Introduction

My obsession with undelivered speeches began late in the evening on November 7, 2000, Election Night.

Working for Vice President Al Gore in the White House was my first job out of college, and it was heady stuff for a twenty-two-year-old. When Gore’s campaign for president moved from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, I moved along with it. Even for my idealistic young self, the Gore 2000 campaign was an affair strangely disconnected from its candidate and unloved even in its home state. (On my drive to the campaign headquarters each morning, I could count on somebody to spot my GORE 2000 bumper sticker and give me the finger.)*

Like all campaigns, there was plenty of camaraderie and carousing, but when each day’s tracking polls would come in, either showing Gore up or down by a couple of points, a fatigued, beleaguered staffer would inevitably mutter under his or her breath, “And that’s just at headquarters.” Even the most relentless enthusiasm can succumb to the numbing grind of a relentless campaign. We will bring prosperity and progress! Or was it progress and prosperity? Was it change that works? Or change that works for working families? Nobody could quite remember.

But as Election Night approached, you could begin to feel an actual change; the pallor from sleeplessness and fast food was replaced with the flush of hope. There was hope for the nation, certainly—America would be moving into a new century and a new millennium as the sole superpower on earth, led by someone who understood the challenges of climate change and the potential of technology.

But there were also more granular, grounded, and, let’s just admit it, self-involved hopes for those of us who had toiled on the campaign. I might get to work in the White House! I might get to work at the State Department! I might be a presidential speechwriter!

And so on Election Night, as the last get-out-the-vote phone calls were dialed, we headed to the outdoor plaza in downtown Nashville.

Vice President Gore prepared to head there as well. In keeping with political superstition, he had both a victory and a concession speech prepared. Because of what the campaign had seen in its polling, he also had a third version of the speech prepared: in case he had won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote.*

As polls closed, it appeared Gore would be giving the victory speech: just before 8:00 p.m., the Associated Press, followed by CNN and the other networks, declared that Al Gore had won Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes. Within the hour, they also called Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for Gore. We were euphoric. Al Gore was going to be the next president.

And yet the people crunching the numbers inside both campaigns were seeing something less definitive than what was being reported. I had received a call earlier in the afternoon from a college acquaintance who told me that his grandmother and some of her friends in Palm Beach, Florida, were having trouble figuring out the ballot. At the time, I reported the call to the campaign “boiler room”—where the Gore campaign’s high command was handling Election Day operations, but didn’t think much of it. On Election Days, all sorts of rumors run rampant, and it becomes hard to separate the signal from the noise. Partly that’s because people who were previously working eighteen-hour days now must sit and wait for results like everyone else, so they trade every bit of information they come across. What are you hearing about turnout? What is exit polling saying? And sometimes they traffic in rumor and paranoia.

But it turned out that call about Florida was prophetic, because Palm Beach’s ballot was designed in such a visually challenging way that an estimated 2,800 Gore voters actually voted for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan, one of many problems with Florida’s voting system that would soon be revealed.

Back in Nashville, we didn’t know any of that yet. What we knew was that Gore had lost Ohio and his own home state of Tennessee. It was all going to come down to Florida, and Bush was claiming that he was actually going to win Florida. Something seemed to be changing, and just before 10:00 p.m., it did: in an unprecedented and embarrassing move, the networks took Florida out of Gore’s column and declared it “too close to call.” Over the next couple of hours, Bush’s lead in Florida grew, and shortly after 2:00 a.m., the networks declared Bush the winner in Florida and the winner of the presidency. Gore called Bush to concede. But as Gore was en route from his hotel to address the crowd in Nashville, Bush’s lead in Florida began to drop again, as numbers from several of the late-reporting counties came in.

At this point, I was with a number of campaign staffers in a bar near the plaza, taking shelter from the persistent drizzle. All our pagers (not everyone had cell phones at the time) began going off. We were being asked to return to campaign headquarters. In a tense phone call, Gore had called Bush to retract his concession. Back at headquarters, staffers who had law degrees or a connection to Florida were being told to pack overnight bags and head to the airport, where the campaign plane would take them to Florida to begin working on the automatic recount the closeness of the election had triggered. At the same time, other groups were dispatched to the other states where the race was too close to call: Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and Oregon. I ended up in Madison, Wisconsin, in desperate need of a new winter coat, helping prepare for a recount that never happened.

That night, Vice President Gore gave no speech at all. Just after 4:00 a.m., Gore’s campaign chairman, William Daley, stepped to the lectern and said,

I’ve been in politics for a long time. But there’s never been a night like this one … As everyone in America knows, this race has come down to the State of Florida. And without being certain of the results in Florida, we simply cannot be certain of the results of this national election.… Until the recount is concluded and the results in Florida become official, our campaign continues.

Far from being a statement for posterity, posterity was put on pause. I’ve been through stacks of files trying to find my printed copy of the speeches Al Gore was prepared to give that evening, or the floppy disk they were stored on, to no avail. Whatever it was that Al Gore had planned on saying to the cold, wet assembled crowd may be lost to history.*

Since that night, I’ve nursed an obsession with finding and bringing to light the undelivered.

* * *

Growing up, we all learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. But what if the March on Washington had taken on a different tone and tenor? What if John Lewis, the fieriest speaker of the day, had preceded King by declaring that he could not support Kennedy’s civil rights bill, “for it is too little and too late”? What if King had kept his dream to himself and taken the stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to declare that there would be “normalcy never again”? Both of them went to bed the night before the 1963 March on Washington with prepared speeches that did just that.