Gore Still Getting Good Press; Bayh Gives A Good Answer On Iraq

by Steve

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.
--Sebastian Mallaby, today’s Post

Here are several 2008 notes for consideration.

The Gore boomlet is still ongoing, despite his assurances once again that he isn’t running. Aside from Bush doing the stupid thing and trying to duck global warming to please his masters at Exxon, Gore is getting a lot of positive attention, even from some quarters that trashed him in the past. Read the long but good essay by John Heilemann from New York Magazine, and note in these pieces that Gore is being touted as the anti-Hillary. Read Sebastian Mallaby’s comment today on how the GOP and its industry lackeys have made Gore appealing again. And Eric Alterman throws in his two cents as well.

Note the answer that Evan Bayh gave about his Iraq war vote after he got heat from Iowa Democrats over the weekend. Unlike Hillary or even Kerry, who have both said they would have cast the same vote again, and Mark Warner, who seems to avoid saying what he would have done if he had been in the Senate back in 2002, Bayh did as John Edwards has now done: he said if he knew then what he knows now, he would not have voted to authorize force. Of course, Russ Feingold and Gore have been against the war from the beginning.

A solid piece on Hillary, also in New York Magazine, notes the likely strategy of the Mark Warner camp, to last long enough to be in a one-on-one campaign at the end of the primaries with Hillary. The piece also has Dick Morris’s endorsement of Hillary’s move to the center and adoption of a tough-on-terror posture.