Michelle here.
Confession time: I rarely keep up with secular news. I glance at the headlines on the Internet, scan the front page of the newspaper kept in the company break room, and very occasionally watch the local news, but for the most part I’m out of the loop on current events. So Al Gore’s prospects in the 2008 presidential election may be old news to you, but it threw me for a loop.
"The burst of enthusiasm for Gore owes much to his emergence, since 9/11, as one of the Bush administration’s most full-throated critics. On state-sanctioned torture, wiretapping, and, crucially, Iraq, his indictments have been searing and prescient, often far ahead of his party. He has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember — calculating, chameleonic, soporific — from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who ‘found his voice in the wilderness.’
"But the Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s march to her party’s nomination. ‘Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences,’ observes a senior party player. ‘One: "She is the presumptive front-runner." Two: "I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God’s sake!" And three: "If she’s our nominee, we’re going to get killed." It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it.’
"Gore’s loyalists take pains to avoid criticizing Hillary (on the record, at least). But many of them plainly see their guy as the solution to the Democrats’ dilemma. ‘If he runs, he’s certainly the front-runner or the co-front-runner with Mrs. Clinton,’ contends Ron Klain, Gore’s former vice-presidential chief of staff. ‘And, in the end, he would probably win the nomination.’"
(Nod to Katie Allison Granju for the link.)
The Democratic choice in ’08: Lady Macbeth or Treebeard.
Should be fun to watch them duke it out.
[JIMMY ADDS: Michelle wrote this piece last week and over the weekend Al Gore apparently said to "Tell everyone I'm not running." But then politicians frequently say that when they're planning to run, so who knows?]
