Al Gore: Presidential Candidate or Presidential Footnote?

In this brave new world of the permanent campaign, one of the most enviable positions for a candidate to be in is to not need to campaign. While there are some doom and gloomers who say that it will soon be too late to get in the race, there are a few heavy hitters who have yet to make up their minds. The right, nervous about Rudy’s liberalism (we haven’t heard about a right-wing crazy man in a dress since J. Edna Hoover’s death), is still looking for their knight in shining armor, thus the flirtations with Newt and Fred. The left is more optimistic about their chances in 2008, but should Barack and Hillary go down in flames, the choice for knight-delegate is obvious: Al Gore.

Not that Al is actually running, mind you, but to be able to pull off a solid third place in most polls while not having made a single fundraising phone call, raised a single penny, or even declared that he seeks or would accept the job, must have the likes of Bill Richardson and John Edwards seething with envy.

In what has to be the greatest slacker campaign in modern history, Al Gore is using every forum possible to spread his message, a good chunk of which is that he is not running for president. He is not running for president, his only campaign is against global warming, he enjoys life much more now, feels he is doing more good now than he ever did before, and has no desire to get back into politics. He has said all of things but conspicuously absent has been one single phrase that would end all speculation: "I will not seek election in 2008." He wants to leave the door ever so slightly ajar.

In 2003, Gore ended speculation of a Bush-Gore rematch when he endorsed former Vermont Governor Howard Dean and asked the grassroots organization draftgore.com to cease and desist. DraftGore is back in business, along with an army of believers ready to sign on to the cause. So why won’t he announce his intention to run? Two reasons: He hasn’t made up his mind, and he’s getting the best publicity possible by shunning publicity.

Traditional advertising has reached its limits. The constant assault by print, billboard, radio, television and internet advertising has led to a general numbness towards the industry. The average American will view an estimated 2 million television advertisements by age 65, to say nothing of the other mediums. Speaking in round numbers, probably 20 million advertisements in a lifetime, which brings new meaning to the term way too much information. The brain can’t hope to process or retain even a fraction of it, so we learn to ignore it, and this has led to the rise of two enormous growth industries in advertising: targeted advertising and guerilla marketing.

Targeted advertising makes use of extremely sophisticated statistical analysis looking at past behavior to predict future interests. It works extremely well for select groups, but not so well if you’re trying to reach a large generalized audience. To reach a generalized audience, for example registered voters, you need a much broader scope in your advertising, but you need your voice not to get lost in the din. The point of guerilla marketing is to get other people to do your talking for you, constantly and repeatedly, as happened in February with the Adult Swim cartoon network’s ad campaign that first caused a bomb scare and then became national news for days. For the moment, Al Gore is running an incredibly effective guerilla campaign. But is he really running for president, or is he just having fun? Probably a little bit of both.

Reasons Al Gore Might Not Want Run For President

Iraq: Even with the best, most effective management possible in the last 21 months of his presidency, George W. Bush will be leaving an enormous mess for his successor, and if the numerous current scandals surrounding the White House are any indication, the mess will only get worse with each month of the countdown until W is history. Yes, a sensible president could put us on the road to recovery in the middle east, but the cleanup job will outlast the next president, and Al knows he would never get credit it for it anyway.

There will be no “winning” solution in Iraq in the short term, and the Neocons have concocted a fail-safe method of assigning blame to others: always raise the stakes. They will never admit failure in Iraq or do anything to correct their mistakes, they’ll just keep compounding them, knowing that eventually a democratic congress or president will end the madness, and then everything will be the democrats' fault, ie, “If only you had the strength of will to continue our policies just a little longer…” John McCain still think we could have won in Vietnam, if only the politicians had done a better job.Vietnam beat President Johnson and Gore must realize it could beat him too.

Terrorism: The foreign policy of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have done more to foster terrorism than Osama Bin Laden could ever hope to. Bin Laden’s skillfully timed broadcast in 2004, tying in the war in Iraq, terrorism and global warming, had the intended effect of driving Republicans to the polls. The Bin Ladens have always been chummy with the Bushes, and Osama probably thinks of George and Dick as his two best recruiters. With so many new terror cells being formed and so much hatred engendered, sooner or later something bad is going to happen. If it happens with a Republican at the helm, well that just means we need to spend more money, clamp down more, send more people to Guantanamo, eviscerate the constitution a little more, tap a few more phones, and torture a few more citizens. But if it happens with a democrat in charge, then at best, the democrat’s “liberalism” undoubtedly allowed it to happen or, as the Hannity and O'Reilly clones will undoubtedly accuse, was actually in on the conspiracy.

Hillary Clinton: Al Gore has up close and personal experience with just how formidable the Clinton machine is. The thought of taking that machine on probably doesn’t fill him with dread as much as profound weariness. Anyone going against Clinton will have a tough time, but Al will constantly be fighting a two-front war against the Clinton slash-and-burn-win-at-all-costs machine as well as the very similar right-wing-slander machine.

The Right Wing Slander Machine: Does anybody know how much Bill O’Reilly’s electric bill was last month? Or Sean Hannity’s or Rush Limbaugh’s or any other fatcat Republicanazi millionaire’s? Of course not. But Al Gore’s was front page news. This is a well-used RWSM trick: Take your opponent’s strength and turn it into a weakness. Thus, Micheal Dukakis was Boston Harbored, John Kerry was Swift Boated, and now Al Gore is being Inconvenient Truthed. The RWSM will continue to use this technique for as long as it’s effective, which will be until the slandered fight back. Hillary and Bill love a good fight, but Al does not. Historically, he has shown that he would much rather take the high road. From his early days in the senate until his current campaign against global warming, he has consistently held to the belief that if you present the data, people will do the right thing. Gore knew he had won in 2000, not just the popular vote but in the electoral college as well. A recount of the Florida 2000 vote, which he did not request and which did not take place until after the vote was certified, showed that in fact he had won in Florida. But knowing he had won he also knew that he would have little chance of governing effectively. To win in 2008, he would have to wade neck deep into the mud.

Money: To effectively compete for the presidency in 2008 will probably cost half a billion dollars. One hundred million by the end of 2007 is considered the entry fee for serious contenders at this high-stakes political poker tournament. To become a high roller means lots and lots of phone calls, lots and lots of begging, and lots and lots of favors called in and favors promised. This is exactly the kind of sleazy dollars-for-favors politics that Al Gore despises and he would have to saturate himself with it.

Reasons Al Gore Might Want to Run for President

Iraq: No politician has been a more vocal critic of the ill-advised and ruinously managed invasion of Iraq. If ever Gore was tempted to play the role of knight in shining armor, what better opportunity than to right the wrongs of his archnemesis?

Terrorism: The Neocons love to go after Bill Clinton for failing to do more to get Bin Laden, conveniently forgetting that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. Whoever comes next is going to need a wealth of political experience, not to mention international experience, as well as the ability to change tactics as necessary. It is possible that Gore looks at the current democratic field (to say nothing of the repubs) and recoils, and sees himself as the nation’s only chance.

Hillary Clinton: Cookie-baking attempts to soften her image aside, the adjective “nice” is not among the many strong adjectives used to describe the former first lady. This is an organization so formidable that it’s tracking Al Gore’s weight. Having been pushed around by Hillary for eight years, it’s possible that Al would like a little payback. And as far as Hillary as president, Gore probably has two fears about that: that she won’t win, and thus we’ll be stuck with Wasit-Deep-In-The-Big-Muddy McCain or Onward-Christian-Soldiers Romey, or that she will win, which amounts to about the same thing.

The RWSM: The problem with shock value is that it only works once, and then you have to change tactics. Thus, a Borat II would be hard to pull off because too many people are now in on the joke. It’s possible that Gore is a little gun-shy after his own bashing at the hands of the RWSM, but he may be emboldened by how flat their techniques fell in the 2006 election, and he may have noticed how easy it was to fight back after the electric bill nonsense. Or maybe he’s just itching for a rematch.

Money: All kinds of would-be presidents set records for the first quarter of 2007, with Clinton, Obama and Romney all checking in at about $23 million. (Hillary’s actual total was $26 million, but she wouldn’t disclose how much of that must be saved for the general election, so the real numbers for her, Barack and Mitt are probably very close.) And as sitting US Senators, Hillary and Barack are able to get a certain amount of free publicity. But does any of that compare to the free publicity that Al has been basking in lately? And as far as donations go, Al has an army at the ready, and there’s no law against donating to more than one candidate, something that will probably do the democrats more good than the repubs for the first time ever, since now more high-end donors are giving to the dems. And that’s to say nothing of the soft money that could come pouring in for Al, given his long list of high roller pals.

Gore’s Decision

So will he or won’t he? He likely hasn’t made up his mind, but to keep his options open he’ll keep himself in the spotlight. For those of us on the sideline, we can only guess. And maybe keep an eye on that waistline.

Senator Clinton Alienates Progressives With Her "Never Admit Mistakes" Campaign

Hatred of Hillary Clinton on the Far Right approaches the pathologic, and is so prominent it ought to be given its own name; call it That Damn Woman Syndrome. Tapping into that hatred is keeping a hopeless candidate like Rudy Giuliani at the current head of the GOP pack, with the simple logic that any hard-nosed conservative—most of whom would rather see him pilloried than elected—will vote for him if the other choice is that damn woman! Given that such hatred is the ultimate “street cred” for Progressives, it is surprising that TDWS is almost as pervasive on the Left as it is on the Right.

Months before the 1992 election, Hillary Clinton first brought infamy to herself by saying, during an interview on Nightline: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

Conservatives didn’t need a whole lot more reason to hate Hillary; just her assertion that children should be declared legally competent (which would allow children to sue their parents) was plenty. But the “cookies” statement turned a storm of anti-Hillary sentiment into a hurricane. It was, in their view, arrogant, anti-family, anti-marriage, cold and calculating. The rest of the campaign only hardened their opinion of her.

The view on the Left, meanwhile, was quite the opposite. The election of Bill Clinton in November of 1992 meant to Liberals and Progressives that there would be a First Lady who was anything but window dressing to her husband. She was smart, articulate, and had a strength of will that hearkened back to Eleanor Roosevelt. But a lot has changed in the last fifteen years, and now there are probably almost as many new-generation Progressives as there are old-school Conservatives who see Clinton as cold and calculating.

There are many reasons for this: First, there is the Iraq War. She voted to authorize it in 2002. So did a lot of other Democrats in the Senate, but most of them have disavowed that vote. But Clinton steadfastly refuses to recant that vote, or call it a mistake, as former Senator and 2008 hopeful John Edwards did in an opinion piece in November 2005. Even the fact that it’s costing her votes does not faze her. Progressives are starting to feel that the formidable Clinton shares one chilling trait in common with George W. Bush: Never admit you’re wrong, even when it’s painfully obvious that your lack of candor is costing you support.

She has displayed other too-close-to-George sentiments that are setting progressives teeth on edge. On the Iraq war, she has said repeatedly that had she been president in 2002, we would not have gone to war, but that she still made the right decision in authorizing, because she was given bad information. In other words, I was a pawn, and did as I was told, but make me Queen and I’ll do a better job.

Besides not admitting the Iraq vote was a mistake, she states that she will not redeploy all troops out of the region if elected president. “There will be missions,” she said ominously. And while there rest of the country (and the whole world) is screaming to Bush to not make the Iraq mess worse by attacking Iran, Clinton insists “No option can be taken off the table,” in dealing with Iran, including military action.

In trying to break the glass ceiling of presidential politics, she obviously thinks that her admit-no-mistakes policy is the best way forward, but if she thinks that by sticking to her guns (literally) she is going to avoid John Kerry’s fate of being labeled a flip-flopper, it’s already too late: The Necons, remembering their success with Kerry, have already started calling her a flip flopper. Meanwhile, she is fooling no one with her nuanced “If I had only known” explanation; if tens of millions of progressives were able to see through the Bush Administration lies that led up to the Iraq invasion (Iraq-Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, 9/11 connection), how is it that a US Senator was not able to see through them? She would do better to take a lesson about learning from mistakes from another politician, the Gipper himself, who escaped unscathed from a completely botched Lebanon deployment by taking responsibility, admitting his mistake, and moving on.

Moving on is exactly what progressives want to see in any presidential candidate: Moving on in Iraq; moving on in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process; moving on in economic development at home and abroad; moving on toward a balanced budget that stops giving the best pieces of the pie to the super rich at the expense of the middle class; moving on toward reclaiming this country from the badly misguided policies of politicians who can’t admit mistakes. And moving on is something the steadfast Clinton shows no inclination of doing, giving progressives a bad case of TDWS.

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Senator Obama says he meant no offense by saying soldiers' lives “wasted.”

To say that war is wasteful is to state the obvious. The trillion or more dollars that will eventually be spent on the Iraq War is indeed being poured down a rat-hole. To say nothing of the good that money could have accomplished for education, health care, tax cuts, energy, or science, we could hardly have used it more foolishly. We have wasted, through ludicrous foreign policy, our international standing, our technology, and our resources.

But to say a life has been wasted is to say something else entirely. A "wasted" life implies one spent for nothing, as for example someone of great talent who wastes their life pursuing low and mean pleasures of the moment, spending their potential on things of no value. Truly, our celebrities’ lives are wasted. The lives of soldiers are never wasted.

The founders of our country had the foresight to place ultimate control of military might in the hands of a civilian government, that zealotry and dictatorship would be checked. The United States soldier does not swear an oath of allegiance to any one man, as German soldiers once swore to Hitler, but rather they swear to defend the Constitution. It is from this simple oath that the honor of the soldier, living or dead, rests securely. Whatever the motivations of those who sent him, the soldier offers his life in defense of the core values of his country.

The United States Military, from the Air Force to the Navy Seals, makes one unique demand of those who serve that is unequalled in any other profession: that they be willing to lay down their lives in service of their country. There are many professions in which service to community is paramount and danger plays a large role; police and fire fighters come to mind. But in each case, other than the military, the risk is always a calculated risk. That is, the individual has the luxury to assess the risk and to avoid it, as in a police officer awaiting backup before arresting a dangerous suspect. For soldiers, there is no calculating to be done; they are told to go into the line of fire and they go.

I have served as a fire fighter, risking myself to save others. But never did I feel that the flames had a special hatred for me; I never worried that a burning structure hid the fixed eye of a sniper; not one time did I fear that our truck would be blown to atoms by an IED buried under the street. The calculated risk of dangerous jobs, whether police officer, fire fighter, or underwater welder, cannot compare with a soldier’s risk, because it is not constant. Our soldiers in Iraq live with the fear of death 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for as many years as those in power care to tell them to stay there.

They can be held beyond their tour of duty and they can be recalled after discharge. They can be sent to die at any time, from the time they volunteer, for the rest of their lives. They are on call all day and night, every day and night, for pay that is less than minimum wage, knowing that if they are killed the survivor benefits are so poor that their families may live in poverty.

Whatever his motivations, whatever her intentions, the soldier makes a lopsided bargain with his country: For small pay and modest chances to improve his lot, he will face death that we may know our country is secure. As payback for this ultimate sacrifice we do not have much, but we must give all that we have: Respect for the soldier, honor for the dead, knowledge that they fell doing what they were supposed to do, following orders, ready and willing to die that others may live.

Senator Obama, your wish to chastise the president is well founded. George W. Bush is a dangerous fool, and all of us will pay the price for his follies for decades to come. But with every generation we learn anew what we have known since our founding: that to have the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the many, a few must be willing to give up those blessings. Those who die are to be remembered forever for having given us that precious gift, and no such gift is wasteful.

You recanted your statement immediately and you have been forgiven. But do not be swept away by your current fame and seeming invulnerability so much that you forget those whose lives were not spent in the libraries of Harvard but the deserts of Iraq; not the streets of Chicago but the streets of Baghdad; and who now reside not in the Senate but in the grave.

To all our fallen heroes, you are not forgotten, you are not gone from within us, your spirit moves us, your lives were indeed not wasted.

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Perennial candidate and presidential spoiler Nader says he may be back; Republicans breathe a huge sigh of relief

With George W. Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30s, the Iraq war grinding on with no end in sight and costs spiraling into the stratosphere, and a field of Republican Presidential candidates as inspiring as corned beef, the Republican base finally has something to cheer about: Ralph Nader is back. This is the same Nader, you may remember, who handed the 2000 election to Bush on a silver platter. If not for Nader, there would have been no recount, no Katherine Harris, no 5-4 Supreme Court decision, and no Iraq war.

The 72-year-old activist, self-promoter, and multimillionaire, rose to fame with his 1965 work Unsafe at any Speed, a very poorly-conducted study of automobile safety that purported to show how horrible many cars were, heaping gratuitous abuse on General Motors. Rather than argue the safety of their vehicles or dispute the study, GM foolishly decided to go after Nader personally, and in comically inept fashion: They tapped his phone, they followed him around, they hired hookers to try and entice him into sexual escapades they could use for blackmail. Nader won a lawsuit against GM easily, garnered just under $300,000 for himself, got tort law rewritten in the process, and landed himself in the spotlight. And like a grinning high school girl at her Sweet 16 birthday party, Nader has loved the spotlight ever since.

His foray into presidential politics began in 1980 when he urged voters not to support Carter, his reasoning being that "Reagan is going to breed the biggest resurgence in nonpartisan citizen activism in history." Actually, Reagan’s election led to the birth of the Reagan Youth, who were very active in moving this country far to the right. And Reaganomics, which devastated the working class, and support of the paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, which left tens of thousands dead, and a costly war and illegal support of the Contras in Nicaragua, which led to trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal. As in Iran, that pesky soon-to-be Nuclear Iran, which is currently using weapons technology supplied by the US against US soldiers in Iraq. Nader proved to be as wrong about the harm that Reagan could do as he was about most things. But being wrong never stopped Nader.

Nader continued with his presidential politics in 1992 with a small write-in campaign in New Hampshire, followed by a very disorganized coalition with the Green Party in 1996. And then 2000. Without rehashing the details of the 2000 debacle, Nader set out to deliberately hurt Gore’s chances of election, to the exclusion of his own chances of making the 5% cutoff for federal matching funds. As an example, many liberals in swing states were terrified of a Bush victory but wanted to support a third party and so began the “vote pairing” (more accurately, vote trading) in which voters in swing states would vote for Gore while voters in solidly Blue states would vote for Nader. But Nader denounced the movement and focused his energies on those very same swing states.

Having gotten the message, most Nader 2000 supporters deserted him in 2004, but John Kerry was such a disaster of a candidate that it didn’t make any difference, the result being that we have had eight long years of George W. Bush, the Iraq war, thousands of our own soldiers killed, tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of Iraqis killed, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, furthering the cause of Jihadism, making this country more unsafe and more likely to be hit by terrorists, record profits for the oil industry at the expense of the working class, a widening of the gap between rich and poor, tax breaks for the rich, slashing of family planning funds, and general damage to the country that it will take at least a generation to undo. But that, of course, is not Nader’s problem. He maintains that Gore, the same Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth and outspoken critic of the Iraq war from its beginning, would have been just as bad. Is it possible, in the tiny part of his brain not occupied by his ego that Nader actually believes this? Probably not. But it does sell books and continue to make him very rich and keep him in the headlines.

What Ralph Nader does not seem to realize (or does realize but doesn’t care) is that by saying: accept this bad thing, so that hopefully people will see how bad it is and then things will improve, he is effectively saying: the ends justify the means. Republicans, including Bush, are famous for this kind of flawed logic that was the hallmark of Nazi Germany’s “final solution.” The ends never jsutify the means, a moral life is lived only by making the best possible or least bad decisions at all times. Nader may sleep well at night for his own clear conscience, but he ought to be an insomniac from nightmares of the thousands of dead and maimed in Iraq.

What would be really nice is if we could draft Ralph Nader and George W. Bush, put them through basic training, and ship them off to Iraq to learn, first hand, what they are really accomplishing in this world. They could go out together and look for snipers or try to disarm IEDs, work and live with the devastation being wrought there, live in fear daily of loss of limb or life, perhaps even earn a Purple Heart experiencing the pain and horror of war, the agony of shattered bodies and wasted lives. Then, marked forever as those who experience war are, they could return to their respective work, and maybe have learned a little bit more compassion for humanity.

Wars are not fought by toy soldiers on computer battlefields. These are real people with real lives and real families that are devastated. People who die are dead forever. Species that become extinct are gone forever. Opportunities for progress that are missed are missed forever. Global warming will not improve by saying it has to get worse before it gets better. The effects on humanity of 100 million climate refugees may not be felt by Alzheimerish multimillionaire septaugenarians, but the rest of us will feel it. Three steps forward and one back is still two steps forward, and that’s infinitely better than 20 steps back. When the choice is between mediocre and disaster, we had better choose mediocre; this country can’t survive too many more disasters in the presidency. Life is finite, the fight to move forward is ongoing, never-ending, and every step yielded is ground lost forever. The cerebral existentialist nonsense that things must get worse before anything can get better plays directly into the hands of evildoers, as it always has. By opposing pollution standards that are not strict enough, leaving existing pollution unchecked and growing, do Nader and his minions want to wait until New York City looks like Mexico City before they will get off their rear ends and actually support progress? It is unlikely that Nader has thought much about this, or would care if he did. He has his millions, and his minions, and his 15 minutes.

So now he wants to reprise his spoiler role, and has announced that he is gunning for Hillary Clinton. Many progressives are not fans of Hillary Clinton, and not because they’re not sure if a woman can win the general election in 2008, but because of her support for the Iraq invasion in the first place. Whatever her faults, she’s smart enough to have seen through the lies being used by the Bush administration at the time, which can only mean that her vote was cast with an eye toward a future presidential run and not for the future of this country. But if she survives to become the eventual Democratic nominee, everyone and anyone who considers themselves to be progressive had best vote for her, or endure the police state we will live in under Romney or McCain.

Not content to let the democratic system of primary and caucus take its course, Nader wants to direct its course himself. He sees himself as crown-maker, or at least as crown-spoiler. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer if he would support Clinton’s candidacy, he called her a panderer and flatterer, then went onto say that he was more likely to run his own campaign if she wins the Democratic nomination. In other words, he’d much rather have Romney or McCain for another four years. Surely this time it will lead to a progressive revolution. His conscience is clear. But for those of us who will be the ones to suffer under such an administration, Ralph Nader should stand down, stay home, and shut up.

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She May Be Leading Now, but a Democratic White House is Going to Take a Different Kind of Star Power

Hillary Clinton may be leading in the polls, but with negative ratings of over 40%, her poor resonance with independents, her flipflop vote on the Iraq war, and a general wariness among Democrats that she is unelectable in the general election, her race to the nomination is anything but assured. The best indicator that her front-runner status is on shaky ground is that fact that most of the buzz about other possible candidates centers not on other “heavyweights” like Senators John Kerry (gone) and Joe Biden (going), both of whom have terminal cases of foot-in-mouth disease, but rather it is all about two surprise candidates; the first, surprising because he’s brand new, the other because he isn’t running at all. But that’s not stopping millions from looking forward to a President Obama or a President Gore.  

Senatorial heavyweights have a long-history of presidential aspirations but there are a very short list of success stories. The last person elected to the presidency who had served as a senator was Richard Nixon. He had also served in congress and as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower. The last sitting senator to be elected president was John F. Kennedy. In fact, the only other sitting US Senator to be elected to the presidency was Warren G. Harding, who served for two short years before dying in 1923 of complications of pneumonia, his administration mired in scandal. In all, 15 of our 43 presidents have served in the US Senate. One out of three might sound like reasonable odds (most of the rest were governors), but in considering the actual success rate, take into account that there have been 55 elections for the presidency, and more than twice that number of major-party candidates.  

The reason that US Senators have done so poorly is that, just like Hillary, they come with lots of baggage: a long history of public scrutiny, controversial votes, and for a sitting senator, the perception of stealing time away from the “day job,” as in: Why are you spending all your time fundraising when you’re supposed to be doing your job in the Senate? As far as public scrutiny, anyone remember Whitewater? You’ll be hearing a whole lot more about that and every other scandal that came out in the 90s as Hillary gets further into the campaign. And as far as controversial votes, being a “flip-flopper” on the Iraq war did a lot better job of sinking John Kerry’s presidential ship than the Swift Boaters ever could have hoped to. Know any other prominent senators with presidential aspirations out there who also flip-flopped on Iraq? The junior senator from New York will have a lot of explaining to do. 

The success story behind the last sitting US Senator to be elected the White House had to do with one very simple phenomenon: star power. JFK had his medals of honor for rescuing fellow crew members during World War II, his humility about his war service, his  Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage, and that first-ever nationally televised debate, in which JFK looks cool and calm and Nixon looks like a sweaty child molester. Plus JFK was darn handsome. Unfair though it may be, looks and star power count for a lot in presidential politics. 

If any of this is starting to sound familiar, it should: Obama has two best-selling books, he is articulate, calm, reflective and humble. And darn good looking. Obama also has the Teflon factor going for him. It’s a rare thing among politicians, the last person who comes to mind being Ronald Reagan. Something about their star power, their affect, their way of handling bad news, and the way the media treats them, that makes them immune to the general nastiness of modern politics. Obama is the poster child for the Teflon phenomenon, while Clinton might be more accurately known as the Velcro Senator. 

And in case the electorate is looking for someone more experienced, someone who has decades of experience in the highest echelons of American politics, vast foreign policy experience, and lots of star power, there is one potential candidate who fits that description exactly. And if you’re a candidate being coy with the media, what better time to kick off a campaign than at the same time you’re picking up an Academy Award? Want tens of millions of dollars of free media coverage in this era of everything is about how much money you can spend? Then you couldn’t ask for a better scenario than to pick up a Nobel Prize two months before the New Hampshire primary. Al Gore, winner of the popular vote in 2000, disputed winner of the electoral vote, his movie An Inconvenient Truth nominated for an Academy Award, recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, benefeciary of the hugely energizing we was wronged sentiment among Democrats, and multimillionaire with lots of deep-pocket connections is a hugely popular potential candidate.  

Consider the following scenarios of possible presidential tickets for 2008, using the current front runner as the presidential candidate and the runner up as the vice presidential candidate: McCain/Guiliani vs. Clinton/Obama. The former sounds like a center-leaning and star-powered electoral landslide in the making, the latter the penultimate in left-wing pandering and an electoral disaster not seen since Walter Mondale. But now consider McCain/Guiliani (or McCain/Romney or Romney/Guiliani or any similar combination) vs Gore/Obama. More of the same Old Guard Nonsense from the Repubs vs. Star Power from the Dems. A Gore/Obama ticket would be a media frenzy (a huge force-multiplier in campaign dollars) and a good balance of old experience and new thinking. Plus, wouldn’t it be nice to have a viable candidate for 2008 and lay the groundwork for a future viable candidate? 

To take a closer look at which Democratic ticket might have the best chance of winning in 2008, look at the electoral map from recent elections: In 2004 Kerry won the Northeast including New Hampshire, the Eastern states Pennsylvania and Maryland and the midwestern states Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the West Coast, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia, for a total of 252 electoral votes. Aside from New Hampshire’s 4 electoral votes, let’s call this voting block Solidly Blue, and Guiliani, McCain or any other centrist is unlikely to peel away any of these states. (Guiliani is not going to win New York nor Romney Massachusetts because they are not well-liked in their home states.) In 2000, Gore won all the Solidly Blue states, plus Iowa and New Mexico, winning 266 electoral votes. (Yes, we know he won Florida also, but the supreme court took it away, no use crying over spilt milk.) Had he won New Hampshire he would have won the election with it, but changes in the electoral map since 2000 mean that Gore 2000 states plus New Hampshire does not equal victory. In 1992, locked into a three-way race with an incumbent president and fiery billionaire, Clinton won Solidy Blue, plus New Hampshire, as well as Montana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, West Virginia and Arizona. In 1996, he added Nevada and Florida to that list but lost Montana. Those middle and southern states that Clinton won in 1992 and 1996 are reddish, but subject to change if they are particularly unhappy, say for example if they were tired of a particular party’s blind support of an unpopular war. 

To go from the 252 Solidly Blue electoral votes to victory requires 17 more votes. Perennial battleground states Florida (27) and Ohio (20) are slam dunks. Without either of these, a combination of weakly red western or southern states is needed, such as Tennessee (11), Iowa (7), and New Mexico (5). Bill Clinton proved that some states in the South are willing to vote for a Dem if they feel he is one of them, and some Western states, including Iowa, New Mexico, even Colorado, might be up for grabs to the right centrist, and Virginia did just vote in a Democrat for governor in 2005 and senator in 2006. Looking at these numbers, can anyone explain where Hillary Clinton is going to come up with 17 more electoral votes, assuming she can get the 252? Appealing to moderates is not likely to garner her enough votes, because so many people have already made up their minds about her. She can appeal to women, but unless she can appeal to southern and western women she may as well stay in New York. Bottom line, she has very little chance in Florida, a slight chance in Ohio, and very little chance of coming up with 17 votes from the weakly red South and West. Now consider a Gore/Obama ticket: Florida and Ohio are both in reach, there’s appeal to moderates, appeal to the South, and suddenly the weakly red states all come into play. 

So who has the better odds of taking back the White House in 2008? I’m placing my bet on Obama or Gore, or better yet, a Gore/Obama ticket. Maybe I should have some bumper stickers made.

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Even though it’s (sort of) illegal, any time there’s a contest of any sort, someone is going to be taking bets on it.

Probably the most famous gambler still living is Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston Jr. Slim, who gained fame with his victory at the World Series of Poker in 1972, and went on to become notorious for taking just about any bet. Among his victories: He beat Minnesota Fats at pool played with broom handles; beat Evel Knievel at golf played with claw hammers; won $300,000 from Willie Nelson by beating him at a game of Dominoes; and won a sucker bet that he could hit a golf ball a mile—which he did on a frozen lake. He also won a bet in 2000 by correctly picking George W. Bush to win the presidency. But did he break the law in making that bet? Popular wisdom has it that it’s against the law to bet on the outcome of elections, a “known known” (as Donald Rumsfeld would say) that nobody bothers to check, because everybody knows it to be true. Except that it’s false. Sort of.

In fact, several jurisdictions do ban betting on the outcome of an election. The District of Columbia, for example, specifically prohibits betting on “contests,” but it is a law never enforced. About the only example of anyone actually brought to justice for betting on an election occurred in Arizona in the mid-1990s, when two elderly men, Jack Bird and Loft Hollamon, were brought up on charges of offering a wager on an election. Their crime caught the attention of authorities because they took out advertisements in the newspaper, in which they each urged voters to vote for their favorite so that they would win the bet. But even with that level of blatant disrespect for the Arizona law, Superior Court Judge Richard Anderson threw the case out as unconstitutional, and called gambling the “favorite national pastime.” An Arizona State Court of Appeals later reversed that ruling, deciding that the state is allowed to prohibit wagering on elections in order to maintain the integrity of the act of voting. By this time in 1995 both men had spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees, far more than the maximum $750 fine, and the case was eventually dropped by the Yavapai County attorney.

At the federal level, the Supreme Court has weighed in on two occasions in the last century. A 1973 Supreme Court case, Civil Service Commission v. Letter Carriers cited a 1939 civil service form that provides: “Betting or wagering upon the results of primary and general elections is penalized by the laws of most States and is improper political activity.” Hardly a stern and decisive admoniton. More recently, former Chief Justice and avid gambler William Rehnquist more accurately described the Court's opinion of betting on elections by organizing a betting pool wagering the state by state outcome of the 1992 presidential election. White, Scalia and Souter all recused themselves, but the remaining six justices enjoyed a lively contest, in which Sandra Day O’Connor was the clear winner, collecting $18.30. (Harry Blackmun was the only other winner, garnering $1.70. The remaining four justices had to pony up, losing a total of $20.)

In any case, even if a particular jurisdiction decided to repeat Yavapai County’s experiment with electoral justice, most gambling on elections is done online, and most of the hosts are outside the scope of US law. There’s not much to the mechanics of the betting: There are plenty of online houses that will take your credit card information and place your bet for you. It works just like football; the farther in advance you place your bet, or the more narrow your wager, the better the payoff will be if you turn out to be right. If you want to bet on the Bears today, if they win or if they lose by less than seven points, you’ll win the exact amount of the bet (put in two bucks, walk away with your two and two more). If you want to have a larger payoff, bet on the specific score that will occur. Or, if you had made your bet back in August, your payoff would be many times your wager. So what are the odds of a Hillary Clinton victory in 2008? Five to one (bet one dollar to win five more). John McCain is slightly ahead, running at nine to two, Giuliani and Romney at ten to one, Al Gore—who hasn’t even said he is running—at twenty to one, and recently defeated ex-Senator George Allen at a hundred to one. Want a chance at making some really big money? Bet on filmmaker Michael Moore; the payoff is ten thousand to one. Just don’t bet your life savings. And if you do bet on any candidate or potential candidate, don’t advertise the fact in the newspaper. You never know who might be reading.

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Yesterday's Protesters Can Be Today's Liability. Jane Fonda, infamous to the Vietnam War protests, wants back in the anti-war spotlight. But for many on the left, the best way she can help is by staying home.

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Obama Says He's Ready to Run, Right Wingers Start Slinging Mud. Throwing foul-smelling dreck at Democrats is an old stand-by for the Right Wing Hate Machine, but with the junior senator from Illinois, nothing seems to stick.

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Democratic Melting Pot. A woman, a black, and a Hispanic all declare their interest in running for the Democratic nomination. Are the Dems pandering, or are they just better at representing modern America?

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Ever wonder what Joe Lieberman is up to? The Connecticut “Independent Democrat” is certainly showing his independence, at least from Democrats, being the only Senate Democrat to back Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war. His stance is causing all kinds of hand wringing among Democrats, who feel the anti-war Ned Lamont should be occupying his seat in the US Senate, and Republicans, at least the ones up for reelection in 2008, who suspect Lieberman would sell his grandmother for body parts if he could get a few votes out of it. About the only person who mentions Lieberman favorably these days is the president, whose own party is deserting him in droves.

The liberal Fatalist-Pessimists (who are aligned closely with the Conspiracy Theorists) suspect that this is just the first foray into Republicanism before he switches parties and throws the senate back into the Red column. This is unlikely. Although Lieberman has used his status as potential defector to arm wrestle some choice scraps from a senate leadership that would just as soon see him boiled in Saudi oil, he is a man who knows the lay of the land. He is aware that 2008 is not far off, and with 22 Republican seats up for reelection compared to 11 Democratic seats, it is extremely unlikely that Republicans, if thrown the senate for now, would be able to hold it in 2008, after which revenge on Lieberman would be swift and decisive. Voters in Connecticut, including the Republicans who voted for him, would soon figure out that their state was routinely cut out of the federal pie. And that’s to say nothing of the other type of revenge, which is when you arouse the especial ire and hatred of the opposing party and they make you their Public Enemy Number One. Anybody remember what happened to Jim Wright? All it takes is enough money and enough accusations, and Senator Lieberman wouldn’t need to wait until 2012 to see his career come crashing down in flames. (Perhaps a better example of what unfounded accusation can do would be former New York prosecutor Steven Pagones, who was cleared of all charges relating to the 1987 Tawana Brawley fiasco and later won a defamation lawsuit against Al Sharpton, but had his reputation savaged in the process. A party-switching Lieberman might be the next politician looking at the ruins of his career wondering: To what office do I apply to get my reputation back?)

No, Joe is too much interested in long-term political survival to be likely to switch. Probably his discussions with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other senate leaders went something like this:

“Being one of only two independents in a very narrowly divided senate, I’m sure you’d like to keep me in your column, Harry.”

“Sure, Joe, but we’d look pretty unfavorably on outright blackmail. Things could get very ugly.”

“Of course, of course, nothing like blackmail. But it would be nice to have something to take back to my constituents…”

“You can stay on Homeland Security and Armed Services, and I’ll throw in Small Business.”

“Deal.”

The second possibility for why Lieberman is supporting the escalation is out of pure mule-headed stubbornness. He would not be the first politician willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives (not to mention many times that number of the lives of non-Americans) and uncounted billions of dollars rather than admit a mistake (see, for example, Vietnam, History of American Involvement In). By always calling for more troops, he can lay the blame of failure on someone else. If this “surge” doesn’t work, he’ll call for another. Sooner or later, we’ll pull out, and he can always say that if we had just backed one more surge, we would have won. Among all the horrible possibilities of what might be going on in his twisted mind, this is the one I’d actually hope for.

The third possibility is the most insidious and the one I fear the most. Among the most self-serving and deadly of policies being shopped around by right wing think tanks these days is that the spread of sectarian violence throughout Iraq is a good thing. The “best and the brightest” of the far-right (check out, for example, what's coming out of the American Enterprise Institute these days) actually believe that having sectarian violence spread from Iraq throughout the middle east would be good for American business interests. Even in Israel, which certainly has a lot more to lose from a destabilized middle east, there are those on the far right who think that it’s in their interests to fuel sectarian violence. These are the same people, both in America and Israel, who think that attacking Iran right now would be a dandy thing to do. It is frighteningly possible that Lieberman has aligned himself with this lunacy. He knows the Iraqis want a timetable for our withdrawal. He knows that Bush’s international policies foment a land-office business in the spread of extremism and recruitment of terrorists. Is he, already so deep into a failed policy, buying into a plan that says risk World War III on the outside chance that we can weather the storm and some huge corporations can make a few more billions? That possible explanation of the senator’s support of the escalation of the war is truly the stuff of nightmares, making the possibility of his wanting to just throw his hat in with the Republicans a visit to Disney World in comparison. For myself, I’m hoping he’s just plain stubborn, and that enough Republicans have seen the light to pull the plug on the president, so that Lieberman’s opinion, however he arrived at it, won’t amount to anything more than the braying of an ass.

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