OT - Al Gore to the Rescue?

The Gore Door
By David Michael Green
June 8, 2007

It'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 could be worse, true. But this is, nevertheless, an ugly time in
the historical journey of this nation, and the peril of the present
moment runs far deeper than middle America has begun to appreciate.
Just as a single plane crash is often more horrifying to people than
is the plethora of everyday car wrecks ultimately inflicting much more
carnage on the society in total, so it is that far too many of us are
not noticing our slow-motion national wreck, even as it transpires
before our eyes.

Make that wrecks, actually, for the crises are multiple, and they are
extensive.

You can play all the statistical games you want (Hey, have you heard?
National debt as a ratio to GDP over the population growth vector
times the inverse of Chinese export subsidy allowances is actually not
at historic highs!), but the truth is that we're handing over an
obscene pile of IOUs to our own children. Right now, each American
taxpayer owns about $60,000 worth of federal debt, a number which is
growing by about $2,000 with each year's additional deficit, and which
is compounded each day by additional interest on the loans as well.

You can bury your head so deep in the sand that the soles of your feet
get sunburned, but the idea that "we're fighting them over there so we
don't have to fight them here!" still cannot be made into a sensible
conclusion for sentient creatures. The nasty truth about Iraq will not
go away. Every additional day there is another day of fodder feeding
the booming output for the American hatred factory, as it stamps out
enemies of the United States faster than you can say "IED". Even if we
weren't bankrupting ourselves in Baghdad, and even if we hadn't broken
our Army there, as well as our National Guard and Reserves meant for
domestic crises, and even if we hadn't made the rest of the world hate
us, this adventure would still be a crisis of first proportions for
the United States.

And, perhaps most historically egregious of all (which is really
saying a lot!), you can keep cranking up your air conditioner till the
knob breaks off in your hand, but that won't change the facts about
the environmental destruction that a society in deep denial is causing
to its one and only life support system. Boy, is history going to
judge us harshly on this one, assuming there are any people left
around to be historians. And, boy, will we deserve that.

The list (sigh) goes on and on. From Florida to Ohio to the
(In-)Justice Department itself, American democracy is in crisis on
more fronts than I care to count. Our civil liberties are under siege.
Jobs are flying out the window. Our healthcare system is the pride of
the planet, as long as you're willing to leave aside those pesky
countries of the First and Second Worlds (and even some of the Third).
And so on, and so on.

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.

So, yeah, this is some pretty awful stuff, though we also don't want
to overstate the case. This isn't bad like Civil War bad. But it is
still quite disastrous, and it will get worse, even if we were to at
least stanch the bleeding today, without taking any remedial steps.
Say impeachment were to put an end right now to our lovely little
national project of inflicting greater and greater damage upon
ourselves (one of "Rumsfeld's Rules" - and, man, should he ever know:
"If you are in a hole, stop digging"). We'd still be suffering for a
long time to come. These guys have been so cynically clever with their
project from the beginning, and one of the smartest things they've
done is to temporally disengage consequences from their causes. We're
going to pay huge costs for their mistakes, that's for sure. But
they've made sure that those fees mostly come later, not during the
time the damages are being done. Kinda like Best Buy selling stereos.
We have the "No Payments Till January of 2009!" government, and it
works. Turns out you can sell wars, deficits and environmental
destruction that way too, not just appliances.

One of the many benefits of doing that (take careful notes here, all
you would-be Machiavellis) is that it produces a condition amongst the
public in which some substantial political wisdom and some real
attention to governance are required to recognize in the present tense
how profoundly destructive such regressive policies actually are.
Regrettably, not many Americans can claim either of those two
qualities, let alone both.

Truly this is one of the worst of times. But, all that said, I
actually believe that we stand today on the precipice of a possible
reversal of this ugly chapter in our history, and one of considerable
potential magnitude. Call it a case of national-scale lemonade-making.
Without question, there are a lot of ifs involved for this to
transpire. More challenging still is that hitting a few of these
conditionals is not enough - we more or less have to do them all. But
if we do - and I honestly don't think that even the collective series
is all that improbable - there is real potential here for something
positive to happen. And not just a Clintonesque, non-Bushist, version
of kinder, gentler corporate marauding. I'm talking about something
more akin to a latter day revival of the New Deal. In short, a truly
progressive political agenda for America.

The first thing that has to happen to achieve this is 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.

Given that core mission, it is impossible to imagine them reversing
the tax giveaways to the rich. Indeed, Bush is seeking to make them
permanent. Given that raison d'etre, it is impossible to imagine a
serious effort on global warming when so much oil and coal money is at
stake. Given that purpose, it is impossible to imagine a reversal on
Iraq short of Republicans in Congress dusting off their white robes
and pointy hats and forming a little posse for a brief cruise down
Pennsylvania Avenue (which could happen if Bush continues to be the
one-man GOP unemployment machine that he's become of late). Short of
that, however, what would Blackwater or Halliburton, let alone
ExxonMobil, say if we bailed on Iraq? No, John Bolton will be out
trick-or-treating for UNICEF before we see these guys change stripes.

Of the several things that need to happen for an American progressive
revival, you can count this one as a sure thing. Bush will certainly
continue to pursue his disastrous policies. Moreover, my gut has never
been surer of anything than that scandal in this administration runs
deep and wide. I doubt seriously that it can all continue to be
bottled up, even though the contemporary Democratic Party would
probably attempt the physiologically impossible act of running from
its own spine, should it ever happen to accidentally stumble across it
tucked away in a broom closet somewhere. Bush will keep pursuing his
unpopular policies till the bitter end. Scandals great and small will
continue to emerge during the same period. And the public's attitude
toward him will thus migrate from exhausted disdain to active disgust
to simmering anger to and perhaps even to a bubbling boil. And that,
ladies and gentlemen, is a good thing for those of us hoping to
advance a progressive agenda in this country.

Bush's follies will also, secondly, continue to increase the visceral
unease of America's great apolitical center, a cohort which generally
avoids politics, and does so in part for good reason. These are the
people who could be readily persuaded that Saddam was a threat and
that if the president says we need to go to war, no doubt he knows
best. They're also the people who think, four years later, that
something was not right about that whole Iraq thing, and that probably
the troops ought to come home. More importantly, they're the people
who generally see that the country is a train gone off the rails.
Indeed, that is the very question which pollsters continually pose to
them, and the proposition that America is on the right track today has
pathetically few subscribers. A whopping 25 percent of us agree with
that notion, with nearly three times as many disagreeing, the worst
it's been in at least a decade, if not ever. Sixty percent of
Americans think things are going worse today than they were five years
ago, versus 18 percent who think they are better. More Americans think
things will be worse five years from now than think things will be
better. More Americans think the next generation will be worse off
than think it will do better. And 76 percent of us say they are angry
about the way things are going in the country, compared to only 21
percent who report themselves as being content. The portrait these
numbers paint is not exactly a picture of health for any modern
polity.

Most Americans couldn't identify the exact source of their anger and
their anxiety, but they know that things are not working right, and
they have lost faith in the present government to solve these
problems. To make the leap to progressivism, there needs to be more of
that, and given time there will be. The flame underneath this kettle
must be turned up, to the point where the Bush administration and the
regressive movement it leads are not only seen as unable to solve the
problem, but as its actual source. Maybe Reagan was right, after all,
at least if we slightly modify one of his most famous aphorisms:
"(This) government is not the solution, (this) government is the
problem."

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.

I could be wrong, but my take on Gore is that he's walked away from
the bull*** part of politics, forever. I think that if he ran, he
would run with a sincerity and a passion for real issues that have
been long and tragically absent from an American political landscape
far too frequently populated with either scary sociopaths of the right
or apolitical opportunists of the center. Indeed, given what Gore has
already committed to the public record, both verbally and in print, he
would almost have to run as the sort of straight-talking candidate
John McCain can only pretend to be in countless consultant-crafted,
focus-group tested, 30-second spots. And I don't think the importance
of this quality, were it to actually show up, should ever be
underestimated. Even though they far too often cave-in to the guy who
tells them what they want to hear, Americans also desperately crave
authenticity in their politics. The first person to come along and
really speak honestly with the public is going to turn a lot of heads.
First in shock, then in admiration, finally in devoted support.

So 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."

Those previous Democratic bids were cautious campaigns of calculated
centrism, devoted to winning the presidency for the candidate, as
opposed to for any sort of cause. Today, I don't think that is what
animates Al Gore, for he 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.

The same is true when it comes to the matter of taming of press. I
would expect them to also fall apart the minute they are outted.
Imagine if, when they tried their usual deprecations, candidate Gore
turned to the public, going over the heads of the media, and simply
said "When are you going to investigate the Bush administration?" I
think the American media knows full well how culpable they are for the
mess that is Bushism. I think they are scared to death that anyone
might expose them for their part in that disaster, for their
cowardice, their complicity and their cooptation. We know for sure
that the press can readily be bullied. A truth-speaking Al Gore could
keep them constantly on the defensive for their rightward bias, their
favoring of Bush, their savaging of Clinton and their complete failure
to do their job during the Bush administration. He could do what the
right has done for twenty years now - but using intimidation based on
truth rather than on lies - and make them self-conscious and self-
editing, just as the whole 'liberal bias' shtick has so successfully
worked for the Dark Side.

But, of course, righting the wrongs of the last quarter-century is
just the beginning. There is a lot to say for that alone, but the
point of governing (as long as we are indulging our fantasies here)
should be to advance an agenda which positively serves the public
interest, and here is where we can envision the possibility of a
progressive resurgence in America, without first having to imbibe
massive quantities of hallucinogens in order to make it seem remotely
plausible.

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.

No wonder they've already started savaging him, even while he says he
has no plans to run. Like a hurricane gathering energy at sea, they
recognize his potential.

And like a Potemkin village on the shore awaiting the storm's
devastation, they also recognize the complete vacuousness, and
therefore the utter vulnerability, of their own project.

.