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Edited on Tue Jan-23-07 08:13 PM by smalll
Many if not most people here at DU would like to see Al Gore run for President. He’d be an excellent candidate. He hasn’t jumped in yet, and he may never do so: he might think that the cause he has taken up, the survival of the planet itself, demands all his resources. Who can argue with that. On the other hand, if he were President, he could do so much for the world’s environment – not only with the power of the American Presidency, but also with the additional power he would have gained to help the world simply because he was elected by the American people in full knowledge of his devotion to the global warming issue. What a message that would send! One can say even that the planet might need Al Gore to run for its survival.
The planet may or may not survive without a Gore 2008 campaign; DU, I fear, cannot. DU NEEDS Gore to run: take a look at GDP these days – for all intents and purposes, it is “GD: 2008 Election Discussion” already. And it’s looking so ugly so early. How DU will be able to get through the primaries a year from now I don’t know.
And this “blocking” thing won’t help: I predict, if it hasn’t started already, that the vocal partisans of one candidate will start to block the vocal partisans of others. Give it time, there’ll be pms flying through the ether amongst the tribes: great long blocking lists, one to be executed by the Hillaryites, one to be used by the Clarkies, etc. etc. And as more and more of us actually get involved in this race an irresistible tide of mass blockings will roll in.
Only Al Gore could unify DU, it seems to me. If he got into the race, I think he’s a candidate that almost all of us could get behind. He could satisfy most of the Hillaryites, most of the Clarkies – most of the Edwardsians, the Back-Barackers, the Kucitizens, the Kerry supporters, with their romantic, Jacobite souls, longing for their own true Prince, even the odd Richardson-fancier or guy who thinks Biden’s not so bad really. If Gore ran, the upcoming election could actually be – *gasp* - a unifying, positive experience here at DU. Rather than its Armageddon.
(Disclaimer: recent member, lurked since November 2004 – so I never saw that year’s Primary Wars firsthand. But still, it seems so ugly so early, can DU really go through them again?)
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