1996 election cycle.
Investigators also want to know whether hefty legal political donations to Democrats caused the transfer of sensitive satellite technology to China, which has a massive emerging wireless telecom market.
While the administration has tended to side with law enforcement on the encryption and digital wiretap policies, a zealous trade policy drives a U.S.-Sino relationship that some critics say has comprised national security.
Gore, for his part, managed to avoid serious political trouble after an appearance at a Buddhist temple outside Los Angeles in 1996. The vice president initially characterized his visit as community outreach, but the event has since been determined to have involved fund raising. It seemed Gore dodged the bullet again after revelations surfaced earlier this year of his 45 campaign-solicitation calls from the White House in 1995 and 1996. The escape hatch was that the calls were supposedly for soft-party money. That is legal.
Now there could be evidence some money from Gore phone solicitations was funneled into the ’96 Clinton-Gore re-election
