My Analysis of the Gore Speech (This is SUPER long, but I think relevant)
Much has been made about the idiotic and intellectually vacant Gore speech, although the criticisms at this point seem to be limited to the blogosphere. Certainly, the NY Times had a fawning newsitorial yesterday, but I have not seen any op-ed pieces yet today discussing the speech. Maybe he is as irrelevant as the White House has concluded, but I think that is not the case. As I stated yesterday, the reason for the speech is clear: Gore is running in 2004.
Stephen Green (aka Vodkapundit) fired a salvo yesterday, in an open letter to Mr. Gore. This opening shot across the bow was far from a clear point by point refutation of Gore’s oration, but it served as a nice primer. Today, Herr Vodkapundit attacks Gore’s speech again- but methinks he misses the real reason for the Gore speech. But I will get to that later.
Susanna Cornett blogged almost immediately after Gore finished speaking, and did a fine job of a point by point refutation of Mr. Gore’s speeech. Again, Susanna, like Stephen, is missing the forest for the trees.
Andrew Sullivan also has wasted no time and spared no bandwidth criticizing Gore on the merits of the speech and, and Sullivan, like Green and Cornett, notes the flip-flops and inconsistencies. However, where Sullivan nails it on the head is recognizing the naked ambition and the soon to appear historical revisionism. Gore’s, not Saddam’s. This quote from Sully is so prescient that it is absolutely astounding that more people did not immediately recognize it (and to their credit, perhaps Stephen and Susanna did, but felt it was so obvious that they need not state it):
They just show that he is a pure opportunist, with no consistency in his political views on foreign or domestic policy.
The other member of the blogosphere to grasp the realpolitik of the Gore speech is William Quick, the Daily Pundit. Check out this quote from Quick, referencing the demise of the Democrat opposition as penned by David Broder:
Well, what’s going on is Broder is helping to set up the re-launch of Big Honest Al’s endless campaign for the Presidency. It’s also a nice bit of political theater. The Donk pols who are actually in office at the moment can continue to dodge the main question as they pursue their real goals in the fall; and Big Honest Al, who holds no office and never will, is earmarked to fall on his sword as he makes the Donk “attack dog” case against an attack on Iraq.
Quick is right, in that this is the beginning of the Gore 2004 campaign. I am not sure how complicit Broder is in this timetable (although he is oft called the ‘Dean of the Washington Press Corps, I have long felt he was merely a nuanced hatchet man for the left- check out this self-serving attack of Jesse Helms), but it is clear that this is the opening salvo of his campaign. Where I differ from Bill Quick is when he states that Gore ” simply has a wooden ear (to match his manner and his skull) about politics.” I think this speech yesterday was a master stroke (from Gore’s perspective), and it includes all the craven, overly-ambitious, delusional, dishonest, disgusting, and self-serving aspects of Gore and his ambitions that Gore-haters like me have been watching for years. Let me explain how.
The political reality of the landscape in the Democrat party is that there is a leadership and a rank-in-file that are politically at odds with each other. However, like a poor married couple, fight as they might, neither can exist without each other. The grass roots is composed of numerous disparate groups of self-serving fringe issue constituencies, ranging from the Naderite greens, the African-American caucus, women