>Perhaps Gore would have faced this bedrock problem without the drama of the Clinton factor. But his anxiety over Clinton magnified it, making it the very backdrop of his entire campaign. He ended up wrapping himself in the most dangerous parts of the Clinton legacy—voters’ doubts about values and trustworthiness—while getting no credit for the parts that had sustained Clinton’s approval ratings throughout the impeachment process.

>“The psychodrama overpowers everything,” says someone who knows Gore well. “I think the guy just so much wanted for this to be his victory, and not Clinton’s. He didn’t want to wear the older sibling’s jeans.”

>This, finally, is the other explanation for why Gore seemed so unnerved by his Clinton problem. As the son of a forceful father who had bragged of raising him for the presidency, Gore had struggled all his life with the assumption that he was wearing borrowed clothes. Even under the best of circumstances, it might have been harder for him than for others to manage with grace the eternal vice-presidential conundrum of how to stop looking like a second fiddle when his turn finally came

>“Clinton was going nuts,” says someone who spoke to him in the late stages of the campaign. “He’s going, ‘Don’t use me, O.K. But, God knows, use my presidency. Use my record!’”

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With the Clinton era coming to an end, the nation was enjoying a prosperous economy fueled by the explosive rise of Internet businesses in the late…