As others have said, if no Gore, I can live with who we have but I believe if it’s Hilliary, the Dems will lose on a McGovernish scale against the GOP, a party of contemptible, corrupt, hypocritical traitors.

Al committed to the the Keynote speaker for this weekends Organic Trade Association annual
gathering, about 30,000 people attend.

Monday he pulled the plug.

He has something more important to do than talk to a group already committed to his message.

Anyhow, I’ve signed all the petitions for Gore to run in 2008, and in addition, I’ve spent mental time designing his campaign. So here is a thumbnail sketch.

First of all May and June will be the Book Tour and the radio and TV interviews. As I understand the book’s content, it is a serious attack on current Politics, structural as well as issues. It is about the kind of discourse necessary to Pragmatic Politics, that solve problems people and the society confront.

In July, Al Gore has a huge international concert for the benefit of Global Warming scheduled — it is a world-wide thing. It will lead into discussion of all the small and large things necessary to addressing a huge international threat.

I don’t think Gore should announce till perhaps Labor Day. If he goes ahead — he should run an unconventional campaign. For starters, I think he should announce his running mate from the get-go — and my preference would be for Wesley Clark as VP. (That way they can cover twice as much territory before the first Primary/Caucus.)

I also think Gore should present a program of perhaps 5-10 “big issues” that would be presidential priorities, and campaign on those, and try as much as possible to ignore the nonsense questions about hair, and who you would like to have a beer with, etc. etc., but instead, use many of the Video Advocates who have shown up on Gore’s TV channel — Current — to lay out his own priorities. Global Warming is obviously one of these — But Gore is opposed to the Patriot act, as written, all the wiretapping et. al., so he has a position on privacy, and protections of privacy.

Gore has opposed the Iraq war from before the invasion, and he made a number of speeches about it. He also came out early on against Bush’s doctrine of Preemptive War, announced in June, 2002. Iraq was preemptive, a War of Choice as some put it, and campaigning against the current situation in Iraq is mush given what can be done by campaigning against the underlying doctrine as well as the horror that is Iraq.

Which leads me to why Wesley Clark should be VP — because we need the four stars this particular retired General brings to re-thinking National Defense, and, given that Bush has ruined our military, rebuilding a new one along somewhat different lines. It will have to be sold to Americans, sold to Congress, and the seller will have to work from strength. Clark has written two books on Doctrine — read them.

Gore needs to campaign on a priority for making Government Services excellent — not just as cheap and dumb as you can get away with. His book is going to be massively about this topic. This issue pulls together stuff like Katrina, Homeland Security matters, Health Care, Food and Drug regulation and inspection, — a whole lot of things where cheap and dumb have been substituted for excellence. (We might add in Justice here too)

There are a whole range of issues under the general topic, Education, that are ripe for a campaign. No Child Left Behind, no work on early childhood education, the fraud that college loan programs have become — you name it, we have a target. In terms of public services Education and Transportation are the two issues that code best for Democrats thinking about personal life.

Gore — of all the candidates, Democratic or Republican, has the best comfortable relations with leaders — political and otherwise — in other nations. No one dislikes him really, and because of his Global Warming work, he has a massive popular following abroad. I want our relationships with International Organizations and the rest of the world rebuilt, and I sense Gore is the one who is best suited to accomplishing some of this. His book is scheduled for publication in ten languages. His film has done well all over the world.

To accomplish anything after the next election, the election itself is going to have to be a mandate — meaning a candidate who can get better than 57% of the popular vote — better yet, over 60%. It also has to be someone who will campaign so as to support electing Democrats to the Senate and House in large numbers and with decent margins district and state by district and state. Gore, as I see it, is the only candidate out there who has supported what Howard Dean is doing with the 50 State Project — and the whole point of that project is to provide routes to getting good people elected independent of the gatekeepers in DC, and their DC bundled money. Gore, I think, would open his campaign up to people involved in the 50 State Project, thus cutting out some if not much of the Consultant Class influence.

Gore can campaign on that thingie-dingie he invented called the internet. He isn’t afraid of it, it loves it. With his TV Channel and the sites related to it, he has a fascinating cultural experiment going with interactiveness. Check it all out.

Riesz Fischer @ 181

I think I should stop commenting on Gore here, it doesn’t do any good and it just pisses people off. (And it doesn’t bring out the best in me either).

Peace :-)

no! please don’t stop! i don’t want to get caught up in “group think” – a variety of views and information is good.

Thank you, selise!

I think I should stop commenting on Gore here, it doesn’t do any good and it just pisses people off. (And it doesn’t bring out the best in me either).

Peace :-)

no! please don’t stop! i don’t want to get caught up in “group think” – a variety of views and information is good.

Riesz — perhaps the man you are so blithely labeling “loser” wasn’t a loser at all, by any stretch of the imagination.

Buried in the emails of gwb43.com and other RNC-owned servers are the details of how at least one other so-called loser lost, by way of election theft. I’m sure it didn’t happen once.

Tim Griffin — does that name sound familiar to you? That’s one of the people who created the “loser” of 2000. And I’m sure there were more of his kind in 2000.

Add the handicap of the consultantocracy that Kos and Jerome Armstrong describe in Crashing the Gates, and you have the real losers: the American public, including those who have been deluded into believing that Democratic hopefuls are losers.

Let me guess that you’ve already been stumping for somebody else, are solidly behind a candidate, making you less than neutral. I don’t see you commenting much on the other major issues we’re facing, like the USA scandal that overlaps not only election fraud, but Abramoff, CIA infiltration and domestic public corruption. Do these not serve your interests?

Thanks for talking so calmly, Rayne. I think I had a little too much caffeine this morning!

I know Gore didn’t actually lose, but I feel he shouldn’t have let it be close enough to steal.

I like John Edwards and I still hope he wins the nomination. I think Norske’s right about Hillary, and STTP in Ohio is right that Obama would have a hard time overcoming the racist lobby.

Those other issues are very important to me, but I think any Democrat, even Hillary, would be on the right side of them.

I think I should stop commenting on Gore here, it doesn’t do any good and it just pisses people off. (And it doesn’t bring out the best in me either).

Peace :-)

STTP in Ohio @ 69

RF@40

So how about the fact that he lost three debates to the stupidest person on the planet, and didn’t even carry his home state?

I’ll give you not carrying his home state (although I’m sure enough of those “I’d rather have a beer with George” voters have come to their senses to carry it now), but I must disagree on the debates, that’s simply MSM spin.

Our expectations of Dubya were skewed so low that as long as he didn’t drool when answering questions he got positive marks.

If you watched them, it wasn’t even close.

That was my impression as well.

ANYONE who actually reads the transcripts of these debates and sees just what happened over the last 6 years and thinks that Bush “won” is an utter fool.

Bush’s comments were filled with lies, contradictions, false claims, utter pandering to American’s greed instinct, more lies, attacks on the personal character of a good man, belittling of the accomplishments of the Clinton Administration while asserting that he was going to use those accomplishments to make us all filthy rich…and moral!

http://www.debates.org/pages/his_2000.html

Read the actual debates…just see how Gore walloped Bush on every issue and idea…with Bush laying out lie after lie. About his foreign policy, about his tax cuts, about Social Security, about Education, about decreasing the size of government, about reducing the number of Federal Agencies, about improving health care, ridding the Administration of cronies, about working with Democrats, reducing partisanship, simply being a good “administrator”…and a compassionate Conservative.

But I guess that the goal of these debates isn’t laying out the truth and policies that are beneficial and workable…

Lying is okay in order to “win”.

You have to appeal to to the baser instincts of the public to “win”.

Oh, and you have to look like Tom Cruise.
[Or maybe Metrosexual Edwards or Obama?]

Please look:
The agreement was initially pursued by conservative governments in the United States and Canada supportive of free trade, led by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and the Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The three-nation NAFTA was signed on 17 December 1992, pending its ratification by the legislatures of the three countries. There was considerable opposition in all three countries, but in the United States it was able to secure passage after Bill Clinton made its passage a major legislative initiative in 1993. Wiki – history of the implimentation

NAFTA is a Bush(GHW)Baby and only legislatively passed under Clinton and the DLC. The Bad Idea was Bush negotiated. What purpose does it serve to tar Gore with responsibility. Peg DLC yes.

Especially since Gore is no longer a part of the DLC. The group had become something he could no longer support, and he was moving back leftwards himself, away from their stances. Hence his backing of Howard Dean over Lieberman (the DLC’s darling) in December 2003.