Great. Now Cuomo is urging Gore to jump back in.
No, really, and it's Mario, not Perry.
I'm sorry, but what an asshole? Shouldn't he know better?
This just gets under my skin, because it is so typical of the freaking political establishment. You just can't pound some things through their thick skulls. How dense did you need to be to see that Gore would never excite the electorate before he ran. (And yes of course I was saying this in 1999. How hard was that?) After his disaster against the dufus, what more do you need? (He won a slight majority of the popular vote against a total nimrod when he had everything going for him to win a third Clinton term. Wow, great accomplishment.)
Thank God for Calvin Trillin. He made my night on Charlie Rose last week with this little observation:
"When they said about Al Gore: Well, he just has this horrifying inability to make contact with his fellow human beings, BUT ... {No emphasis I can create here can possibly capture the theatricality of how he wailed the "but."}
That pretty much said it all, but he continued, "That's like saying he's a great second baseman, but he can't make the double play, otherwise he's wonderful. Wait a minute, that's his job."
(Aside: I actually heard from a Salon blogger bragging the other day that Kerry was unexciting. Sorry dude, that's his job. Kerry is no Gore-alien, but he's got a bit of work to do in the charisma department.)
Al Gore's nomination should be laid out in textbooks as a prime example of a candidate that any fool can tell should not be running for president. And who virtually the entire contingent of beltway boys decided was the only conceivable choice for president, by virtue of holding the vice presidency, a job specifically reserved most years for presidential losers. Because those political imbeciles--and yes, in this regard, imbecile is too kind a word for them--christened him so unbeatable for the nomination that only the sleep-inducing Bradley would run against him, we were stuck with a miserable option who couldn't even beat the bumbler.
(And to a lesser extent they did the same thing with Bush, though that time it was mostly the Republican moneymen and Old Guard who refused to let McCain in when the R electorate began going wild for him. If McCain had run on the Dem side, he easily would have cast Gore aside and trounced Bush in November. But no one with any sort of appeal ran against Gore for the nom, so we were stuck with him.)
It was infuriating enough when the beltway boys foisted Bush and Gore on us the last time. Now some of them want to do it AGAIN! (God, even a Salon piece last December pegged Gore as the frontrunner for this election. I nearly choked. Even Salon. Luckily it was one of the few very-establishment editors who is no longer there.)
Luckily, Gore seems to know better, but they're determined to foist some other block of deadwood upon us instead--based on their same old tired checklist of inconsequential factors they worship.
WAKE UP! you morons in the establishment. There is a groundswell around Dean because he really ignites people. And a smaller one around Clark for similar reasons even before he has announced and has never run for office in his life. God knows, we may even witness a groundswell for Biden. (I wouldn't count on it, but who knows.) And maybe Kerry will get his act together and we'll see some real enthusiasm for him.
But the press remains grudging on Dean, and power brokers like the DLC are positively beside themselves. Time and Newsweek were finally forced to recognize his momentum this week, but only half-heartedly. Both began their stories by illustrating how his quest was probably hopeless. They came into his campaign with an agenda, and by golly and they're sticking to it. (Luckily some of the other media has been more willing to report what they're seeing, including several pieces in Slate, Salon, Dan Balz in the Washington Post and a wide assortment of other outlets.)
They'll do the same thing if and when Clark announces. They'll keep reporting his two percent poll showings as proof of his lunacy, as if his name recognition could escalate overnight. They are nursing a long, long love affair with the "conventional wisdom" they like to make fun of for its pathetic prediction rate, then immediately return to worshipping. It's pathetic, they're pathetic, why don't they just give it up?
Why not listen to what people are actually responding to, instead of your idiotic pre-conceived notions about who ought to get elected?
This just drives me nuts.
Dutton (Penguin) in 2007. 
