Obliging Ezra.
Ezra asks his friends to link to his first ever cover story, about Al Gore. How can I refuse?
It's a really good piece. Personally, I think Gore's 2000 effort is underrated and his chance of ever mounting another credible national campaign is overrated by a lot of my favourite bloggers, including Ezra. But the only substantive comment I have is on this part:
In endorsing Dean, Gore did more than signal support for the chaotic, democratized nature of the campaign. For a wonk like Gore, the endorsement of Dean -- the DLC’s bête noire during the 2004 primaries -- was an embrace of the new “it” Democrat. If the DLC’s “New Democrats,” led by Clinton and Gore, were the buzzworthy wing of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the 2004 election ushered in their successors, led by Dean.
Call them the New New Democrats, MoveOn Democrats, or whatever you want. They were the liberal response to Clinton’s triangulation and Bush’s ascension. Gleefully pugilistic, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War, deeply distrustful of a “corporate media” they believe screwed Gore specifically and Democrats generally, and proudly unapologetic about the progressive agenda, they found their first champion in Dean and, in Gore, their most surprising convert.
I basically buy this narrative (although I'm inclined to believe Gore that he supported Dean because of Iraq). But how much really has changed? Dean wasn't and isn't that "liberal" in the old-school sense. Often during the 90s, he placed himself to the right of the Clinton White House on fiscal matters (and military matters, if we equate hawkishness with being on the right). Yes, Dean was a free trade skeptic by the time he ran for president in 2004 (actually, from about 1998). But Gore moved left on trade (quietly) in 1999 as well. So did John Kerry. It's not that politicians, at least the ones worth supporting, have no core beliefs. But their views are shaped by the political and ascendent intellectual forces working on them, the times in which they campaign and woo their coalitions, and the demands and counter-arguments of those coaltions. By 2000, Gore probably owed more to Joseph Stiglitz' crtique of go-go global capitalism (Stiglitz, btw, is quite nice to Gore in his excoriation of Clinton Admin globalization policy The Roaring Nineties) than to Larry Summers, Joel Hyatt and "the end of economics".
Adjust for these forces and the new Atari Democrats are pretty much like the old Atari Democrats -- idealistic, hyper-rationalist, secular* technophiles, combining a fierce partisanship (and judging by everything I've read, Gore was basically the Clinton Admin's house partisan) with systematic challenges to industrial-era liberal orthodoxy. I find it all very appealing in the way an upper-middle-class blogging grad school student would. But the distance between Gore-Hart-Wirth neoliberalism of the late '80s -- the sort that "went to the South Pole and shot home movies of penguins playing on the ice surrounded by senators in parkas and wrote about it for The New Republic" -- and the milky third-way politics of fake consensus and managed conflict that defined the 90s (including Howard Dean's Vermont, what Clintonism would have been if Republicans were weaker and/or reasonable) and the new hyper-partisan netroots-fuelled Democratic party (as symbolized, perhaps by Dean's DNC and maybe also by Gore's little renaissance) is probably a lot shorter than we think.
* Secular by American standards, anyway. I'm thinking of the rather unsubtle references to evolution Gore stuffs into all his speeches. I don't think it's an accident.
It's a really good piece. Personally, I think Gore's 2000 effort is underrated and his chance of ever mounting another credible national campaign is overrated by a lot of my favourite bloggers, including Ezra. But the only substantive comment I have is on this part:
In endorsing Dean, Gore did more than signal support for the chaotic, democratized nature of the campaign. For a wonk like Gore, the endorsement of Dean -- the DLC’s bête noire during the 2004 primaries -- was an embrace of the new “it” Democrat. If the DLC’s “New Democrats,” led by Clinton and Gore, were the buzzworthy wing of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the 2004 election ushered in their successors, led by Dean.
Call them the New New Democrats, MoveOn Democrats, or whatever you want. They were the liberal response to Clinton’s triangulation and Bush’s ascension. Gleefully pugilistic, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War, deeply distrustful of a “corporate media” they believe screwed Gore specifically and Democrats generally, and proudly unapologetic about the progressive agenda, they found their first champion in Dean and, in Gore, their most surprising convert.
I basically buy this narrative (although I'm inclined to believe Gore that he supported Dean because of Iraq). But how much really has changed? Dean wasn't and isn't that "liberal" in the old-school sense. Often during the 90s, he placed himself to the right of the Clinton White House on fiscal matters (and military matters, if we equate hawkishness with being on the right). Yes, Dean was a free trade skeptic by the time he ran for president in 2004 (actually, from about 1998). But Gore moved left on trade (quietly) in 1999 as well. So did John Kerry. It's not that politicians, at least the ones worth supporting, have no core beliefs. But their views are shaped by the political and ascendent intellectual forces working on them, the times in which they campaign and woo their coalitions, and the demands and counter-arguments of those coaltions. By 2000, Gore probably owed more to Joseph Stiglitz' crtique of go-go global capitalism (Stiglitz, btw, is quite nice to Gore in his excoriation of Clinton Admin globalization policy The Roaring Nineties) than to Larry Summers, Joel Hyatt and "the end of economics".
Adjust for these forces and the new Atari Democrats are pretty much like the old Atari Democrats -- idealistic, hyper-rationalist, secular* technophiles, combining a fierce partisanship (and judging by everything I've read, Gore was basically the Clinton Admin's house partisan) with systematic challenges to industrial-era liberal orthodoxy. I find it all very appealing in the way an upper-middle-class blogging grad school student would. But the distance between Gore-Hart-Wirth neoliberalism of the late '80s -- the sort that "went to the South Pole and shot home movies of penguins playing on the ice surrounded by senators in parkas and wrote about it for The New Republic" -- and the milky third-way politics of fake consensus and managed conflict that defined the 90s (including Howard Dean's Vermont, what Clintonism would have been if Republicans were weaker and/or reasonable) and the new hyper-partisan netroots-fuelled Democratic party (as symbolized, perhaps by Dean's DNC and maybe also by Gore's little renaissance) is probably a lot shorter than we think.
* Secular by American standards, anyway. I'm thinking of the rather unsubtle references to evolution Gore stuffs into all his speeches. I don't think it's an accident.
4 Comments:
Gore's views and thinking has nothing to do with his 2000 campaign. Gore was a bad campaigner, he made bizarre moves, he ran against Clinton instead of against Bush, he managed to lose when the country did very well and his mentor was highly popular.
Gore was not underrated enough!
Well, these things are all subjective, but I'd say it's pretty debatable that Clinton was popular in 2000. It depends whether you think people vote as a response to job performance or as a response to perceived personal attributes. Clinton's polls were weirdly dichotomous that way. I agree that Gore is a bad campaigner generically, but I don't think giving a bad stump speech matters all that much. He was good at the convention. He won the debates in the snap polls. Those are the only things people really pay attention to. Everything else is filtered through the press.
On the other hand, I'd say the point of Ezra's piece is that everything Gore has done since 2000 -- his "views and thinking" -- is a reaction to that campaign and its outcome. But we can't really know.
I certainly saw Ezra's article that way, although I saw in it a strong desire to see Gore transmute his post-election activities into a pre-election campaign.
That said, I think Gore would be a reluctant candidate. It's one thing to be passionate about issues; it's quite another to want to get into the ugly pig-fight that is a presidential campaign.
Too bad. I really do like Gore.
I've always liked Gore, Dave. I think it was one of my first political opinions. He's the smartest and most interesting figure in American politics imo. But I think Neil (in Ezra's comments) and Lindsay are right: a presidential candidate just can't do an end-run around the mainstream media, no matter how clever he is. Gore's polls aren't awful right now. He could rehabilite himself, but it would require doing all those things he's been avoiding: slogging it out on Sunday shows and whatnot and making himself bland and unthreatening in the way most US politicians are. (That's why I think the 2000 campaign was less objectively awful than most people claim; we tend to overlook what a pol has to say and not say to build and hold a coalition.) Right now, though, he obviously doesn't want to do that, at least not for the 2008 cycle. So there we are.
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