If Only...

I couldn’t help notic­ing an edi­to­r­ial in the St. Peters­burg Times by Robyn Blum­ner that dared utter the words “Gore” and “Democ­rats should enlist in 2008″ in the same para­graph. Ms. Blum­ner voiced what I’ve been feel­ing for quite some time; that there are no good Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­dates will­ing to run for the Pres­i­dency in 2008. Gore, unlike the drool­ing idiot who sits in the White House, would be “an Adult”, and like Ms. Blum­ner, I believe that these days the US needs an Adult at the helm pretty badly. The edi­to­r­ial says:

Amer­ica is ready for an adult like Gore to take charge and put the nation back on sen­si­ble foot­ing: a foot­ing where deficits do mat­ter, where energy con­ser­va­tion is not sneered at as a “per­sonal virtue” but is an aggres­sive national pol­icy, and where sci­ence, facts and real­ity drive pub­lic pol­icy, not the Chris­t­ian Right’s neo-medieval agenda.

My other favourite quote from the edi­to­r­ial is from Gore him­self, who said in a Rolling Stone interview:

“Right now we are bor­row­ing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unsta­ble region of the world, and to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the hab­it­abil­ity of the planet. That is nuts! We have to change every aspect of that.”

Ms. Blum­ner men­tions the “Draft Gore” move­ment on the Inter­net (www.draftgore.com) that’s try­ing to get him to recon­sider run­ning (he has no plans, and has made this clear).

While I wish Mr. Gore were a can­di­date, I’m also real­is­tic about his chances, which are next to none (although that’s bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton, who would be a dis­as­ter). Until he can get past the Repub­li­can con­trol of the vot­ing machines, draw­ing up of dis­tricts, and judi­cial branch if there are dis­putes about the vot­ing, the out­come is still going to be a Repub­li­can vic­tory. With a press largely con­trolled by cor­po­rate inter­ests who only want the image of an excit­ing con­test but the out­come of their choice (i.e., a can­di­date friend­lier to cor­po­ra­tions. which is usu­ally a Repub­li­can), the best a can­di­date who tells the truth about Global Warm­ing and what the US must change can do, is scream into the wind. Then they’ll be dis­missed as crazy and hav­ing ‘the wrong tem­pera­ment’ to lead by the press, as they did with Howard Dean. Another bit in Blumner’s piece talks about how Gore knows this all too well:

As reported by the Amer­i­can Prospect in April, Gore feels strongly that today’s media is fail­ing in its duty to inform the pub­lic. For­mer FCC chair­man and long­time Gore friend Reed Hundt summed it up like this: “Gore’s own view is that he sighed nois­ily in the debate and used the wrong tele­phone line to ask for money and the media said these are momen­tous events. Mean­while, they ignore global warm­ing and the fail­ure to catch Osama and the destruc­tion of the safety net.”

If only cir­cum­stances were dif­fer­ent. If only the tables weren’t rigged. I see our move here as a bit of pes­simism (or is it real­ism?) about what could but won’t change in the US in our life­times. While I would cer­tainly approve of a pres­i­dency (and gov­ern­ment) reclaimed from the Proto-fascists (as John Dean referred to them a cou­ple of weeks ago), I don’t see it com­ing to pass, unless their Iraq/Katrina-style incom­pe­tency finally bleeds over into the one thing they seem to be able to do con­sis­tently well time after time: mess with elections.