http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/The_Gore_Door.htmlIt’s fair to say that this is not the very worst of times in American history.
The British are not marching through the homeland, burning down the White House. We are not murdering each other by the hundreds of thousands, as we did during our Civil War. A fourth of us are not unemployed, as was the case during the Great Depression. And Joseph McCarthy – though not necessarily his techniques and his amorality – seems safely ensconced in his grave, despite Ann Coulter’s attempt to revive him (wow, how sick is that?)....It is truly a dark hour for America, and all roads lead to the same explanatory address: the country has been hijacked by a movement of regressive kleptocrats who have not governed well in large part because their intention never was to govern well – but rather, instead, to liquidate every asset from the beast before then dumping its tattered carcass in a fire sale. There are no parallels for this in our political history. Only the leveraged buyout does it justice. Think of this as the Gordon Gekko model of governance. Woo-hoo.
Add to that, however, the political parallels that do exist. Bush embodies the worst of all American presidencies (and notice they’re almost all Republicans). If you took the drunken bungling of (Bush’s cousin) Franklin Pierce, and combined it with the corruption of the Grant administration, the imperialism of McKinley, the incompetence of Harding, the coldheartedness of Hoover, the militarism of Eisenhower, Constitution-smashing of Nixon, the nationalist arrogance of Reagan, and the ham-handedness of Poppy Bush, you might begin to approximate the disaster of the current Resident. It’s as if Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant not only brought back the sociopath’s brain from the morgue, but every other part as well, and they stitched them all together to make the present monster.... (Expect) more of the same of what we’re experiencing right now. This is well more than possible – it’s highly probable. I don’t think Bush and Cheney are going to be impeached and convicted in the time remaining, and I know for sure they’re not going to change their policy stripes in a last-ditch effort to save this presidency from its unsalvageable fate as the worst in American history. The fundamental mistake that Americans – even those who have come to revile this administration – still make in assessing them is to believe that their problem is incompetence, arrogance, ideological rigidity, political aggressiveness or even petty corruption. All those things are true, of course, in spades, but they also serve to mask a deeper core which is significantly worse. Like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, this administration fundamentally exists to steal the national patrimony from you and I and deliver it into the hands of an already fabulously wealthy plutocracy.
There is a third condition that is very much required in order for a progressive renaissance to occur. It is an obvious one, but given the Constitution shredding we’ve all lived through these last six years, it must nevertheless be overtly articulated: Bush and Cheney must actually leave office on January 20, 2009. I still have concerns about this, though fewer than I did a few years back. It worries me, though, that we’ve taught these reprobates an unfortunate lesson – namely, that you can steal elections, trash the Bill of Rights, blow off Congress, manufacture a war, and steal the national crown jewels – all without much more consequence than a bit of photo-op grumbling by an anemic opposition party, the occasional off-script question from an otherwise completely obsequious press, and the latent hostility of a powerless public. After all that, would it be so much to fake another international crisis and suspend elections? If you can kill habeas corpus after nearly a millennium of it being woven deep into the fabric of Western cultural tradition, could you not readily spike an election or two under conditions of ‘national emergency’? And let us not be under any illusions about the massive incentives that exist for them to stay in office, not least of which is to avoid losing the ability to block investigations of their crimes once they’re out of power. The Bush junta has plenty of good reasons not to go when their (stolen) term expires. And then, of course, there is the matter of that mysterious underground bunker Cheney has been building, and the giant prison complexes recently constructed for as-yet unspecified purposes...But let us assume that Bush and Cheney find a happy home for prolonged pillaging in some scandal-waiting-to-happen corporation headquartered in Dubai or somewhere. The obvious next set of conditions needed for a progressive revival in America is that there is actually a bold progressive candidate to replace them, that this person wins the election, and that he or she does in fact then govern as a progressive.
From what I can see, only one realistic possibility exists for this to happen, and that is for Al Gore to make a run for the presidency.
Even leaving aside Gore’s resume, which makes him the ideal candidate in terms of experience and preparation (and, man, have we ever learned how much those things matter!), and even leaving aside that he has been out in front of everybody in the mainstream on everything, including the two most important issues of our time – Iraq and global warming – Gore is the ideal candidate for other even more important reasons...(He) is the first Democrat who can throw a punch, and doesn’t fall down the minute a punk like George Bush or Newt Gingrich rolls out another embarrassingly juvenile schoolyard taunt. Today, I look at Gore and I see a man on fire. I see a guy who is not only angry, but angry for all the right reasons. And I see a candidate who could be devastating in response to the right-wing cheap shots sure to be tossed out by the GOP in 2008. I think Gore would be willing to call out the purveyors of political filth on the right, to dress down their facilitators in the media, and to publicly humiliate both when they pull their egregious stunts. Indeed, I think he knows that to do otherwise is political suicide. If he does run, I can’t imagine him running the sort of weak campaign like the one he mounted in 2000, or the inexcusable disaster that Kerry (who absolutely should have known better) put forth in 2004. I can’t imagine him not dismissing the GOP and its surrogate pundits by saying “You’re the same folks who’ve gotten everything imaginable wrong these last years, so shut up already. We’re done with you and your disasters.”... Al Gore... has been anything but the centrist candidate who is cautiously building a foundation for one last run. Instead, he has more or less done all the things you’re not supposed to do when you run for president nowadays, especially as a Democrat. He’s called out the Bush administration for the disaster that it is, and he did so early and without mincing words, at a time when the Clintons and the Edwards of this world were voting for the Iraq war resolution so they could run for president. He’s made noise about a crucial issue everybody wanted to ignore, and did so at the cost of being subjected to great personal ridicule. He has avoided all the political pandering of pathetic politicians running hither and yon across Iowa and New Hampshire, promising everything to everyone, and trying to be all things to all people.
All of this is important, and for more reasons than simply electing a non-regressive president in 2008. What we’ve learned in the last six years is what regressives are capable of when they’re in power. What we’d already seen, from the previous decade, is just how damaging they can be even when out of power. It’s ludicrous to imagine that another Clinton presidency would be any less hounded from the get-go than was the first one. And while Hillary might be somewhat more effectual at countering the vast right-wing conspiracy than Bill was, it will always be at the service of her personal power and glory, never to serve a progressive policy agenda. For there to be the possibility of a progressive revival in America, it will require a candidate who gets in the face of the radical right during the campaign, in order to lay the groundwork for doing the same during the presidency. Hillary might be able to do that, but what distinguishes Gore is that he goes even one better, doing it in service to a public agenda, rather than a personal one. That brings a lot of people around behind him in support for their champion.
.............
The prospect of a good-natured, well-intentioned, highly qualified and unintimidated presidential candidate – and, especially, president – scares the hell out of regressives. It is both a measure of their fear, their political and policy bankruptcy, and the correctly perceived threat of a Gore candidacy that they’ve already begun hurling their cheapest pot shots at him, though the guy is nowhere near having even announced yet. With more than just echoes of the character assassination done on him in 2000, columnists from the Washington Post and the New York Times have mocked Gore and his new book, suggesting that he is arrogant, pompous and foolish. But these ladies doth protest too much!...I think today’s Al Gore frightens these people very much. His presidency would follow our era’s Pierce/Grant/McKinley/Hoover/Eisenhower/Nixon/ Reagan meltdown, thus setting the stage for maximum receptivity to real and significant change. He likely would not be intimidated or shut down by personal assaults or fabricated scandals. (In fact, if he was really smart, he would inoculate himself against them by warning the public right from the beginning to expect that they are coming, reminding them of what was done to Clinton. Then each time another bogus scandal was proffered he could simply offer a Reaganesque display of disdainful tedium, along the lines of “There you go again”. He could also publicly challenge members of the media to also investigate their sources, as well as the allegations of those sources, and he could play a game of resignation brinksmanship with Republicans making warrantless accusations, as in “If you’re right Senator, I’ll resign. If you’re wrong, you resign. Agreed?”.) Gore would also likely not be afraid to continue to explain to Americans the depth of the pit the GOP has dug for us these last years, perhaps launching continuing investigations into war profiteering and other scandals. In short, Gore could take progressives from a position of playing weak defense to one of playing offense, and leave the right stuck licking their wounds in a collapsing world of hurt. My own guess is that regressives will completely crumble at the point anyone stands up to them and starts hitting back, and thus the attacks already being mounted on Gore – it is imperative to them that anyone who would do so be silenced, preferably by means of ridicule. But I suspect Gore now well knows what so many of us learned in kindergarten, that the best way to deal with a bully is to push back. Hard.
Lord knows I’ve had my heart broken by too many politicians not to be a bit cautious. Moreover, the old Al Gore could sometimes make Bill Clinton look positively liberal. But nowadays I think a Gore presidency would very likely be different. I think it would be bold enough to end the war, to seriously address global warming, to create a real universal national healthcare program, to begin re-balancing the distribution of wealth in the United States, to restore the Constitution, to appoint progressives to the federal courts, to restore America’s participation in international institutions and its reputation in world opinion, to implement a full-scale alternative energy program, as well as job development, stem cell research, and a whole lot more. I think the majority of the American public already wants all of those things, and it might be very easy to achieve them under the combined circumstances of a completely failed conservative experiment, a clearly articulated progressive vision, and a bold agenda-setting president showing aggressive and fearless leadership in pointing the way.....Which I think is precisely why Gore, the non-candidate, inspires such over-the-top ridicule from conservatives and the press. His capacity to expose them and their lies, to put a label on their failures, and to chart a path toward a popular politics of potential watershed magnitude, makes him nothing short of a regressive’s nightmare. This could be the second coming of FDR, not only politically and ideologically, but in terms of a generational-scale realignment, much as the New Deal coalition dominated American politics for forty years.
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