Certain corners of the liberal blogosphere, suffering from various combinations of amnesia and masochism, have hit upon the perfect Presidential candidate for 2008: Al Gore. See Marshall Wittman, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Atrios, Scott Lemieux. They like the fact that he was actually against the Iraq war. This seems to have blinded them to another important fact: Al Gore is just an incredibly, embarassingly, unforgivably bad candidate. This is the guy who managed to turn a booming economy and the advantages of incumbency into a defeat by our completely inarticulate current President. This is the guy who would dramatically change his style from debate to debate based on what he saw on Saturday Night Live. This is the guy who moved to distance himself from his boss by demonstrating that he only lusted after his wife, by French-kissing her before his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. This is another in a long line of Democratic politicians will always come across to most voters as 100% irredeemably phony. I can hear the anguished cries of recrimination in Nov. 2008 all the way from here.
The lonely voice of reason seems to be Julie Saltman. More evidence that men shouldn’t be allowed to make important political decisions.
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Ah, but have we all forgotten that Gore was never really a phony? He was a victim of a non-stop media campaign against him from sources that one might have thought sympathetic to his campaign. Was it really that Gore was so horrible, or was it just that the New York Times spent days flaming him over “his invention of the internet?”
Personally, I don’t think Gore would be a good candidate either, but I don’t think it’s because Gore himself was some unlikeable phony. Rather, the media (back before Coulter was claiming that conservatives own it) already showed that it, for one reason or another, hates Al Gore, and how is a candidate with such a long and vindictive character assasination campaign against him going to be viable again?
The same problem arises when we come to the (in my opinion hideous) spectre of Hillary ’08. Is it too far into the relm of logic to see that someone who spent her Husband’s presidency getting slammed as a hyper-liberal probably won’t be all that plausable as a centrist candidate from the DLC?
Commander Keen, huh? That game distracted me all the way through college! Anyway… It think the NYT would be surprised to hear itself described as an organ of the Bush campaign. At least Sean is in touch with reality on this: Gore lost because he was a lousy candidate, period. Based on the economy alone, he should have bested Bush by 5 points. I guess we got lucky 🙂
So who do you guys (and gals) favor for the 2008 nomination? I can tell you this: no GOPer wants to face Bill Richardson.
Zero
I completely agree that Gore is a poor candidate for the presidency.
But, Why Not Hillary?
Any Democratic presidential candidate is going to find themselves waist-deep in demagoguery. Best to pick someone with the poise, charisma, and political instincts to handle it. Like Hillary.
I could easily get behind a campaign for Hillary. Read the article linked above for some good points.
Here’s the counterpoint article: Not so fast.
PS The instant preview for comments is sweet.
I like Bill Richardson too.
You all seem to forget that the “poor candidate” Al Gore acutally received more votes than that superb candidate GWB.
I agree about Gore but you’re completely wrong about Bush. He
was an extremely good candidate in 2000, not quite comparable
to Reagan but as good as Clinton in the likeability factor that is, alas,
crucial to electoral politics. It took a weak Democratic candidate
and a strong Republican one to lose (or rather tie) that election. This
matters alot in 2008. I don’t know why people are down on John
Edwards, who I think might have won last year and would be formidable
in 2008.
The gore issue:
For those of you who doubt my assertion about the NY times, I would suggest going back and reading the opinion pages from that period. When you look at the accounts, you see lies plastered up by people like Richard Berke (http://www.dailyhowler.com/h100900_1.shtml [I know this guy is hardly impartial, but the Times doesn’t give access to old articles through the website]), and though the paper endorsed Gore there was far too much press given to fabrications about what gore said:
I recommend this story for those of you who’ve forgotten:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,330871,00.html
Look, I understand having opinion pieces from all sides, but constantly allowing lies to be printed is just bad journalistic practice.
Take this example: If I were to misquote something Sean said in a lecture once “I am a black-belt in general relativity” to say that Sean is claiming that he’s a karate master and as such is clearly a lying clown and we shouldn’t listen to him about other crazy ideas like superstrings, you would think I’m nuts. But if you didn’t know Sean, and every time you picked up the campus paper you saw references to how “critics mention Sean’s claims to be a karate master,” you might start thinking twice about Sean’s credibility.
And, I might remind you, this is the TIMES we’re talking about. The rest of the media was downright sickening.
Let us not forget the Atlantic Monthly profile with Gore + fang = evil on the cover and lies about what he said in his book within.
Beyond that, the conception that he was not a personable candidate came direct from Fox News to the American Public’s brain. They slapped on a label and then mocked him for using gestures when he told jokes.
I agree that the Gore campaign failed miserably in combating the lies and misinformation that came out during the race, but I believe that that is more damning of the Democratic party’s failings, not Gore’s supposedly robotic nature. I think that all the hullabaloo about the Swift Boats and their lies should have come as no surprise seeing as how it was merely a logical conclusion to the tactics employed against Gore. It’s just that since SB was lying about demonstrable facts rather than about intangibles like someone’s personalities we got a little more pissed off.
Anyway, about Hilary
I think she’s shamelessly opportunistic: take the recent Hot Coffee debacle where she jumps on the moral crusade to keep filth from the hands of children because a game rated for 17+ people can be changed with the help of illegal third party software to reveal some blocky boobs. Call me crazy but I think it would be much better for the Senator to do something useful with her political capitol rather than embrace censorship-because-oh-my-god-the-children!
That and I believe that her work led to the ultimate failure of the Clinton Healthcare initiative, which might have provided a healthcare solution for this country back when it wasn’t the travesty it is now.
In short: I think she’s incompetent and has a legacy of material already in place to smash her with. I know the article points to popularity despite that history, but the article itself acknowledges that Democratic contenders have a nasty habit of shooting down in the polls when they’re actually running for office rather than sitting in hypothetical limbo. I submit that the already present load of crapola that surrounds her from the right wing poop machine will make that slide faster when it hits.
NO NEW SENATORS!
When will we learn that senators make awful presidential candidates? They have a record of votes; some they made in the spirit of comprimise which come back to haunt them. And to paraphrase something from the 2004 election: the U.S. Senate is the Top Gun school for boring, pontificating polititians.
So, for love of all that is secular, social, and sensible, NO NEW SENATORS. Leave the Democratic nomination for someone who can actually win.
Ed Rendell? A likeable non-senator.
A little history to support my NO NEW SENATORS campaign:
None of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Poppy Bush, Clinton, and Shrub were ever US senators. Before that, Nixon was a senator from 1950-52, but had 16 years to recover before his successful presidential run in 1968. Lyndon Johnson was a senator for 12 years, but he ran for US President as an incumbant, since he was elevated from VP upon Kennedy’s assassination. So you have to go back to J.F.K. to count the last US President to be elected coming fresh from the Senate. Also note that J.F.K. was the first President of the TV era.
Senatorial losers in the TV era: Goldwater, Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dole, Gore, and Kerry. The only non-senatorial loser in the TV era: Michael Dukakis. Boy, he was exciting.
[Warning: off-topic.]
Ampracific: The instant preview is sweet indeed … except that it doesn’t work. That is: its interpretation of what you type doesn’t match the real thing in some instances. For instance:
If you start paragraphs with “1.”, “2.”, etc., then the preview will show you paragraphs starting with “1.”, “2.”, etc. What actually appears when you submit, however, will be a series of indented paragraphs with no numbers.
If you write a smiley as colon-minus-rightparen, then the preview will show you colon-minus-rightparen. What actually appears when you submit, however, is a hideous yellow grinning face.
For some reason WordPress interprets numbers at the start of paragraphs in comments as elements of ordered lists, whether that’s what you want or not. I’ve tweaked it so that the numbers at least show up, but I don’t know how to just stop the lists from being created.
Update: Okay, lists no longer created against one’s will. As for the smiley’s, you’ll just have to deal.
Personally, I dont think Gore is going to make it in 2008. Not enough of whatever…
Gordon
Sean,
I am no expert, but from what I can tell Gore has the right personality to win big in Canada. That is, if he tones down his right wing agenda…
Brilliant! -cvj
Pretty funny Moshe!
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The facts do not support your theory about Gore being a bad candidate.
1.The economy was not booming in 2000. It was slowing down after March, in case you missed it.
2.Vice presidents do NOT get credit for the good things but get the blame for the bad things — even if they themselves had nothing to do with them.
This has been the case for a long time, this is why so few sitting veep could become president.
3.Gore had to start the campaign behind Bush in the polls by double-digit.
You cannot blame that on his campaign since he wasn’t even a candidate.
He was however Clinton’s veep. And half of the electorate was fed up with the Clinton/Gore administration — mostly because of the scandals.
Gore had to pay for them by starting his campaign with a huge deficit.
Still he managed to trun thing aroung — despite the most hostile press coverage in recent history and the fact that Bush outspent him 2-1.
You cannot do that if you are a bad candidate.
The election was Bush’s to lose — and he lost it at least among the voters.
4.A good presidential candidate is someone who would make a good president.
Hence Gore was a good candidate and Bush was not.
Gore’s agenda made sense Bush’s didn’t make any sense.
Nothing else matters.
Sean,
Your assumption that Gore “lost” the election is IMHO flawed. My sense is that Gore is a good man who was handled badly by his advisors. His big sin was inconsistency in the debates. Bush was the same guy in all 3 debates and we saw 3 different Gores.
He also never should have picked Lieberman for a running mate.
As bad as a candidate he might have been I believe he would have been a very good president. I’d love to see either one of the senators from Illinois or Russ Feingold. I’ve got no use for Hillary and I think Bill Richardson is a big phony. He did a terrible job as Secretary of Energy.
Maybe Martin Sheen will make a run….;)
Elliot
You crazy pinkos* are hard on your failed candidates.
*Democrats.
8 months of a Gore campaign, with Global Warming front and center, might give Lubos Motl an aneuryism.