In a kind of intellectual parlor game, the journalist Joe Klein has toyed with the idea of how Al Gore could save the Democrats from a conceivable calamity in the making, one in which either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would face defeat as the party’s presidential nominee.
Klein’s idea is that Gore would be awarded the nomination and take Obama as his vice presidential running mate.
There can be little doubt what Republicans should say: Let it happen. Forget the candidates who have spent long, exhausting months winning delegates in primaries and caucuses while Gore sat by conveying misinformation about global warming. Let there be a mass desertion of women and blacks from the Democrats. Nominate this man, who couldn’t even carry his home state of Tennessee in 2000.
Of course, this almost certainly won’t happen, as Klein acknowledges while also putting himself in the position of the Grand Prophet of American Politics if, by some odds-defying miracle, the Democrats did decide to commit electoral suicide.
But even Klein’s wild speculation in Time magazine on a newly ascendant Gore reminds us of what a hero Gore remains to many. Why, just as Jimmy Carter has supposedly been the best ex-president ever, Gore has been the best loser of a presidential contest ever.
He won a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate clamor, after all, and let’s don’t forget that he really won the presidency in the run against George W. Bush. If justice had prevailed, some have insisted, America would now be purer and more successful than ever in her history.
Some response to such gibberish is in order, beginning with the news the left has missed; namely that Gore’s Oscar-winning movie on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was wildly amiss on many of its contentions. An English judge reflected on its scientific calculations before ruling the movie contained nine bigerrors, such as its claim of a 20-foot rise in sea level in the not-so-distant future.
When you get as much wrong as this movie did, you have to assume either 1) the people who made it did not work particularly hard at mastering their subject matter; or 2) they were engaged in bits and pieces of knowing fraud. The judge, who was deciding whether the movie could be shown in certain public schools, said it could be — but only if its contested assertions were noted.
It would be nice if, every now and then, the mythologizing Gore worshippers were also obliged — not by a judge, but by attention to the facts — to note what’s wrong with their version of how Gore won Florida in his run against President Bush, only to be cheated of his victory by Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court.
As The Examiner’s Bill Sammon reminds us in his book, “At Any Cost,” it was the Florida Supreme Court that acted in partisan fashion by calling for a selective recount without clear standards of determining voter intent on confusing ballots. Before arriving at a more controversial remedy, the U.S. court ruled 7-to-2 that the Florida decision was unconstitutional; it wasn’t just Republican justices who figured out as much. A later media recount showed Bush would likely have won in the state even if the Florida court had prevailed.
Klein, who once produced a novel about Bill Clinton, would need to give full vent to his prowess as a writer of fiction to produce an Al Gore who would have quit his endless fumbling had he become president, or who would be a better candidate today than either of the two battle-scarred Democrats now left standing.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
