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Gore's fire in the belly When I read it over my morning coffee, I liked Al Gore's Sunday op-ed counterpunch to Joe Lieberman's criticism of his populist, "I'm for the people, not the powerful" rhetoric in 2000. It seems that the Beltway punditocracy did not share the reaction. Slate's William Saletan cites the piece as proof that Gore "still doesn't get it." The piece, Saletan argues, shows Gore hasn't tamed the pugnacious streak that, according to Saletan, cost him the presidency: "As the 2000 presidential debates demonstrated, his driving imperative is to prove that he's right and his opponents are wrong."
The Saletan piece is the kind of classic inside-the-Beltway analysis that, too often, we get, not only from Slate but from the Washington Post and the rest of the political media. Saletan, a smart and insightful writer, seems to have no interest (as Josh Marshall points out today) in even exploring whether Gore was right or not. Right or wrong is irrelevant. Gore is chastised for even caring about whether he was right or wrong. All that matters is tactics. Did Gore find the precise point on the rhetoric dial to press the electorate's buttons or not? Well, he didn't win the election, so obviously he didn't. (Though, actually, he did win a majority of the votes, but Saletan, like the rest of the Beltway world, won't even think of going there -- rehashing the contested 2000 election is so tiresome and unpatriotic in these days of the War on Something or Other.)
Even when viewed purely tactically, it's not at all clear that Saletan is right to blame populism for Gore's failure to capture more votes. Consider this L.A. Times analysis: "Exit polling from the 2000 campaign suggests that Gore's populist appeal neither attracted the working-class voters it targeted nor repelled the more affluent voters that critics believe it alienated. More dramatic was the party's decline in 2000 among culturally conservative rural voters."
Gore has his patently obvious weaknesses as a candidate, but they have mostly stemmed from problems of image and failures of consistency. Whenever Gore puts on those populist shoes he keeps trying on, he goes somewhere interesting -- somewhere that makes the world of Washington insiders profoundly uncomfortable, but that, in this season of outrage against government mismanagement of the economy and corporate misprision, makes a lot of sense to the rest of the country. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
10:25:22 PM 
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