In a March 20 column, Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris blamed former Vice President Al Gore for his loss in the 2000 election: “A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.” But Harris did not mention the treatment Gore received in 2000 from the “Freak Show” media -- a term Harris and ABC News political director Mark Halperin coined in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (Random House, 2006) and identified as a factor in the 2000 election. As Harris and Halperin noted in the book, the media in 2000 “exerted intense destructive pressure on Gore,” seizing on Gore's “petty frailties” and making them his “defining” characteristics while downplaying Gore's “substantial strengths as a man and politician.”

Harris wrote in his March 20 column:

For the moment, Gore's legacy in American politics rests on two opposing facts:

• From the perspective of Democrats, no politician has been more right, more often, on more important questions. On global warming, words that had a radical edge in 1992 -- and still do, to many conservative ears -- Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance,” anticipating mainstream liberal rhetoric by a decade. Many Washington Democrats cringed at what they regarded as his shrill people-vs.-powerful 2000 convention speech, when he warned that a Bush presidency would favor special interests and the wealthy. They cringed even more in 2002 at what they regarded as Gore's naive warnings that the coming Iraq war was a disaster in waiting and a distraction from other fronts in the campaign against terrorism. But within a year or so of both speeches, most Democrats inside Washington and beyond essentially embraced Gore's argument and tone.
• From the perspective of people who believe, as nearly all Democrats do, that the Bush presidency has been a historic debacle, no Democratic politician is more culpable for these consequences than Gore himself. A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.

Included in The Way to Win, however, is a chapter titled “How the Freak Show Killed Al Gore,” in which Harris and Halperin criticize the media's unfair treatment of Gore in 2000 election as contributing to Gore's defeat. From Pages 120-121 of The Way to Win:

Al Gore inherited eight years of peace and prosperity from Bill Clinton. Many Democrats believed that would be enough to keep the White House in party hands. Along with that record of policy successes, Clinton also bequeathed to Gore other less desirable legacies, including a still expanding Freak Show, which favored the political Right and which had grown accustomed to chewing Gore up and spitting him out.

[...]

Gore's burden was heavier. He was the first sitting vice president to run in the modern Freak Show media environment. The Freak Show swoops upon any public figure who projects weakness or leaves himself open to easy caricature. Vice presidents, who owe their power wholly to another politician, are vulnerable to caricature almost by definition. The Freak Show's bullying tendencies against vice presidents presumably will not figure in 2008, since Dick Cheney has suggested he does not intend to seek the presidency.

But Gore, just like [Sen.] John Kerry [D-MA], is a compelling case study in the way to lose. The two men lost control of the public images and therefore lost elections in markedly similar manners. In Gore's case, the tragedy seemed especially acute. He had, over twenty years, compiled a record of exceptionally serious study and advocacy on issues such as technology and global warming. But on the 2000 campaign trail, he was reduced to a clownish figure. ... By 2000, however, the only thing Gore wanted from Clinton was for him to slap on a muzzle and stay off the stage. The Freak Show exerted intense destructive pressure on Gore. It seized his substantial strengths as a man and politician and shriveled them. It took a long roster of somewhat petty frailties and made them defining.

On Page 129 of The Way to Win, while Harris and Halperin wrote that certain members of the press who “played their part in churning out negative copy of Gore” were “more representative of Gore's problem that they were the cause,” they also wrote that "[a] number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason" Bush won was that Gore received unfair coverage, particularly from three influential national reporters:

No one who kept a close eye on the media coverage of the 2000 campaign would deny that the press corps assigned to Gore was more aggressive and more hostile toward the candidate than those assigned to Bush, a vivid reminder that liberal bias is hardly the only factor influencing Old Media coverage, and often not the most important. This discrepancy made Old Media reporters much more likely to buy into political party press releases, late-night comic jokes, and the general story line that mirrored the Bush campaign's crafted version of Gore.

A number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore's regular press pack included the trio of Katherine “Kit” Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press).

Those three journalists were known collectively in some corners of the press bus as the “Spice Girls.” But by Gore's staff, the trio was called a word that, as Barbara Bush might say, rhymes with “witches.” Journalism publications and blogs galore have appraised the fairness of their coverage.

Those three influential reporters -- and the influential news organizations for which they worked -- certainly played their part in churning out negative copy about Gore, but they were more representative of Gore's problem than they were the cause. At some point along the way, those reporters contributed to the vice president of the United States losing control of his image. Seelye, Connolly, and Sobieraj most assuredly never resolved to confer with the Gore campaign to help the candidate recover his image. But a more adept campaign (and candidate) would have worked to defuse the danger early on.

From Page 130 of The Way to Win:

Gore made mistakes, and had some bad luck (including the infamous Florida butterfly ballot), but the biggest Trade Secret that explained what happened to him applied to Bill Clinton before and John Kerry afterward: Not every election is a fair fight. The media, the New leading the Old, helped Bush tell a good story about himself, and helped Republicans tell a bad story about Gore. And, once again, Matt Drudge was a big factor.