Posted on 11/26/2002 9:20:29 AM PST by Wright is right!
Do We Have to Call You Al?
By FRANK RICH
"Tomorrow night Liza Minnelli returns," said Larry King on Wednesday night. But while America held its breath, Al Gore was getting more airtime than "The Bachelor." You could wake up to him and Tipper on the "Today" show. You could drift off to dreamland watching him with Charlie Rose. The man who went AWOL in defeat was back — to sell not one but two new books (Mr. Gore can leave no lily ungilded) and, of course, himself.
The books celebrate The Family, the one cause every Democrat feels compelled to embrace after Monicagate. The reviews for the author are thumbs up. "He's even, if you can believe it, funny," said Barbara Walters. "I think you've gotten funnier in two years," gushed David Letterman to the former vice president. The new, post-wooden Gore is determined to be spontaneous if it kills him, and us. "I am just letting my hair down," he says, as in interview after interview he quotes a boomer mantra: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." From now on, he is going to "just let it rip" and "let the chips fall where they may." Next month he's a host on "Saturday Night Live."
But it took Katie Couric all of three minutes to uncover the old Al Gore lurking inside the latest model. When he protested that he wouldn't really, really decide whether to run for president until after the holidays, she spoke for many viewers by responding, "Why am I having a hard time believing that wholeheartedly?" Then came the Gore equivocation and hair-splitting that he perfected in the 2000 debates. Ms. Couric had to ask seven questions to pin him down on how he would "handle Saddam" if he were president. The answer? He said that President Bush was taking "the right course of action" by winning a unanimous Security Council vote. And now what? "I don't know where this goes from here," said Mr. Gore.
People don't change. Mr. Gore doesn't let the chips fall where they may; you can still spot him counting each one before doling them out. And of course he is still running for president. Polls of Democratic voters and politicians alike show that he remains the first choice of a plurality of them, and besides, what else does the guy, a political lifer, have to do with himself?
Republicans profess to be delighted at this prospect while non-Gore Democrats are despondent. They are united in their recognition that he is the least spontaneous presidential contender since Richard Nixon, who similarly kept rolling out "new" incarnations of his public persona after each defeat. But Nixon did bounce back, and from a worse setback than Mr. Gore's: He lost his own state even more embarrassingly, in a failed post-vice-presidency run for governor, and then threw a public temper tantrum to blame his own failings on the press. Six years later he took the White House anyway, at a time when the country and the party in power were both traumatized by a war without end.
So many have written off our former vice president in 2002 that the conventional wisdom could be as wrong about him as it was about the former vice president of 1962. Yet if Mr. Gore — or the tongue-tied party he all too perfectly embodies right now — is going to be taken seriously by voters, "I don't know where this goes from here" will hardly do.
What will? In the aftermath of the election, I received hundreds of e-mails from readers suggesting what Democrats might stand for today after standing for nothing brought them their Nov. 5 debacle. "It need not be such a complicated question," wrote one correspondent, cutting to the chase for many others. "Stand up honestly and courageously for workers, consumers, voters, investors, people who breathe air and drink water and eat food. Do what's best for them. Big business can take care of itself."
That traditional party ethic is embryonically reflected in the domestic policy staples emerging so far among pundits and most Democrats running for president, Mr. Gore included: some kind of universal health insurance (bothersome details and price tags to come during primary season), a fast Democratic tax cut for the non-rich in lieu of the slo-mo Bush windfall for the upper brackets, fights for the environment and civil liberties and against hard-right judicial appointments and corporate malfeasance.
But none of it addresses the reality of post-election-November 2002, when each day brings news that Osama bin Laden and his minions are alive and hard at work, that the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism efforts remain slack and that the war on Saddam Hussein has started "in everything but name," as ABC News put it on Wednesday night. At a time like this, in the words of Heather Hurlburt of The Washington Monthly, "a party that comes across as unserious about national security is permanently vulnerable, no matter how compelling its vision of domestic policy."
Not every Democratic politician is unserious about national security. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman notwithstanding, the most urgent voice this fall is that of Bob Graham of Florida, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Working from two realistic premises — that it's likely "we've only got about 60 days" before the Iraq war starts for keeps and that Saddam will pull every terrorist lever he can once it does — Senator Graham has been demanding concrete action, especially from an F.B.I. that he discovered still had not completed a strategic plan for coping with terrorism within the United States, first ordered up by Congress in 1999.
He further warns that Hezbollah and Hamas are at least as threatening as Al Qaeda to Americans both at home and abroad, especially once the war on Iraq is fully joined. In league with his Republican counterpart on the Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, he calls for the war on terror to be extended without further delay, whether by diplomacy or force, to Hezbollah training camps in Iran, Syria and the Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon. He dismisses the bipartisan self-congratulation about Washington's panacea, a new Department of Homeland Security that may not be up and running for years and that even then will exclude the F.B.I. and C.I.A. "I don't think we have the time in the next 60 days to be moving organizational charts around," Senator Graham told CNN, later observing that this chaotic bureaucratic shuffle may actually bring us "some degree of lessened domestic security" at the moment of greatest urgency.
There might yet be a Democratic foreign policy to complement a national security policy. But at this point an antiwar policy is hardly in the cards; the only party leader who voted against the war resolution, Nancy Pelosi, is so easily distracted by predictable attacks on her as a "San Francisco Democrat" that she is too busy defending her own family bona fides (five children, five grandchildren) to say much coherent about Iraq or anything else.
"The Democrats should start standing up for certain core principles that were historically Democratic principles under Truman, F.D.R., J.F.K. and, for that matter, Clinton," proposes Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton ambassador to the United Nations. "Democrats should go back to advocating strong support for democracy and human rights. Nor should they be afraid to use power to defend either American interests or values." Another core Democratic principle, as Mr. Holbrooke has long pointed out, is that America should seek to strengthen the U.N. — an approach that polls consistently show most Americans support. But such was the desperation of Democratic leaders to "move on" from Iraq and talk about the economy during the campaign that it is Colin Powell and Tony Blair, not they, who are now identified with pushing the administration toward the tough Security Council resolution it at first so strenuously resisted.
But the Democrats who signed on to this war have an opening now to stake out a position on where and how it will end. The Bush administration is internally conflicted on this crucial point — witness the mixed signals and frightening disarray in post-Taliban Afghanistan. When will we have won the war on Saddam? What kind of nation-building are we in favor of, and at what sacrifice? What is Plan B if the Middle East doesn't fall into place after regime change in Baghdad? The list of questions crying out for Democratic answers is as long as the list of fears that shadow America during holiday season 2002. At the very least Mr. Gore, the only Democrat to command a media spotlight at this pivotal moment, might speak up about "where this goes from here" rather than playing peek-a-boo about where he goes from here. Even if he is on hold, history is not.
Frank Rich is the former Theater Critic for the Times who got kicked upstairs.
Michael
Probably because that shows that she is a "real" person, despite the fact that the children were probably raised by servants. (Or child care and private school, which ammounts to the same thing.)
It must be awfully clueless to be Al.
Michael
This was the suggestion by one of the "correspondents" to Frank Rich, advising what Democrats should do now. Let's pick this apart:
"Stand up honestly and corrageously"... this coming from the politicians who called Bill Clinton one of our greatest presidents... the politicians who argued he shouldn't be impeached because "what harm can he do in the remaining 2 years of his presidency."
"Stand up for workers": by keeping the Ponzi Scheme of Social Security creaking along knowing it will crash and burn in about 15 years.
"Stand up for voters and consumers": well, that's about everybody that votes, right? I'm not sure what this person thinks should be done for voters (count Demo votes twice?). For consumers: how about helping people keep more of their hard earned money so they can consumer more or have some savings after necessary consumption. Maybe if they reduced the regulatory burden on companies (and controlled crazy ambulance chasing lawyers) prices would be lower and consummables would be more affordable.
Finally "Stand up for people who breathe air and drink water and eat food." Well, that is a big audience. Since air and water quality has been relentlessly improving the past 30 years, I think we're on a decent path no matter who is in charge in Washington. So maybe the Demos have an opportunity to exploit the recent problems in food safety -- a rather narrow niche for the future of the Demo party.
I can't. It is too painful. Especially after 9-11. I would suggest that his PC sensitivity would have meant the suffering of more large scale attacks since then--not that they still won't happen....
Al Gore has found a new excuse to explain all his woes : Post-Modernism !!!
Gore begins by complaining that he can't get a fair shake out of the media, which mocks and lampoons him ... Mocked and Lampooned by Leno every night, the idea that Gore is as dull as a 2-by-4 eventually becomes part of "the fabric of the zeitgeist" ... (Should anyone ever be elected president who used the word "zeitgeist" in normal conversation ???) ...
Sounding every day more like Chomsky, Gore complains that the media is unserious and not focused on the real issues because it is "financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations" ... Their hired thugs are paid to lampoon him ... Yes, SNL is really part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" ...Endlessly lampooned, a man who would really "fight for the people" is barred from higher office ...
No doubt any day Gore will take the next Chomsky step ... since media-for-profit allows the "zeitgeist" to be the plaything of "billionaires," media (like medicine) must be socialized by the government and run on a non-profit basis by civil servants totally / selflessly dedicated to the public trust ...
As odd as that sounds, I must add that the first essay George Orwell got a check for writing was a piece for "GK's Weekly" (as in GK Chesterton) on how the billionaires control the media and must be broken / broken up by the government ... In addition to wanting to keep the Fleet Street billionaires' hands off the zeitgeist, Chesterton also used "GK Weekly" to run a crusade against the Cadbury chocolate bar trust (insert your own joke) ...
But the real shocker of Gore's attack on the media that the media is too POST-MODERN :
http://www2.observer.com/observer/pages/frontpage1.asp
For now, Mr. Gore can only attempt to explain what motivates the ceaseless lampooning he continues to face from America's columnists and commentators. "That's postmodernism," he offered. "It's the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism, and that's another interview for another time, if you're interested in it."
Again, as with "zeitgeist," I'm not sure if anyone who knows the word "post-modern" should be allowed to campaign for high office ... These are words that are best treated as abstract jokes ... Like the movie where WC Fields throws around the word "technocracy" for laughs ...
But the more I thought about it, the more I concluded that Gore would be the natural enemy of "Post-Modernism" ...
Here is a nice SHORT description of Post-Modernism :
http://jonmattox.com/grids/ideas/postmodernism.html
Lets look at some of the main points :
PoMo doesn't take itself seriously -- Already it is chaffing against Gore
PoMo is against "grand theory" / "metanarrative" and for "multiple-interpretations-of-the-text" / "schizophrenia"-- "Environmentalism" is nothing is not a "metanarrative" -- all things must be judged by one standard -- how they effect "the earth in the balance" ... In the 80's, scholars would write that America loved Reagan because America was "Post-Modern" and I was amused by the buzzword ... Rethinking those old arguments, now I'm no longer amused, simply convinced ...
PoMo is for a sense of fun -- In a key Post-Modern manifesto, architect Robert Venturi said that people must start "Learning From Las Vegas" -- Can you think of anyone who has learned less from Las Vegas than Gore ???
As the final stage in the crisis of Capitalism, PoMo is for the "inflation of theory" and the "overproduction of artifacts" -- What environmentalist can be for "overproduction" ??? And all that "theory" is just going to mean more landfills ...
In 1979, critic Clement Greenberg, the Patron Saint of AB-EX / the man who made Pollock a household name, said PoMo is "the antithesis of everything he loved" ... "a lowering of aesthetic standards caused by the democratization of culture under industrialism" :
" ... it's an excuse to pile together oodles of wild and crazy decor ..."
Doesn't this sound like the "Bush is Popular because Bush is Stupid" argument ???
No one would ever describe Gore as having "oodles of wild and crazy" anything ... And since the "billionaires" controlling the "zeitgeist" have given America a constant lust for "oodles" of the wild and crazy, I can see why Gore hates Post-Modernism ...
Personally, I want "oodles" of wildness and craziness and so I say, keep the zeitgeist plowing ahead at full speed ...
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