Presidential Guessing Games

Near record temperatures in Chicago today (we missed tying the record by one degree) made for a sweltering day. Add another project for which I'm doing some preliminary research, and I'm left with hardly any time to devote to blogging. It's a good thing it's Sunday, then, because there's a new column from Frank Rich that I can link to (once again courtesy of donkey o.d.

Today Rich takes a look at the new Al Gore and the welcome reception his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, is receiving at Cannes. He calls it "The Cannes Landslide for Al Gore" and compares it to the more reserved support Hillary seems to be getting for the top job these days.

Still, the unexpected rebirth of Al Gore says more about the desperation of the Democrats than it does about him. He is most of all the beneficiary of a perfect storm of events, the right man in the right place at the right time. It was just after Mr. Gore appeared on "Saturday Night Live" to kick off his movie's publicity campaign that long-rumbling discontent with the party's presumptive (if unannounced) presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, boiled over. Last week both New York magazine and The New Yorker ran lead articles quoting party insiders who described a Clinton candidacy in 2008 as a pox tantamount to avian flu. The Times jumped in with a front-page remembrance of headlines past: a dissection of the Clinton marriage.

If Senator Clinton is the Antichrist, might not it be time for a resurrected messiah to inherit (and save) the earth? Enter Mr. Gore, celebrated by New York on its cover as "The Un-Hillary."

There's a certain logic to this. Mrs. Clinton does look like a weak candidate — not so much because of her marriage, her gender or her liberalism, but because of her eagerness to fudge her stands on anything and everything to appeal to any and all potential voters. Where once she inspired passions pro and con, now she often induces apathy. Her most excited constituency seems to be the right-wing pundits who still hope to make a killing with books excoriating her. At least eight fresh titles are listed at Amazon.com, including my own personal favorite, "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." (Why settle for Il Duce when you can go for Hitler?)

Since no crowd-pleasing Democratic challenger has emerged at this early date to disrupt Mrs. Clinton's presumed coronation, the newly crowned movie star who won the popular vote in 2000 is the quick fix. Better the defeated devil the Democrats know than the losers they don't. Besides, there are at least two strong arguments in favor of Mr. Gore. He was way ahead of the Washington curve, not just on greenhouse gases but on another issue far more pressing than Mrs. Clinton's spirited crusade to stamp out flag burning: Iraq.

But it's not all gushes for the former vice president.

If this were the whole picture, Mr. Gore would seem the perfect antidote to the Democrats' ills. But it's not. The less flattering aspect of Mr. Gore has not gone away: the cautious and contrived presidential candidate who, like Mrs. Clinton now, was so in thrall to consultants that he ran away from his own administration's record and muted his views, even about pet subjects like science. (He waffled on the teaching of creationism in August 1999, after the Kansas Board of Education struck down the teaching of evolution.) That Gore is actually accentuated, not obscured, by "An Inconvenient Truth." The more hard-hitting his onscreen slide show about global warming, the more he reminds you of how much less he focused on the issue in 2000. Gore the uninhibited private citizen is not the same as Gore the timid candidate.

Though many of the rave reviews don't mention it, there are also considerable chunks of "An Inconvenient Truth" that are more about hawking Mr. Gore's image than his cause. They also bring back unflattering memories of him as a politician. The movie contains no other voices that might upstage him, not even those of scientists supporting his argument. It is instead larded with sycophantic audiences, as meticulously multicultural as any Benetton ad, who dote on every word and laugh at every joke, like the studio audience at "Live With Regis and Kelly."

In the end, Rich comes out in support of a Gore presidential run, if only to raise issues that need to be raised, "patriotically goading the national debate onto higher ground."

Last week in Slate, John Dickerson discussed why Gore should not run (even if he said he'd personally like to see it).

Talk about the New Gore also builds upon a structural flaw of his last candidacy: Does he know his own mind? If what we're seeing now is the real Al Gore, why was he so easily swayed last time by advisers and pollsters bearing bad advice? If authenticity is just a political gambit, it's hardly authentic. The Old Gore vs. New Gore angle is likely to become a theme of the coverage if Gore runs. The press will remind us again and again about the 2000 campaign's earth-tone suits and the Great Dane kiss of Tipper at the convention and all the other inauthentic things he did to tailor his behavior to show people what he thought they wanted to see. The press will watch closely for signs of a relapse.

Although it annoys me, I have to admit that Dickerson has a point. There's no reason to expect that the liberal media would jump right back to where they left off in ridiculing and misrepresenting the former veep. While that's not enough reason to keep him out, he has to have an active strategy to counteract that kind of coverage.

Closer to home, the senior senator from Illinois has gone on record encouraging the junior senator from Illinois to toss his hat into the presidential ring. The Chicago Tribune ran a speculative piece on a Barack Obama candidacy, and Chris Wallace asked Dick Durbin about it on FOX News Sunday:

DURBIN: I will tell you this. You have to witness Senator Barack Obama in my state of Illinois, from southern Illinois through the Chicago suburbs, into the city, and across the United States to understand that this man brings something special to American politics.

He connects with people better than anyone I've ever seen. He is the number one person sought after to speak at Democratic events across the United States of America. I think he has dramatic potential to unite this country, both red and blue. And yes, I'm encouraging him. But ultimately, it's his personal decision with his wife and...

WALLACE: You're encouraging him. As the number-two Democrat in the Senate, you're saying you would like to see him run for president.

DURBIN: I can tell you that I've sat down with him and said you ought to look at this long and hard. I know many people are saying wait, and he may decide to wait. But he ought to take a hard look at it.

WALLACE: Would you endorse him if he did run?

DURBIN: Well, let me tell you, Barack Obama is my closest colleague in the United States Senate. We've worked together on everything for the state of Illinois. And if he makes a plan to move forward, I'm going to be at his side.

At this point, more than twenty-nine months before the next presidential election, all of this is just fun speculation. Whatever happens in the mid-term elections this fall has the possibility of turning anything we're thinking about today completely on its head. But it's a long weekend--why not indulge in some foolish guessing games.