Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Al Gore: The Come-Back Kid


We are solidly for Gore in 2008!

Al Gore: The Come-Back Kid -- New York Magazine:

"Looking back, I ask, are you happy with the campaign you ran?

'I think it was a tough environment,' he replies. 'It's now clear that a fairly significant recession started in the spring of the election year, and the stock market fell dramatically all through the campaign, and it came at the end of an eight-year cycle that triggered the normal pendulum effect of American politics,which cuts in two different ways. The hunger of the party that's been satiated for eight years has a half-life. And the hunger and determination of the party that's been out for eight years is built up to a fevered pitch. And then there's a third factor.

In both 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton and I were very fortunate to have a significant third-party candidate that drew virtually all of his votes from the Republican nominee. By contrast, in 2000, there was a third-party candidate drawing from me. And the task of holding down that number to the noise level, while simultaneously reaching out to the centrist voters who were vulnerable to that pendulum effect, made it a campaign of an impressive degree of difficulty.

'In spite of that,' Gore goes on, 'we won the popular vote and came within one Supreme Court justice's vote of winning the election. So if that final decision had gone the other way, the question might well be, how did you guys pull it off?'

Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen?
Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. 'There may come a time when I speak on that,' Gore says, 'but it's not now; I need more time to frame it carefully, if I do" Gore sighs, 'In our system of government, there is no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution."

(One more stolen election, and all the Supreme's decsions in the world won't stop that revolution, because we, as Americans, are either a Democratic Republic, living under the rule of law, not a monarchy or a fascist dictatorship, or we are nothing and there is no rule of law.)

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