The 2000 U.S. presidential election was a mess. There were hanging chads, a controversial Supreme Court decision and JibJab rap battles that somehow passed for entertainment back then.
In the end, future war criminal/Ellen BFF George W. Bush took the White House, while his opponent, Al Gore, was forced to concede. But losing the election had one silver lining: It meant that Gore was totally free to host Saturday Night Live in December of 2002.
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At the time, the question of whether or not Gore would be seeking the presidency again in 2004 was very much up in the air. And SNL played with the suspense in their promo for the episode.
Gore had an interview with 60 Minutes booked for the Sunday after his hosting debut, and reporter Lesley Stahl just assumed that the SNL appearance was confirmation of his intention to run, because SNL was “one of the ritual stops now on the campaign. You do the late-night comics and SNL — it’s one of the Stations of the Cross.”
But once Gore took the stage at Studio 8H, it became pretty apparent that he wasn’t using SNL to further his political career. If anything, it was the other way around; he was using politics as a way to get on SNL. After parodying his headline-making DNC kiss with then wife Tipper Gore in the cold open, Gore’s monologue chronicled his process for choosing past running mate Joe Lieberman: a Bachelor-style reality show that ends with Al and Joe sipping champagne in a hot tub together.
NBC/onesnladay.com
Gore’s willingness to lampoon himself was even more apparent in a filmed segment in which he tours the set of The West Wing, but then refuses to leave the Oval Office. “He did win the popular vote,” actor Bradley Whitford admits.
Gore announced that he wouldn’t be running for president during the 60 Minutes segment that aired the following day, but The New York Times confessed that they’d already been clued in by the SNL performance because “the Al Gore on Saturday Night Live was a liberated man.” The Times also suggested that Gore was more emotionally revealing on SNL than he was on 60 Minutes, specifically in the Stuart Smiley sketch — the Al Franken character helps Gore move past the pain of losing the 2000 election.
Gore has stated that he hadn’t made a final decision about his political future in the week leading up to the show, and claimed that he would have gone through with the exact same show regardless. “Absolutely I would have done the sketches I did if I had decided to run for president,” Gore stressed. “I didn’t see anything wrong with them.”
And who knows, if he’d become president after hosting SNL maybe Gore would have found a cabinet position for Tracy Morgan.
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