By Jim Sleeper
Whatever Al Gore’s shortcomings (and I wrote plenty about them in the 1990s), he has risen with impressive decency and effectiveness above setbacks I doubt I could have endured without succumbing to the mild derangement one finds in many a political “survivor.” Gore has only grown stronger. He’s been prescient about big changes in communications, in climates, even in the fog of war. And the best argument for his running for President is that a Gore-Obama ticket stands the best chance of bringing 16 years of seasoned sanity to the White House.
I have the campaign slogan ready: “Make it Right, America.” It means, “You know that you elected Gore in 2000, but see what you got instead. Make it Right.” The slogan blurs the moral and partisan meanings of “right” -- just in time for a political realignment beyond “liberal” and “conservative,” even “Democrat” and “Republican.”
There's only one small problem: Just what kind of political realignment would it be?
A really interesting answer is developing here at TPM Café. Yesterday Andrew Golis contrasted Barack Obama’s claim, “I have the capacity to get people to recognize themselves in each other,” with what he called the Right’s “dehumanization of some Other… on nearly every policy” – on immigrants, gays, Muslims, and, liberals, for instance.
The left has done that, too, I would add, in its overemphasis of diversity and in the more virulent of its racial and sexual identity politics. (Remember mau-mauing? The Weathermen? Rioting? Various kinds of sex police? Heterophobia?) Andrew commends Obama’s “new kind of politics,” which would work to end the “active demonization of political opponents” by doing more to “cultivate social empathy.”
more
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/specialguests/2007/may/24/gore_obama_and_a_coalition_against_the_politics_of_fear