Spring A-Ling

A real quick one today, just to keep my streak of one post per three months alive and well …

I'm really serious about putting up the next in the Concerts series … or at least, serious about getting ready to think about putting up the next one. Naw, I ain't jokin'. I'm pondering the options – likely one of the following:

• Nirvana, Live at Fitchburg State (11.12.1993);
• Phish, Live at the Ballpark, Old Orchard Beach (7.02.1993);
• Morphine– at Granny Killams (defunct Portland club) in (??.1994) and Black Cat, D.C. 4.14.1996);
• U2 Zoo TV Outside Broadcast, Foxborough (8.22.1992);
• Pearl Jam, Live at the Orpheum (4.XX.1994) or
• Bob Mould, Live at the 9:30 Club (10.10.1996)

That said, options are like … uhh, oh well, whatever, nevermind …



Yah, yah, yah … Pennsylvania comes and goes, and what we gots? Nobody knows … that includes the Christian Science Monitor, whose editorial today described the ever-dreaded "Superdelegates' Superdilemma":

Their campaign styles are telling of what kind of president each might be. For superdelegates caught on the fence of interpreting primary results, they must ask if the party wants a nominee whose tactics will carry over to the general election against Mr. McCain, then the White House, and ultimately to creating a different America.



Clinton won this primary squarely, but 68 percent of voters thought that she had "attacked unfairly." With mixed messages like that, the 300 will need Solomonic wisdom.

Meanwhile, Joe Klein writes in Time Magazine … well, wrote a bit, about a month ago, about the prospect that just won't die. Only he who sees things in Primary Colors has the gall to project a bit outside of the horserace, suggesting that perhaps "the answer to the Democratic Party's dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore:

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you're probably right. But let's play a little. Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.



I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely ... and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, "Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place." A congressional Democrat told me, "This could be our way out of a mess." Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. "I don't know that he'd be interested, even if you handed it to him," said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June. And yet ... is this scenario any more preposterous than the one that gave John McCain the Republican nomination? Yes, it's silly season. But this has been an exceptionally "silly" year.

The folks at New York Magazine have taken a more cutsy tack toward the question, with a screenplay-as-article titled "Four Days in Denver." The April 9 piece, by 'West Wing' writer Lawrence O'Donnell Jr, provides a vision into an imminent "Showdown at the Democratic National Convention."

The writer ponders a Hollywood answer to the question that has become all the more bandied about among Democrats as we fall into the jetwash of Hillary's victory in Pennsylvania yesterday. Fading in and out of screenplay style, he offers mini-scenarios like:

CUT TO:
Harold Ickes hanging up the phone in his hotel suite, the Clinton delegate-counting center.

Ickes: Hey, I just got the lieutenant governor of—

Howard Wolfson: Have you seen Gore? (Grabs a remote, flips on CNN’s live coverage of Al Gore arriving at Denver airport.)

Ickes (shocked): Holy shit!

Wolfson: He’s lost, what, 30 pounds?

Ickes (still can’t believe his eyes): He looks like …

Wolfson: A fucking candidate!



CUT TO:
Al Gore passes through a hotel lobby and is swarmed by fans and delegates. The fat man from the sex scene fights his way close to Gore. A Gore aide whispers the fat man’s name to Gore.

Fat man: Hey, Al, remember me? I’m the lieutenant govern—

Gore: Hey, Pete, great to see you. Are you committed?

Fat man: Well, actually, I just said yes to Hillary, but if you throw your hat in the—

Gore: Hey, I’m just here to help any way I can.

Fat man: You look just unbelievable.

Another excerpt:

Hillary has never seen this kind of ruthlessness outside of her family. For the first time ever, the thought flashes through her mind that this guy could maybe turn out to be a good president, maybe he could stare down the Putins of the world.

Barack: When you walk out of here I’m going straight to a press conference and announce that when I get the nomination, my choice for VP will be Wesley Clark, and—

Hillary (laughs): Not gonna happen. Wes has been with my campaign from the start.

Barack (continuing): —and on the next ballot, the possible Obama-Clark ticket’s gonna get me the Arkansas delegation and another—what do you think—200 superdelegates at least?

Hillary: I’m not gonna let you have Wes for a phony unity ticket.

Barack: Too late. Michelle is meeting with him right now.

Barack’s iPhone buzzes. He checks it.

Hillary: He won’t accept anything without my—

Barack holds up the iPhone. close on text message: CLARK DEAL DONE. LUV U, M. Hillary looks pained—as much by the Clark deal as by the love in the Obama marriage. Barack gives her a moment to process the shock, then …



Barack (softly): I want you to come with me to the press conference.

Hillary: No way.

Barack: I need—

Hillary (bitterly): You don’t need me. You’ve got my biggest supporter as your VP. He’s got you covered now on foreign-policy credentials, military experience.

Barack: It’s not a unity ticket unless you say it’s a unity ticket. I want to tell the press that I asked you to be VP, you turned it down and suggested General Clark. I want to give you credit for saving the day, saving the party. I want you leaving Denver with your head held high.

Hillary: I, uh, I …

Barack: Wes has already agreed to that story.

CLOSE on Hillary, thinking about it …

Barack: I can win the nomination without you, but I can’t win the election without you. I need you, Hillary

Etc.

Being Tempted

Bear with me here. This might be a slipshod re-entry into the blogosphere, but I need to put something up here. For America, and for common decency. Especially, as it appears that the Al Gore train is moving again, despite the former vice president's assertions to the contrary.

So, it's June 2007 – nearly a year before the two major parties will formally announce their standard bearers for the 2008 Presidential election. Nonetheless, the news coverage of New Hampshire debates and candidacy travails would have the casual observer think that the general election will take place in five months, rather than 17.

And yet, one looming story remains so vitrious that the horse race commentators will not formally annoit a frontrunner – either for the Democrats alone, or between the two parties.

Time Magazine, whose website I too-often forget to check, captured whatever the few solid points that exist for this story in its May 16 cover story titled, "The Last Temptation of Al Gore."

The story carries on for many pages, but the basic theme is erected upon the foundation so obvious to anyone who might be reading that it's almost not worth reading. Rolling Stone published the same story in January here, under the less guised headline Why Al Gore Should run and How He Can Win. Even still, play along with me and the Time reporter anyway:

Let's say you were dreaming up the perfect stealth candidate for 2008, a Democrat who could step into the presidential race when the party confronts its inevitable doubts about the front-runners. You would want a candidate with the grassroots appeal of Barack Obama—someone with a message that transcends politics, someone who spoke out loud and clear and early against the war in Iraq. But you would also want a candidate with the operational toughness of Hillary Clinton—someone with experience and credibility on the world stage.

In other words, you would want someone like Al Gore—the improbably charismatic, Academy Award–winning, Nobel Prize–nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command. There's only one problem. The former Vice President just doesn't seem interested. He says he has "fallen out of love with politics," which is shorthand for both his general disgust with the process and the pain he still feels over the hard blow of the 2000 election, when he became only the fourth man in U.S. history to win the popular vote but lose a presidential election. In the face of wrenching disappointment, he showed enormous discipline—waking up every day knowing he came so close, believing the Supreme Court was dead wrong to shut down the Florida recount but never talking about it publicly because he didn't want Americans to lose faith in their system. That changes a man forever.

And yet, the Time reporter does pinpoint the one piece of news that keeps the Gore candidacy story current today, in June 2007. The former veep has published a book
entitled "The Assault on Reason." The New York Times has a review here. The Times' piece observes of the book:

But Mr. Gore writes not just as a former vice president and the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but also as a possible future candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 race for the White House, and the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.

The tenor of the discussion would suggest that a Gore candidacy is inevitable and, generally speaking, welcomed with exuberance. First, Mr. Gore remains front and center in the limelight of the "global" global warming conversation, playing a latter day Bob Geldof for the Live Earth benefit concerts scheduled for July 7.

Washington Post's Eugene Robinson seems to agree, if by means of veiled and backhanded support. He urges voters to "go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades."

And in his absence, several websites, led by two –
Draft Gore and Al Gore 2008 – are soliciting support for his candidacy in spite of his apparent reluctance to declare for 2008.

The inevitability, moreover, seems supported by history. I've long thought that a Gore ascendancy would mirror the rebound of Richard Nixon in 1968, but some are beginning to hint to another historical analogy – including, perhaps, the former veep in his book himself. At least, that's according to the Time reporter's view:

Gore often compares the climate crisis to the gathering storm of fascism in the 1930s, and he quotes Winston Churchill's warning that "the era of procrastination" is giving way to "a period of consequences." To his followers, Gore is Churchill—the leader who sounds the alarm. And if no declared candidate steps up to lead on this issue, many of them believe he will have a "moral obligation"—you hear the phrase over and over—to jump in.

By my read, the logical comparison need not be made to a former leader of another country, but to the American who stepped up against the Fascist tide.

Today won't be another backrub for historian Stephen Skowronek, such as which I was guilty here and
here.

But I get the sense that a President Gore from 2008-2016 could be another FDR. There I said it. More pressingly, if he doesn't get the Democratic nod, the GOP will win with its version of Jimmy Carter – a loosely affiliated party member who generally takes stands that oppose the mainstream of his party but who can take the November contest by virtue of his promises to tinker with the failing mechanisms of his own party. For what it's worth, a recent poll indicates that Gore beats the Republican Jimmy Carter in a heads-up contest:

Former Vice President Al Gore, who has not declared his candidacy for the 2008 presidential nomination, runs better in Pennsylvania than any Democrat against the Republican front runner, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Gore has 45 percent to Giuliani's 44 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Giuliani leads New York Sen. Hillary Clinton 47 - 43 percent and tops Illinois Sen. Barack Obama 45 - 40 percent, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds.

So there you have it – it's either draft Gore, and usher in the next wave of American Constitutional ascendancy, or get stuck with Guiliani or McCain and their descent into the abyss of trying to revive Reagan-Bush New Federalism as it goes into cardiac arrest.

Seems like an easy enough choice by my read.