Gore to endorse Dean

catty-- you should be in the dean group! we're meeting tomorrow night at the harrow pub (22 whitefriars st, off fleet street) at 7:00. it'll be fun! if you want more details or can't make it but want to hear about events, send me an email at [email protected]

To attempt to clear the field, so that the "seven dwarves" debacle of 88 doesn't happen again.

Also to get himself (Gore) in a position of power in the party (assuming Dean wins, it's a gamble but it could pay off), and possibly to seperate himself from the Clintons/build his own power base/challenge Hillary in 2008?

no way ... Bushco are def. the Scumdogs of the Universe busy trashing This Toilet Earth!

The answer to my question is that Gore made his announcement for purely selfish reasons. The "end the bickering" bullshit is just that--bullshit. The voting public, or at least the part of the swing vote that matters, will not even start paying attention until next summer. This is an utterly embarassing move by Gore that only serves to underscore his incredible irrelevance on the national political scene.

The first female Presidential candidate will come from the GOP, if she can survive the primaries. Democrats won't go after gender as the far-right would.

I'm not sure Dean could beat Bush, but things are so screwed up and if they get worse, who knows...no one at this point would have ever thought Clinton could get elected in 92. Dean has quite a bit of cash and has basically said, I'm open for business by not taking matching funds. Either way, I think Bush will duck and cover when it comes to debates in 04.

All I have to say is I think some campaign consultants (and related buisnesses) are going to make some serious change on both sides of this next election.

Hillary Clinton is a talk show canidate. I don't think she has a snowball's chance in hell of ever being elected president. She will have a tough enough time being re-elected senator next time if she has to run against Rudy (which could be the mother of all mud fights).

Colin Powell has not and proabably will not ever run for public office. I think after this term as Secretary of State, he will retire.

Actually, I think the reason that we're more likely to see the first non-white or non-male president come from the GOP has more to do with simple electoral arithmetic: ie., the GOP has more to gain from runnning a non-male of non-white candidate. Ie., minorites and women already substantially vote Democratic, so the Democratic party has less to gain from running a candidate from those groups. Whereas, for the GOP, running a minority or woman candidate represents the chance to capture key swing votes without having to make any policy sacrifices.

And making the announcement in Harlem...muahahahahahahahahhaah.

I think he will retire to his memoirs sometime in early 2005.

http://www.talkingpresidents.com/product-images/af-coulter-box.jpg

I see how Gore and others are rationalizing this, but to me it overwhelmingly reeks of ego.

And am I supposed to really believe that it took Gore this long to figure it out? I don't have a problem with acting in self interest; this all just seems a little crassly opportunistic.

aha
Gore, who captured the popular vote but lost the electoral count to George W. Bush, said Dean's stance against the war, above all else, swayed him.
"I realized it's only one of the issues, but my friends, this nation has never in our two centuries and more made a worse foreign policy mistake," Gore told several hundred people at a downtown convention center.
The force of his Iraq criticism was a not-too-subtle indictment of the four candidates who backed the congressional resolution on Iraq, including Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman

(still should've been prez.)

So can you explain why the Democrats won't unite behind Dean, if it appears he's pulling away from the other candidates at a rate of knots. This is quite complicated, isn't it?

I have no problem with people changing their minds--that's not the issue here anyway. Gore's kind of latched onto populism since he blew the 2000 election, and it's not surprising in that context that he found an emotional aspect of Dean's campaign appealing. But that really doesn't do a good job of explaining his actions or his words, something that I am very surprised by. The timing is odd, the way he never told Lieberman is odd. I say it's crass, even.

what's most interesting about him is, as i've said before, he represents more a "radical moderate" position.

x-post

While I do think Gore was entitled to make his endorsement, I wonder if perhaps his implication that the other contenders should lay down their rhetorical swords and rally around Dean smacks of hubris. William Saletan makes this point on Slate today, and I tend to agree with him.

The bickering in the party is ridiculous & it's pissing me off -
here's an excerpt of today's message from the DLC. Nothing beats upscale liberals attacking others by calling them upscale liberals. The "Kucinich-lite" and "anti-testing zealots" smears were tops, too. These guys sound like such a bunch of jackasses lately.

re: Dean
"Is the excitement of his core supporters contagious to those swing voters that he has so often dismissed as irrelevant? Can the Dean campaign diversify, transcending its early origins as a sort of therapy group for upscale liberals? Will the candidate learn to take the cultural issues that many voters care passionately about more seriously? Can he become more self-disciplined in his off-the-cuff remarks, which are storing up treasure for Republicans in the fall? [...]

Dean has rightly boasted of a fine centrist record as governor of Vermont, but his light-on-issues, heavy-on-anger presidential effort has borne little resemblance to that record. [...] He's flip-flopped on trade, adopting a Kucinich-Lite position that repudiates the Clinton legacy of trade expansion and a centuries-old Democratic tradition of support for open trade. Can he explain what he would do to make his "fair trade" rhetoric actually work for a stronger economy? He's the one candidate who's called for repeal of the No Child Left Behind education reform initiative, thrilling anti-testing zealots who don't seem to mind failing schools for poor and minority kids."

Go, circular firing squad, go! You have the power!

I don't think Dean's an asshole, that's going too far, but yeah, he can be totally pigheaded about insisting that he is right. It's an advantage, for sure, especially with a lazy media..

Every now and then a random anecdote shows up that gives you an idea of how self-assured Dean must be, and I often find them totally hilarious. Such as, buried in the Gore endorsement stories was the mention of Dean meeting Gore back in December 97 (maybe the reporter got the date wrong, but I hope it was 97) when he went to Washington and told Gore he planned on challenging him for the Democratic nomination in 2000. Gore wasn't happy about this.. I'm trying to picture Gore & Clinton talking afterward: "The governor of Vermont just showed up & said he's going to run against you two years from now? WTF?!!"

What, exactly will a national generic test do to help anything? Dumb.

Daria--I meant that Dean was an asshole in a good way. His assholeness appeals to me. But that's about it. At least if he were POTUS then we would be back to the age of purple fits instead of dudes who can run 6 minute miles (!) and have a resting pulse of 28 or whatever GWB has. Assholes are much more colorful.

Don't a lot of students still manage to fail those damn tests? it's appalling. I don't understand, also, the DLC dude's implying that if you're against giving teachers a mandate to use these stupid tests that don't measure the skills you need for college, well, you must be a racist. Um, of course I'm against failing schools! Duh! I'm also against the way test scores seem to let failing schools pretend like they're improving when they're not.

The Washington Post put up an article about how some Republicans are kind of concerned about Dean. Check it out:

One longtime Republican operative conjured his idea of Dean in debates. "He'd be like Jack Nicholson in 'A Few Good Men,' " the operative said. "When he's being questioned, he gets redder and redder, like his head is exploding, and then he blurts out, 'You can't handle the truth.' Dean is just exactly like that. I see it written all over him."

How cool would THAT be.
Koppel: "Is there ever a time when the President of the United States can lie to the American people?"
Dean: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"

Did I call it or what? Now let's see how I do on the rest.