Gored

Al Gore has decided not to be a candidate for president in 2004 and who can blame him. The psychotic radical right media, which apparently owns cable news, talk radio and so-called conservative think tanks as well as the religious right, has relentlessly ridiculed him, making him their heir to Bill Clinton. Apparently Gore has few friends in the so-called establishment press, so the radical right drumbeat echoes through other coverage.

If the polls are an indication of anything but the echoes of news coverage, voters have taken their anger and shame over the 2000 elections out on Gore, the victim of that shameful absurdity, rather than Bush, who as president became the country's designated father figure, quickly enabled by fear and war fever.

Never mind that Gore is the only major Democrat to oppose war in Iraq in no uncertain terms; that he has outed the psychotic radical right media, come out boldly for a single-payer national health care plan, and has strongly opposed Bush's suicidal economic and environmental policies.

The people who thought and still think that there is no essential difference between a President Gore and a President G.W. Bush are fools. Even those in the immediate post-9/11 days were reverently whispering that maybe Bush was meant to be, are seriously deficient in judgment. The idea that Gore wouldn't have handled himself well, or guided the country to a much more effective response to terrorism with much less threat to domestic rights, is dumb and insulting to Gore. Maybe he doesn't have the fratcharm aplomb of Bush, and the nation is often more comfortable with the dumb regular guy than somebody who might know something, but we would be so much better off right now with President Gore that our situation amounts to yet another national tragedy.

Gore didn't run a good campaign, he squandered his political capital and he's paying the price. But it turns out that the thrust of his campaign, which struck people as odd in such flush times, was just ahead of its time. He talked about fighting for working and middle class Americans because he knew that even in the Clinton years they were the ones left out and left behind, along with the working poor and the unable to work poor. The Clinton prosperity had to be extended, and Act II---the Gore presidency---would use the hard-won benefits of budget surplus to make up those social deficits, to strengthen Social Security, to adjust welfare reforms now that many of its premises and provisions have proven to be delusional, and by now to lead the charge for national health care, among other needful things.

People didn't understand this all that well in 2000, and Gore didn't do a great job of explaining it---and probably the press did its usual poor job of communicating what he did say. Only the president---and only occasionally---gets to have what he says simply reported, and then commented on. What everybody else says (and what the president says most of the time) is packaged by news show biz interpretations, and most of the substance is left out.

But the Bushies understood it, so the first thing they did was vaporize the surplus with tax cuts for the already deliriously and shamefully wealthy, and more military spending. So now it seems they can't do anything but privatize the public sector, so people can pay even more in fees than in taxes in order to benefit lobbyists, advertisers, accountants and lawyers specializing in takeovers and corporate consolidation, just to have expensive and bad health care, and expensive and bad schools and so on. And they can turn their social security checks into lotto cards playing the stock market.

So for 2004, candidates can do worse than resurrect some of Gore's 2000 phrases and speeches, because it's becoming obvious who is getting gored by the current administration.