25 best cold-opens in SNL history
By David Rouben
7. Gore vs. Bush or: Lockbox vs. Strategery
To this day, the best evisceration of Al Gore on TV still comes from South Park. But Darrell Hammond and SNL did a number on him, so much so that Gore’s campaign had him watch this sketch so that he could understand why he wasn’t as popular as he first thought.
The 2000 presidential election was notorious for one thing: the electoral college system. Not unlike this past election, Gore won the popular vote by a count of more than 500,000. However, in the electoral college, the race came down to the state of Florida. The margin was so razor thin that they needed several recounts and a Supreme Court ruling to determine who won. Ultimately, Bush edged him out by a little over 500 votes.
People still bring up that election as an argument against the electoral college system, but for Gore, it never should’ve come to that. This was an extremely winnable election that he completely bottled, and the debates played a role in it. There’s a reason why Hammond repeats “lockbox” ad nauseum in this sketch — it was how he conveyed his message of protecting Social Security and Medicare. While his campaign advisers thought it’d be okay to use the metaphor twice or three times, he ended up saying it so many times that it lost all meaning.
Even though Bush’s performance wasn’t that much better, at least he came across as lovable. That sentiment is underscored in this sketch by Will Ferrell’s portrayal, as well as his birth of the word “strategery.” The fact that Gore kept butting in so that he could have the last word turned many people off him. You could hear the collective eye roll when he said, “Can I have two closing statements?”
While this sketch introduced the world to Dubya, and had Ferrell’s impersonation take on a life of its own, the one thing that stood out was how much of a jerk Gore acted like.