The Politics Of Fear

[Prophet 451]

When An Inconvienient Truth won the Oscar, I was chatting on another message board and one of the posters there is a die-hard Republican. You know the kind, Reagan walked on water, GW hasn't made a single mistake and is probably incapable of doing so, Faux News is both fair and balanced, the whole nine yards. Anyway, he instantly starts in denouncing AIT as a pack of lies (his words) and hammering on Al Gore personally, claiming he made millions off the film (I neither know nor care if that's true), the usual stuff about Gore's personal carbon footprint. That's when it hit me. That's when I understood why Gore must run.

The right is terrified of this guy. They're not scared of Hillary. Hillary is a known quantity, they could deal with Hillary. They're a little nervous about Obama but they figure they could keep him out of the presidency somehow or other (coded race-baiting is always an option). Wes Clark, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards don't even figure in their reckoning but Al Gore frightens them. They have no slime left to throw at him. They could always recycle the lies from the 2000 campaign but in today's soundbite political culture, those have a "seen it all before" air to them. They could try telling stories about his personal carbon emissions but firstly, they've already played those and secondly, the technical details of global warming, carbon offsets and so on are kinda complicated, it's questionable if Joe Six-Pack will understand them. Between his built-in support from both enviromentalists and techies (we know that he really was a big part of the birth of the net), name recognition (which is probably higher now than it was as VP and how depressing is that?), he could raise a massive campaign chest in almost no time and, most importantly, today's Gore is a far cry from the stiff, somewhat wooden guy he was in 2000. Today's Gore is charismatic, passionate and articulate.

This is not to say that the presidency is Al's by default. Even if he runs, he would have to gain the nomination but such is his momentum right now that he would have to be considered the front-runner as soon as he declared. Even after he secures the nomination, he must campaign against the media (who hate Gore with a passion and always have), whomever the Republican's nominate and Karl Rove (assuming he's not in jail by then). Rove is probably the biggest factor. Rove's pattern has always been to make a campaign so bruising, to throw so much poison that even if the other guy wins, he's a broken man. Al Franken in The Truth (with jokes) tells a story about a candidate who did a lot of work to help disadvantaged children. So Rove started the rumour that he was a paedophile. That's the kind of tactics Gore will have to be on-guard against and that may well be what's kept him from announcing his candidacy already. the process of running for office is hard enough, add in Rove and the drain on one's patience, energy, the damage to one's family becomes incalculable. However, if Al Gore can be convinced that he can do more in the Whitehouse than outside it, if he is moved to feel that he can do more to save the planet with his hands on the levers of power, he may yet declare himself. And if he does, the nomination and the presidency are his to lose.

[porphyrian]

1. I'll kick that. - n/t