AFIIK, it Gore that dissed Clinton’s offer to stump for him. You have to remember, that even if of comparable political ideology, they were quite dissimilar in their private lives. Gore’s quite the perfect hubby/daddy type and I think he was genuinely disgusted with Bill’s philandering ways and wanted to distance himself from that part of Clinton. Bad move as we all now know.
By the bye, question for you: have you followed Gore at all after his “defeat.”? 'cause he’s become anything but “wooden” since. Real fire in his belly, tells it like it is no holds barred – other than Sen Byrd, I’ve seen no other Democrat be as critical and on point as Gore. Would that he’d run again – with that same fire of course. I’d give him better than 50/50 odds of getting back to his old stomping grounds.
It was my impression that he wanted to do it on his own, he didn’t want to owe his presidency to Bill, of course the Monica Lewinsky thing made it easy for him to take that stance. Well whaddya know, getting a blowjob from an intern really did detrimentally affect national interests, national security.
I remember some sort of insider commentary during the aftermath of the '00 election, claiming that BC was chomping at the bit to stump for AG, and AG wasn’t having it. He wanted to distance himself from BC, not only because he feared public opinion, but also because he himself was incandescently angry over BC’s idiotic waste of political capital, and was disgusted with idea of having to worth with or rely upon him.
AG was incredibly stupid to behave this way. The real aftermath of the blowjob scandal was far less severe than one might have guessed, and BC’s numbers still looked remarkably good for a two-term president. He still had an almost magical ability to mobilize Dem. voters and had plenty of political capital left to spend supporting the AG bid. Gore just wouldn’t take it.
I gotta disagree. If Kerry had gotten it in '00, then no biggie (as in, not much difference between him and Gore), but that wasn’t possible. Kerry inheriting the mess in Iraq in '04 would have been a bad thing. Kerry proved himself quite willing to say almost anything if he thought that it would get himself elected, and my gut tells me that once he was in office and got wind of how bad things really are in Iraq, he’d “pull a Bush” and try to quash news of it getting out, while being afraid to take the necessary action to get things straightened out (since that’d alert the media that things were going south). Even if he didn’t do this, you could expect the Republicans to blame everything going wrong in Iraq (never mind that the problems began under Bush) on Kerry, thus making it easy for any dead horse the Republicans trotted out in '08 to claim the White House. If they picked someone like Rudy or McCain, then that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but odds are we’d get another one of Rove’s puppets. At least this way, when the election rolls around in '08, the populace will know that whomever gets the White House is inheriting a mess.
Oh, and Doors, if people were still willing to call you a Bush apologist after your thread where you announced you weren’t voting for the prick, I don’t think that this will make much difference, but good on ya for not putting party before country. Would that all of our elected officials do the same.
Yes. I remember a political cartoon from the time, with Gore sunk out of sight in quicksand. Clinton is reaching out, saying “Al, take my hand !” Gore replys from the bubbling quicksand “I’m my own man !”
I, soccer mom, me-never cared one way or another re the BJ. It’s none of my business, and I feel that I would rather have a philanderer in the WH than a well-than what we’ve got now.
I am a lifelong Dem/Ind (in IL you have to declare to vote in the primaries), but now I am a diehard Dem. I loathe the current GOP in all its permutations-keep your church out of my school, your “morals” out of my bed and your fearmongering away from my kids, thankyouverymuch.
I also agree with whoever said it upthread-the “outraged” men re the BJ on Capitol Hill were the ones who feared their own exposure.
BC was a great President-I am amazed at the breadth and depth of his intelligence. GWB is not a great President-I am dismayed at the paucity of his basic thought process. To say he never knew that someone had threatened to “bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age” when it was covered comprehensively at the time is just one example. I’ll give Bush this, though-he knows what molls and guns to hire. I doubt he has a conscience, for all his mouthing of Christian platitudes.
Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to turn my post into a screed against W.
Good on you, Airman -I hope the whole country is finished with all this polarizing and we can get back to some kind of happy medium. I don’t like McCain, though-he strikes me as wishy-washy and too eager to deal with Bush and Co. RG isn’t a serious contender outside New England. I dread and fear the blood bath that will be Hillary’s campaign, but I would vote for her. Like what I’ve seen of Barack Obama, but he’s too inexperienced…
I can’t speak of the tragedy that is AG-I hope he is happy in his life now; I never saw someone so miserable in a campaign.
Exactly. Short-term, re-electing Bush was a disaster. Long-term, if enough of the voting populace can grok the fullness of what the current incarnation of the GOP has wrought, we have a chance of repairing the damage.
Assuming, of course, that the Dems don’t blow it again. And that whoever’s elected President gets a Congress s/he can work with, and has the intestinal fortitude to do what has to be done, even if it means being a one-term President.
This misunderstanding of Kerry’s character is so frustrating. John Kerry has never shown himself as “afraid to take action.” This tracks back to before his days in the Senate when he had the balls to sit before Congress and expose the nightmare that was Vietnam, in spite of being warned against doing so by people who knew it would come back to bit him in the ass. Still, he knew it was the right thing to do, so he did it.
No, I’d dare say John Kerry is the last person who would’ve been “afraid to take the necessary action to get things straightened out” with this fucking mess GWB created in Iraq. We as a nation completely fucked up not electing John Kerry in '04. Completely.
And to keep it on topic, Gore completely fucked up in distancing himself from Bill Clinton. Grrrr.
And all those things occured before he had Presidential aspirations. If he really was the same man who did those things, WTF didn’t he promote the hell out of those things during his run? That would have been better than sticking that little girl up on stage at the convention and having her lecture us about Cheney’s potty mouth. Going into the '04 race, the polls were showing that any Dem could beat Shrub, then Kerry showed up and things went downhill.
A ballsy attack by Kerry, saying that Shrub was an idiot and that we needed to really kick some ass, rather than fucking around in Iraq with half measures, would have got him votes. Instead, we got vague mumblings about getting the UN to help us, and him sounding almost identical to Shrub on Iraq. It doesnt’ matter if Kerry said the things first (I don’t know if he did or not), but once the opposition starts coopting your message, you change things and point out that the otherside is a bunch of “me too” whores.
And all those things occured before he had Presidential aspirations. If he really was the same man who did those things, WTF didn’t he promote the hell out of those things during his run? That would have been better than sticking that little girl up on stage at the convention and having her lecture us about Cheney’s potty mouth. Going into the '04 race, the polls were showing that any Dem could beat Shrub, then Kerry showed up and things went downhill.
A ballsy attack by Kerry, saying that Shrub was an idiot and that we needed to really kick some ass, rather than fucking around in Iraq with half measures, would have got him votes. Instead, we got vague mumblings about getting the UN to help us, and him sounding almost identical to Shrub on Iraq. It doesnt’ matter if Kerry said the things first (I don’t know if he did or not), but once the opposition starts coopting your message, you change things and point out that the otherside is a bunch of “me too” whores.
Sorry, disagree. By failing to repudiate what Bush had done in Session I, we ratified it and screwed the pooch for the next 25 years.
Our international reputation is in a very filthy toilet, the entire world is a more dangerous place as a consequence, and it’s going to take a long sequence of good administrations (Republican and Democratic alike) before folks in other countries stop harboring deservedly contemptuous attitudes towards the US government.
