EVERY DAY, it becomes more and more obvious that a dreadful wrong has been done to Al Gore. No, not the outcome of the 2000 election, though that would have been gruesome for anyone. The election was a tie, each side had grounds to complain about one court or another, and each had reason to believe that some fluke had cost it an unknowable number of votes. In the end, the bad luck on both sides probably worked out to the same kind of tie that prevailed in everything else having to do with that election, but it was inevitable that the loser would be sentenced to a lifetime of gut-churning anguish. There is a story that after his 49 state wipeout in 1984 Walter Mondale asked George McGovern how long it took him to recover from his 49-state wipeout 12 years earlier; McGovern told him he would let him know when he did.

But the real wrong done Gore was less that he lost than that he had had such a dreadful time doing it, and may have had a bad time for much of his life. David Remnick at the New Yorker has developed an intriguing small sideline profiling politicians who could have been president but slipped up and lost everything, his previous takes being Gary Hart, who could have been president if not for the Monkey Business; and Mario Cuomo, who might have been president if he had run in 1992, but who, when Remnick got to him, was

Remnick's >latest riff, in this week's New Yorker, is about Gore, who might have been president if several Florida ballots had been printed differently, or he hadn't backed gun control (goodbye Tennessee and West Virginia), or Bill Clinton hadn't fooled around with an intern, or he hadn't screwed up the debates. Gore is now back in Tennessee (a state that rejected him), where he seems to be making a new career out of grievance, feeding off of contacts with people who assure him he won and was cheated, and venting his rage against Bush. But behind the story of a man who may have lost by a fluke is the story of a man who spent his whole life in the wrong occupation, and lost in large measure because he never fit into the one he was in. What comes through in this piece is what has come through in others--such as Nicholas Lemann's four years ago in the New Yorker, and Liza Mundy's two years ago in the Washington Post: Gore possesses a high degree of the kind of intelligence that is no use whatever in politics, and none of the talents that are, either. He seems born for the world of think tanks and schoolrooms, of dissertations and seminars, of endless digressions about this and that.

In one soliloquy, as Remnick tells us, Gore mentioned in sequence, "the brain-imaging center at New York University, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Sclain; Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan . . . the lack of research on the relation between the brain and television . . . Gutenberg and the rise of print . . . David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term 'broadcast' . . . an article on 'flow' in Scientific American; the 'orienting reflex' in vertebrates; the poignancy and 'ultimate failure' of political demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public sphere."