Al Gore served as the 45th vice president of the United States during the presidency of Bill Clinton from January 20, 1993, to January 20, 2001. Gore, a member of the Democratic Party who previously served as the junior U.S. senator representing Tennessee from 1985 to 1993, was selected as Clinton's running mate and took office following their victory in the 1992 presidential election over Republican incumbent president George H. W. Bush and vice president Dan Quayle. Four years later, in the 1996 presidential election, they defeated Republican nominees, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, to win re-election.
Alongside Gore's vice presidency, the Democratic Party also held their majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate during the 103rd U.S. Congress following the 1992 elections, attained an overall federal government trifecta. Near the end of his tenure, Gore ran for president as the Democratic nominee in the 2000 presidential election and selected junior Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate. They lost the 2000 election to the Republican ticket of Texas governor George W. Bush and his running mate, former U.S. secretary of defense Dick Cheney following the controversial Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision. As vice president in his capacity as the president of the Senate, Gore oversaw the certification of Bush and Cheney as the winners of the election on January 6, 2001. Clinton and Gore were succeeded in office by Bush and Cheney on January 20, 2001.
Gore is considered to have been one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents in American history. His tenure marked increasing influence to the office that would continue under his two successors, Cheney and Joe Biden.
Vice presidential campaign
Although Gore had opted out of running for president (due to the healing process his son was undergoing after a car accident), he accepted the request of Bill Clinton to be his running mate in the 1992 United States presidential election on July 10, 1992. Clinton's choice was perceived as unconventional (as rather than pick a running mate who would diversify the ticket, Clinton chose a fellow Southerner who was close in age) and was criticized by some. Clinton stated that he chose Gore for his foreign policy experience, work with the environment, and commitment to his family. Known as the Baby Boomer Ticket and the Fortysomething Team, The New York Times noted that if elected, Clinton (who was 45) Gore (who was 44) would be the "youngest team to make it to the White House in the country's history." Theirs was the first ticket since 1972 to try to capture the youth vote, a ticket which Gore referred to as "a new generation of leadership."
The ticket increased in popularity after the candidates traveled with their wives, Hillary and Tipper, on a "six-day, 1,000-mile bus ride, from New York to St. Louis." Gore also successfully debated against the other vice presidential candidates, Dan Quayle (a longtime colleague from the House and the Senate) and James Stockdale. The result of the campaign was a win by the Clinton-Gore ticket 44,909,889 votes over the Bush-Quayle ticket 39,104,550 votes. Clinton and Gore were inaugurated on January 20, 1993, and were re-elected to a second term in the 1996 election.
Economy and information technology
Under the Clinton Administration, the U.S. economy expanded; according to David Greenberg (professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University), "by the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged." In addition, one of Gore's major works as vice president was the National Performance Review,Announcement of National Performance Review which pointed out waste, fraud, and other abuse in the federal government and stressed the need for cutting the size of the bureaucracy and the number of regulations. Gore stated that the National Performance Review later helped guide President Clinton when he downsized the federal government.Speech by Vice President Gore: International Reinventing Government Conference. January 14, 1999"
The economic success of this administration was due in part to Gore's continued role as an "Atari Democrat", promoting the development of information technology, which led to the dot-com boom (c. 1995–2001). Clinton and Gore entered office planning to finance research that would "flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry." Their overall aim was to fund the development of, "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications and national computer networks. Also earmarked [were] a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage." These initiatives met with skepticism from critics who claimed that their initiatives would "backfire, bloating Congressional pork and creating whole new categories of Federal waste."
During the election and while vice president, Gore popularized the term Information Superhighway (which became synonymous with the internet) and was involved in the creation of the National Information Infrastructure.
The economic initiatives introduced by the Clinton-Gore administration linked to information technology were a primary focus for Gore during his time as vice president. Gary Stix commented on these initiatives a few months prior in his May 1993 article for Scientific American, "Gigabit Gestalt: Clinton and Gore embrace an activist technology policy." Stix described them as a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology ... gone is the ambivalence or outright hostility toward government involvement in little beyond basic science." Campbell-Kelly and Aspray further note in Computer: A History of the Information Machine:
In the early 1990s the Internet was big news. ... In the fall of 1990 there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton-Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the Information Superhighway|information highway captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (1996). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: BasicBooks, 283
These initiatives were discussed in a number of venues. Howard Rheingold argued in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, that these initiatives played a critical role in the development of digital technology, stating that, "Two powerful forces drove the rapid emergence of the superhighway notion in 1994 ... the second driving force behind the superhighway idea continued to be Vice-President Gore." In addition, Clinton and Gore submitted the report, Science in the National Interest in 1994, which further outlined their plans to develop science and technology in the United States. Gore also discussed these plans in speeches that he made at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA and for the International Telecommunication Union.
On January 13, 1994, Gore "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network". Gore was also asked to write the foreword to the 1994 internet guide, The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking (2nd edition) by Tracy LaQuey. In the foreword he stated the following:
Since I first became interested in high-speed networking almost seventeen years ago, there have been many major advances both in the technology and in public awareness. Articles on high-speed networks are commonplace in major newspapers and in news magazines. In contrast, when as a House member in the early 1980s, I called for creation of a national network of "information superhighways," the only people interested were the manufacturers of optical fiber. Back then, of course, high-speed meant 56,000 bits per second. Today we are building a national information infrastructure that will carry billions of bits of data per second, serve thousands of users simultaneously, and transmit not only electronic mail and data files but voice and video as well.
The Clinton-Gore administration launched the first official White House website on October 21, 1994. It would be followed by three more versions, resulting in the final edition launched in 2000. The White House website was part of a general movement by this administration towards web based communication: "Clinton and Gore were responsible for pressing almost all federal agencies, the U.S. court system and the U.S. military onto the Internet, thus opening up America's government to more of America's citizens than ever before. On July 17, 1996. President Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 - Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to fully utilize information technology to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public."
Clipper Chip The Clipper Chip, which "Clinton inherited from a multi-year National Security Agency effort," was a method of hardware encryption with a government backdoor. In 1994, Vice President Gore issued a memo on the topic of encryption which stated that under a new policy the White House would "provide better encryption to individuals and businesses while ensuring that the needs of law enforcement and national security are met. Encryption is a law and order issue since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution."Statement of the Vice President
Another initiative proposed a software-based key escrow system, in which keys to all encrypted data and communications would reside with a trusted third party. Since the government was seen as possibly having a need to access encrypted data originating in other countries, the pressure to establish such a system was worldwide.Commercial Policy
These policies met with strong opposition from civil liberty groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, scientific groups such as the National Research Council,Press release leading cryptographers,The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, & Trusted Third Party Encryption and the European Commission."Europeans Reject U.S. Plan On Electronic Cryptography" All three Clipper Chip initiatives thus failed to gain widespread acceptance by consumers or support from the industry.The Clipper Chip The ability of a proposal such as the Clipper Chip to meet the stated goals, especially that of enabling better encryption to individuals, was disputed by a number of experts.Crypto Experts Letter
By 1996, the Clipper Chip was abandoned.Rendering Unto CESA
Additional projects
Gore had discussed his concerns with computer technology and levels of access in his 1994 article, "No More Information Have and Have Nots." He was particularly interested in implementing measures which would grant all children access to the Internet, stating: