Today brings another buzz-worthy piece on the game-changing potential of Al Gore running for president in 2008. This is by far the best article on Gore's 08 intentions written to date. It's by John Heilemann in this week's New York magazine and can be found here:
http://newyorkmetro.com/...
Some key excerpts and my view of the perfect 2008 ticket after the jump...
The article is long and it is clear that Gore gave the writer a lot of interview time over several days in different locations. This paragraph comes near the beginning, and will cheer many here at Daily Kos:
The burst of enthusiasm for Gore owes much to his emergence, since 9/11, as one of the Bush administration's most full-throated critics. On state-sanctioned torture, wiretapping, and, crucially, Iraq, his indictments have been searing and prescient, often far ahead of his party. He has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember--calculating, chameleonic, soporific--from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who "found his voice in the wilderness."
That is followed by this:
But the Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton's march to her party's nomination. "Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences," observes a senior party player. "One: `She is the presumptive front-runner.' Two: `I don't much like her, but I don't want to cross her, for God's sake!' And three: `If she's our nominee, we're going to get killed.' It's like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it."
Gore also relays his thoughts on the 2000 election decision by the Supreme Court:
Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen?
Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. "There may come a time when I speak on that," Gore says, "but it's not now; I need more time to frame it carefully if I do." Gore sighs. "In our system, there's no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution."
Later, I put the question of Gore's views on the matter to David Boies, his lawyer in the Florida-recount battle. "He thought the court's ruling was wrong and obviously political," Boies says. So he considers the election stolen? "I think he does--and he's right."
I urge you all to go to the NY magazine web site and read the entire long piece. I will simply include one more passage which I found deeply moving:
In An Inconvenient Truth, he expresses his reaction to the outcome thus: "That was a hard blow, but what do you do? You make the best of it."
Gore is quick to tell me, when I ask about the hardness of the blow, that the phrase isn't entirely personal. "The principal source of disappointment was not the dashed expectations for me or my family," he explains, "but the consequences for the country" of George W. Bush's victory. "What the country has subsequently gone through was much worse than I ever thought, but I expected it to be bad."
Gore's anger at Bush may be a kind of coping mechanism--but it is searing and visceral. And it's been the fuel propelling him on the road to political rehabilitation.
Gore took his first step on that road in September 2002, when he gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club, in San Francisco. The speech, a blazing attack on Bush's march to war in Iraq, centered on the argument that an incursion against Saddam Hussein would undermine the struggle against Al Qaeda. Gore read a draft of the speech to a friend before delivering it. "I said, `Holy shit, this is powerful,' " recalls this friend. "And nobody else is saying this."
Read the rest here:
http://newyorkmetro.com/...
From the magazine's web site you can email the article to friends and family.
By the way, my favorite 2008 ticket would be Gore-Obama. But that's just me!