Gore 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 whatever!!! (Barf alert)

Gore in the Balance: I hadn’t intended to read that Gore book on families. I expected it to be a sugary celebration of home and hearth, a public-relations exercise aimed at convincing suburban moms and other swing voters that Gore was not in fact an android but a man with a heart as big as all of Tennessee. In other words: something yucky.

Not so, according to Andrew Hacker, a very smart left-wing sociologist, in the current (Dec. 5) issue of the New York Review of Books. Hacker contends that Joined at the Heart follows in the tradition of Earth in the Balance: another Gore production written in a voice of almost terrifying frankness. In 1992, Gore told us that if he ever became president, he would dismantle the American economy in the name of environmental regulation. Ten years later, he is ready to execute similar destruction on the American family. I think I am going to have to read the dratted thing after all.

Hacker’s article is not posted online, so I will quote rather than link - but do read the whole thing if you can.

“Joined at the Heart is relentlessly upbeat. Instead of deploring the ubiquity of divorce and part-time parenthood, the Gores applaud the ‘explosion of new family forms and novel solutions to age-old problems.’ ... So we meet Mitch and Cindy, Pat and Todd, Josh and John, and Minh and Thanh, people they’ve talked to, and whose households, we are told, suggest the different kinds of family life that lie ahead. ... Apart from two newlyweds, a gay couple, and some immigrants, almost everyone cited in the book has divorced and remarried at least once. This, the Gores suggest, is becoming the norm, and they ask their readers to be open to new ideas about what can constitute a family.

“To be sure, it would be inaccurate to say that the Gores are ‘pro-divorce.’ No one is. ... [But] their general position is that marital break-ups deserve understanding rather than reproof or disapproval. ... So it is not surprising that they quote Mavis Hetherington, a University of Virginia psychologist who likes to point to people whose lives ‘were really enhanced after divorce.’ However even she admits that only one in four divorced women would make this claim. One wonders why the Gores didn’t talk with any of the other three whose lives didn’t improve or may have gotten worse. They also cite a study which found that ‘fifty percent of divorced adults were still angry at their ex-mates ten years later.’ But signs of such rancor are nowhere in their book. ...

“The Gores cite a study of divorces that found that ‘while sixty percent of the adults involved said they had been in favor of it, only ten percent of the children were.’ However they prefer to rely again on the views of Mavis Hetherington. ‘Most children of divorced families turn out to be no different than those who grew up in married families,’ they write, echoing her opinion. ... Still, what won’t go away is the figure the Gores cite: nine out of ten affected youngsters wish it hadn’t happened.”

What we are seeing here is the reinvention of Gore – the emergence of a new Gore who is more economically radical (the endorsement of single-payer healthcare), more dovish (the attacks on Bush’s Iraq policy), and who now is moving hard to the left in the one area where even conservatives had to admire his values and his conduct: social and family policy. Sometime early next year, Gore will announce his intention to seek the presidency for the third time. And this time, he is giving us all fair warning of the kind of president he would be.

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