GET GORE-TY
FINALLY, someone has picked up on the Gore-Nixon parallel. Eleanor Clift, in an article in this week's Newsweek, writes how "Al Gore is running the best campaign for President ever" for someone who has stated he's not running. She states:
"There is a parallel for Gore in another president who lost narrowly, retreated to private life and then returned to win the presidency. His name was Richard Nixon. He lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 in what was then the closest race in American history. Written off by the political establishment, Nixon went to New York and practiced law. Then in 1964, the Republicans took a drubbing with Barry Goldwater, a conservative whose loose talk about going to war scared the country, and suddenly the uptight and sober Nixon looked pretty good to a party desperate to regain the White House. John Kerry came much closer to winning than Goldwater, but Kerry turned out to be a wind-surfing dilettante who in retrospect reminded Democrats they had a better candidate in Gore. “It’s like the [line in] “Mrs. Robinson”: ‘Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you’,” says a Democratic strategist recalling the Simon & Garfunkel song from the movie, “The Graduate.”
This could be the ultimate remake for Gore, whose struggles with his persona during the 2000 campaign made him an object of ridicule. He’s older now, 57, and the pounds he’s put on have robbed him of that princely patrician look that the voters never liked anyway. He seems more approachable, and he’s a first-rate teacher as he explains in “An Inconvenient Truth” about the inescapable march of global warming, along with its consequences, that first captured his imagination as a college student. The film is not apocalyptic; you don’t leave the theater feeling all is lost. Gore says he deliberately left out recent scientific predictions that the world has just 10 years to reverse global warming or a tipping point will be reached beyond which it cannot be stopped. Reflections about the 2000 presidential race (“It was a hard blow, but you make the best of it”), a childhood split between farm life and a hotel room in Washington and his beloved sister’s death from lung cancer interspersed with the slide show give the movie a biopic feel that makes viewers wonder what might have been if history had taken a different turn. Gore is not anything like Nixon, but there is an underlying psychological subtext they have in common. Once you’re bitten by the presidential bug, you stay bitten. The only cure is formaldehyde. This is his Richard Nixon remake. “He would get in if the timing’s right,” says a Democratic strategist."
What a briliant historical comparison Eleanor has seized upon! Why, it sounds so familiar.... Now, how can that be? Check my earlier blogs (if you DARE) and see why
"There is a parallel for Gore in another president who lost narrowly, retreated to private life and then returned to win the presidency. His name was Richard Nixon. He lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 in what was then the closest race in American history. Written off by the political establishment, Nixon went to New York and practiced law. Then in 1964, the Republicans took a drubbing with Barry Goldwater, a conservative whose loose talk about going to war scared the country, and suddenly the uptight and sober Nixon looked pretty good to a party desperate to regain the White House. John Kerry came much closer to winning than Goldwater, but Kerry turned out to be a wind-surfing dilettante who in retrospect reminded Democrats they had a better candidate in Gore. “It’s like the [line in] “Mrs. Robinson”: ‘Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you’,” says a Democratic strategist recalling the Simon & Garfunkel song from the movie, “The Graduate.”
This could be the ultimate remake for Gore, whose struggles with his persona during the 2000 campaign made him an object of ridicule. He’s older now, 57, and the pounds he’s put on have robbed him of that princely patrician look that the voters never liked anyway. He seems more approachable, and he’s a first-rate teacher as he explains in “An Inconvenient Truth” about the inescapable march of global warming, along with its consequences, that first captured his imagination as a college student. The film is not apocalyptic; you don’t leave the theater feeling all is lost. Gore says he deliberately left out recent scientific predictions that the world has just 10 years to reverse global warming or a tipping point will be reached beyond which it cannot be stopped. Reflections about the 2000 presidential race (“It was a hard blow, but you make the best of it”), a childhood split between farm life and a hotel room in Washington and his beloved sister’s death from lung cancer interspersed with the slide show give the movie a biopic feel that makes viewers wonder what might have been if history had taken a different turn. Gore is not anything like Nixon, but there is an underlying psychological subtext they have in common. Once you’re bitten by the presidential bug, you stay bitten. The only cure is formaldehyde. This is his Richard Nixon remake. “He would get in if the timing’s right,” says a Democratic strategist."
What a briliant historical comparison Eleanor has seized upon! Why, it sounds so familiar.... Now, how can that be? Check my earlier blogs (if you DARE) and see why
posted by EnterCenter at 6:49 AM
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