Birds of a Feather (Gore and Dean)

Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean for President is a natural. These two guys are so much alike they could have been cast in that stupid new Siamese twin movie "Stuck On You."

Both were born in 1948, named after their fathers, and raised in luxury in big cities - Gore in Washington, DC and Dean in Manhattan. Both got elected to office in rural states with lots of hills. At least Dean actually moved to Vermont; for Gore, Tennessee was always a constituency, not a home, which was a big part of the reason the state didn't vote for him in 2000, which in turn is the reason he is not (shudder) President today. If the guy had carried his alleged home state, Florida wouldn't have mattered and the term "Dangling Chad" would still today refer to the guy on the next branch over from Tom Dooley.

(You didn't know about Dean growing up in NYC? Shame on you, I'm sure it's in all his literature and commercials. Well, gosh, I couldn't find it on his website, so I had to look on the CNN website: "The son of a stockbroker and art appraiser, Howard Brush Dean III was born November 17, 1948. He split his childhood between his family's residences on Park Avenue on New York's Upper East Side and in the Hamptons, a favorite stomping ground for New York's elite on southeastern Long Island." There it is. CNN wouldn't lie.)

And how about that middle name? Brush, one of the definitions of which (direct from my Random House Unabridged) is "a thick growth of bushes."

Gore had a brush with a bush back in Ought Ought. Now it appears to be Dean's turn.

Okay, let's get serious. Both Gore and Dean are liberal Democrats who like to masquerade as moderates when it suits their purpose. In their mountain constituencies, both cozied up to the NRA, for example - until they went national. Then their primary colors shone through and they disavowed whatever shred of moderateness they had assumed.

As a one-time event, such a flip-flop can reasonably be excused. A politician who says, "Yes, I used to feel that way, but now I feel this way," is at least telling you where he stands today, which is what you really care about. Nobody is going to vote for a Gore or a Dean thinking they are soft on the NRA.

But Gore and Dean are not one-time flip-floppers. They bounce around from day to day, and the result is that you don't know what to believe about them.

Writing in the New York Times, David Brookes says, "Dean has liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody."

Dean, Brookes believes, "is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence....When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there."

Couldn't that very statement have been written about Gore in 2000? Wasn't America thinking precisely that when they watched him morph from one person to another to a third in successive debates? Yes. And that's why he lost. By Election Day, the voters had no clear image of Al Gore, no answer to the question, "What kind of a person is he?" Like Brookes says about Dean, in the end, there was nothing there.

So far, Dean's approach to presidential politics looks a lot like Gore's, and that's good news for Republicans.

So is the fact that the Gore's teaming with Dean has far more to do with post-2004 internecine Democratic politics than it does with winning next year. This is all about control of the Democratic Party for the next two decades. Because one other thing Gore and Dean have in common is this: neither wants to let the Clintons back in.

To this day, Gore blames Bill Clinton for his loss, while Dean is (correctly) convinced that the Clintons have conspired to deny him the nomination, and do not in fact want him to win the Presidency if - as now appears likely - he is nominated.

So these two liberals are staking out their claim to leadership of that part of the Democratic to the left of Chappaqua. Alike as they are, their political strengths are complimentary - old hand Gore and fresh face Dean - and whatever happens in 2004, they represent the only alternative to subsequent Clintonist domination of the party.

My guess is the Dean-Gore marriage endures, not only because they have so much in common, but also because they need each other. Maybe not as much as the Clintons need each other, but quite a bit nonetheless, and they're more compatible.

Dean and Gore are the resons why the demorats are going to lose in 2004!! I mean lets look at the facts. When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he had all those stupid recounts. Even when President Bush was declared the winner for FL after the first recount Gore couldn't believe that he really lost, so he asked for 4 recounts!!! It's like what the signs said: Sore Losermen! Now Howard Dean,there's no way he's conservative! Sure the NRA may have liked him when he was governor of VT, but he just pretnded to be a moderate when he was really a flaming-libral, becuse he didn't think he was going to run for president. But than he started to see the democrats fall apart and lose the house and more. So he decides to run for president and show his real lift-winged views, and the dems are vary desperate and think a candidate who is very anti-war, anti-Bush, and soo liberal can actually get them the White House in 2004!! Well I'm glad to say they are in for a unpleasent suprise, when they see Dean become the next McGovern in 2004 and lose 48 states!!

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