Posted on 03/02/2007 1:34:39 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
JUST hours after Al Gore was fawned over by Leonardo DiCaprio and a host of other Hollywood luminaries at this week's Academy Awards ceremony, Hillary Clinton's top advisers got together to consider how best to handle what was threatening to become a tidal wave of pressure for Gore to run for the US presidency.
After careful consideration, they let it be known that they were going to continue to closely monitor Gore's weight. Several journalists were briefed on this by a "senior Clinton official" who said the Clinton team was on the lookout for any evidence that Gore is about to get himself a gym membership and a personal trainer - if he has not already.
Polls show Americans are now prepared to elect a woman president or a black president, but not a fat president. And Al Gore is fat, certainly much fatter than he was in 2000 when he won the popular vote against George Bush, only to be denied the presidency when the Supreme Court refused to allow a recount in Florida.
Many Democrats believe Gore was cheated of the presidency by a conservative majority of judges on the Supreme Court. They were furious, inconsolable. So was Gore, even though he publicly accepted the decision and graciously wished Bush success.
Gore disappeared from public view for months, travelling in Europe and sailing around the Greek Islands, wondering what to do next. He was a 52-year-old failed presidential candidate, who had served nine years in the Senate before he was chosen by Bill Clinton as his running mate in 1992. Politics had been his life.
What he did next was put on weight and grow a beard, a signal, said his wife, Tipper, that he was done with politics and done with Washington. The loss to Bush had been so personally traumatic that he determined that his political career was well and truly over.
So, fat matters with Gore: it is a sign of the level of his political ambition. That is why the Clinton camp reckons that if he hits the gym, it will be time for panic - it will offer compelling evidence that Gore will make a run for the Democratic Party's nomination, a move that would completely change the dynamics of the 2008 presidential race.
In particular, the dynamics would change for Clinton, who is struggling to overcome the perception among Democrats that she is too divisive a figure to win a general election. On top of that, the New York senator's refusal to completely repudiate her vote in 2002 to authorise the war in Iraq means she will never get the support of the party's activist base - the people who will play a key role in the party's primaries next year.
The Clinton campaign believes it can fend off the challenge from Barack Obama. While Obama remains a potent challenger who, according to the latest polls, is catching Clinton as the preferred candidate of registered Democrats, his lack of experience could prove too big an obstacle for him to overcome.
Gore, were he to run, would be an even more threatening challenge for Clinton. There are the Academy Awards for his documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and the fact that scalpers charge exorbitant prices for tickets to his sold-out speaking engagements.
Gore has spent the past six years campaigning on the threat of climate change, an issue whose time has finally arrived. On top of that, he has launched Current TV, a cable television channel for young people, has been appointed to the board of Apple, is a consultant to Google and a visiting professor at the University of Tennessee, in his home state.
All this is great for keeping his name in the public eye. On television he is invariably self-deprecating and funny, qualities he did not seem to possess in 2000, when he seemed wooden, unauthentic and in the thrall of his campaign consultants.
But the main reason Gore is such a threat to Clinton and, for that matter, to Obama and to the other contenders for the Democratic nomination is that he remains a political figure of substance, a former vice-president with the sort of experience that Obama cannot match and with a standing in the party - and in the country - Clinton would die for.
Gore has insisted he is not interested in running for office. His standard response to the question is: "I am not planning to run for president again." There is no committee canvassing prospective financial supporters and the half a dozen "Gore for President" websites are run by volunteers with no direct connections to Gore. But the speculation keeps bubbling along.
One of the factors that will influence his decision whether or not to run will be just how well Clinton performs in the next few months. If the polls go south for her, if the contest with Obama gets more bitter - and there were signs recently that it would after the Hollywood mogul David Geffen, a former Clinton supporter who is now backing Obama, said the Clintons were liars and that Bill Clinton was the same man he was six years ago - the chances of a Gore run would increase greatly.
He would certainly have one huge advantage over Clinton when it comes to winning Democratic Party primaries: Gore was always opposed to the war in Iraq.
"The chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam," he said before the invasion.
Key figures in the Democratic Party believe Gore will enter the race, probably in September, well in time to raise the money he will need in the run-up to the first primaries in January.
James Carville, a senior adviser to Bill Clinton who is still close to the Clintons, believes Gore will try again.
"I think he's going to run," Carville said recently. "Running for president is like sex. You don't do it once and forget about it."
The former president Jimmy Carter recently said he had called Gore so many times to press him about running that Gore had finally told Carter to stop calling him about it. "I don't know whether he will run, but his burning issue at the moment is global warming and preventing it," he said. "He can do infinitely more to accomplish that goal from the White House than he can making movies that get Oscars."
Gore may continue to insist he has no plans to run, but he certainly has plans to keep himself in the public eye. He will be the star witness at global warming hearings to be held by committees of both houses of Congress in three weeks.
In May, Gore will publish a book with perhaps the longest title in the history of US publishing. The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision Making, Degrade Our Democracy and Put Our Country and Our World at Peril is likely to be an instant bestseller and sounds very much like a presidential campaign manifesto.
And in July, he will star in a 24-hour "Save Our Selves" concert marathon that will include top musicians from across the world, including Australia. The organisers expect more than 2 billion people across the globe to either attend a concert or watch the event on television.
But in all the buzz and hype about Gore - the sober Financial Times recently called him a cultural icon - what is forgotten is that his 2000 campaign was widely viewed as a failure. Gore was labelled the presidential candidate who lost the unlosable election, a clumsy, geeky politician who tended to exaggerate his achievements - he once claimed to have invented the internet - who was, in the words of one commentator "uncomfortable in his own skin".
And, according to the conventional wisdom of the time, Gore made the fatal political mistake of distancing himself from Bill Clinton, who despite his impeachment and his sex scandals, left the White House with an approval rating of more than 60 per cent.
Some Democratic Party officials, even those who are actively encouraging Gore to run, are concerned that once he enters the political fray, the "old" inept Gore will return. According to some of his friends who have spoken about this to journalists, Gore's reluctance to re-enter the political fray is at least in part due to his enjoyment of his current role, that he is, in the words of one friend, "at peace with himself".
But the pressure on Gore to run is already immense and will likely grow in the coming months. He is the elephant in the room in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination - a rather large elephant at the moment but a few months in the gym would change that.
Furthermore, it's a real stretch to describe Gore's behavior as "gracious" after his people forced all the recounts AND the court cases.
"Gracious" would be better used to describe Richard Nixon who didn't put the country through that type of mess when Chicago precincts clearly needed to be audited after his "loss" to JFK and Johnson.
That would be too delicious a story...kinda like the story I heard this morning. Some genealogy freak "discovered" that Osama...I mean, Obama's maternal great-great-great-great grandfather owned slaves. How convenient!
I Think the Last Thing in the World the Clintons are Afraid of is Albert Arnold Gore; they will just Flick him Aside Like a Bug. (Their Power is Immense, and can Only be Limited by the God of Heaven.)
Large indeed !!
Well, make that a fat man president. Regarding the fat women, luckily for Hillary, that's a whole nuther matter.
Will they ever tire of this lie? - How many recounts did they need? They would surely have recounted until the cards fell into dust.
The Gore threat is more real than many here wish to come to grips with.
After the election debacle had been settled, in 2001, several media teams went to Florida to conduct their own investigations.
Mind you, these media teams were not members of the George-Bush-fan-club. Yet, every team that did their own investigation arrived at the same conclusion:
In nearly all ballot-interpretation scenarios, Bush won. Only in one extreme (read: absurd) interpretation scenario did Gore win. And even in that scenario, the results remaind highly, highly doubtful.
I always remind myself of this every time some idiot parrots the "Gore-won-the-popular-vote-so-he-should-have-been-President" nonsense. The Electoral College is there for a very balanced reason; so any numbskull (e.g. Hillary) who advocates getting rid of the Electoral College is being disengenuous and intellectually lazy.
Interesting article. My only question is, if Algore does indeed jump in, then who does Soros put his $$$ on?
Which, if he'd carried it in 2000, would have resulted in him gathering enough Electoral Votes to have been inaugurated on 20 Jan 2001.
Thank you, Tennessee!
Could well be, but I wouldn't be surprised if Algore has a few old memos and emails kicking around from his Veep days...
I agree. It will be interesting to watch. He may just give it a pass.
lol
I wish he would run! His followers, *The Children of the Corn*, would make a complete mess of the Dim primary.
Earlier candidate for title:
"Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice."
Great cartoon!
Right. They'll save that one for just before the election. Ha!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.