Gore on the Rise

I can't really believe that there's a core of reasonable, central-left Democrats who are hoping for Gore to run again in 2008.  That's what Andrew and several other bloggers have started to write about. 

Now there's no reason to think that Al Gore would be a horrible candidate, he did pretty good the last time he ran for office.  But if the quote that Andrew uses is any indication of Gore's base, he stands less of a chance in 2008 than he did in 2000. 

Yes it could well be Gore in '08. There are many reasons but the most powerful is his statesman's status.

Okay.   And that's as a statesman for what now?  Oh, that's right, he hyped a movie where the Atlantic ocean froze hundreds of meters deep in a matter of a few seconds.  In the streets of New York.  Except in the Library.   As for real statesmanship, that Kyoto thing, how's that going so far? 

He has a unique, unassailable position in having won 2000 but lost in the Supreme Court, and his wilderness years have strengthened and matured him, allowed him to speak his mind forthrightly and without calculation.

This is where the writer gives it away that she's no run-of-the-mill left-of-center, if you couldn't quite get that from the powerful statesman statement.  Every single recount that the NYT could think of, and do, ended up with Gore losing.  Every. Single. One.  You have to be pretty bitter to still think that the Supreme Court stole the election from Gore.  Bitter, or very uninformed.  Neither says centrist to me. 

After all, what further could anyone do politically to Al Gore that he has not already suffered?

He could lose another presidential election.  Which he will if he runs.  Imagine how flipped out he'd be after that. 

Personally, I found his recent speeches absolutely electrifying; I was truly stunned by his transformation.

What was most stunning?  The beard?  The lost flannel shirts?  The ability to make every single speech into a doomsday chant of environmental ruin for the world? 

He has become America's conscience, and is warm, articulate and impassioned.

Gore has never been described as warm.  Even Tipper doesn't describe him as warm.  Is this writer even aware of who Al Gore is?  Oh, that's right.  Next to John Kerry, Al Gore is a friggin' bonfire of warmth. 

He has gone through the valley of tears and what did not break him has strengthened and transformed him - I will use that word again. In comparison, Hillary's politcal calculations look tawdry and obvious.

Hillary's political calculations are tawdry and obvious.  They don't need comparison to anything Gore did to look that way. 

There has never been a president elected who did not capture the center.  At least not in recent history.  Unlike EU nations, where political extremism is a strength, neither the far Left or the far Right has the ability to put a president into office in our country, thank God.  If the writer above is the most centrist that Andrew has heard from concerning their support of Gore, then Gore's doomed.  He may very well capture the nomination; Kerry proved how a few early wins in the primaries can sew up a nomination.   He could very well invigorate an already rabid base, and there will certainly be many who will vote for him in the primaries because of his former positions as a centrist in the Clinton White House.  But I agree with the writer on one thing, Gore has long ago given up those positions and taken on a new persona.  The new Al Gore has a public record.  That record makes Andrew's writer swoon, but it's clear neither she or Gore are anywhere near the center.  One of the mistakes Leftists make in America most often is to imagine they are very near the center, and that their views are shared by a majority of Americans.  Andrew's writer is guilty of that very mistake.  When Al gets into a rant, and proclaims that we will all be dead in a few years because the seas are rising by less than a few centimeters a year, or because temperatures are rising by one or two degrees per century (or that if not for a few feeble-minded voters in Dade County and the Supreme Court, he'd have been elected President in 2000, so we owe him the presidency in 2008) he's going to sound like Jimmy Carter in full manic-depressive swing. 

Comments

[Roy Brooks]

Your article is right on, Gore needs to retire to the farm. We don't need losers who hang on forever as we have plenty of them
and we don't seem to be able to get rid of them.(Kennedy). Too bad we can't get the losers to pass a term limit bill.

[Publius]

I recall a very funny story in "The Onion" a few months after the 2000 election. The article was devoted to Gore family members reporting that Al had been seen giving State of the Union addresses to the bathroom mirror while shaving, and holding high-level foreign affairs briefings with the two family cats. When I think of what probably would have happened (and not happened) had Al been the President on 9/11 it makes me shudder. Keep briefing those cats, Al!