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.