A New Ronald Reagan?

I was going to write something about Fred Thompson being compared as the next Ronald Reagan and how faulty that comparison is. However, Richard Cohen at the Washington Post has been there, and done that.

Watching the video from Fred Thompson's appearance on Jay Leno last night, something else impressed me about Thompson. The man is so much more measured and thoughtful than any of the current Republican nominees. In response to Leno's question about Iran, Thompson responds:

Iran's a difficult problem, and, you have to have all of the facts before you make a final decision about it. We've got a lot of friends among the Iranian people. The Iranian economy is in bad shape. If we handle it right, and use our intelligence services and our propaganda possibilities correctly, part of that problem might take care of itself, so let's not get ahead of ourselves on that.

While I may disagree with the ways in which he would "use our intelligence services and our propoganda possibilities," this is an incredibly measured response that really looks at the issue itself and doesn't buy into the cheap one-liner. Compare this to Mitt Romney's ignorance about basic facts on Iraq, Rudi Giuliani's revisionist 9/11, and even John McCain, who is by all accounts the foremost of all the candidates on foreign policy is making light of bombing Iran. Of course Thompson has the benefit of not actually being in the race and not having to demean himself by hand-raising straw polls, as he points out, but the amazingly stark contrast between his position and all of the other Republican candidates (except Ron Paul), is noticeable.

What I find interesting is that there is a similar movement afoot in the Democratic party to get Al Gore to run. On their website, the folks at Draft Gore call Al Gore "The Conscience of the Democratic Party" in no small part because he is eloquent and intelligent and, except for his concern about global warming, is not really an activist-type politician. I discussed this more in relation to Eugene Robinson's column.

I don't think that Thompson and Gore are the same and are, in fact, less alike than Thompson is from Reagan; but, what I do think is that Cohen, or even Robinson, glaze over the underlying sense from the strength of these two candidates. People are tired of politics, not for politics' sake — Al Gore has certainly been talking about politics little "p" and big "P" the past couple of years, but the deeply partisan "horse-race" politics reported by CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, NYT, etc. The left wants President Bartlet and the right wants D.A. Arthur Branch. Why? Because these are the consummate thoughtful, intelligent decision-makers who put the country and law in front of themselves; I mean, Aaron Spelling and Dick Wolf created the characters precisely because that is what people want in their elected leaders — and is also precisely why they are fictional.

What is not so fictional, however, is the mess that our country is in. We have a disaster in Iraq, a dismal world opinion, a global climate problem, millions of uninsured citizens, personal and national debt problems and a failing infrastructure that is going to need serious investment in the next twenty years. Al Gore to the left and Fred Thompson to the right have created themselves (both, I should say through the use of Hollywood), to be the characters that we all create in our minds and recreate (through those Hollywood images) to put their face on those characters so that we imagine them as type-cast for the role of President. I'm not exactly sure what this postmodern mirror means in terms of real politics, policies or the health of our country, but looking at the field I can honestly say that we could do a lot worse than Al Gore and Fred Thompson as the race in 2008.

Braniacs for President (and Columnists) 2008!

To all three loyal readers out there, you may have noticed my hiatus. This past week, I flew to California to attend the wedding of a good friend from college and to spent some time with the parental units since I don't get to see them much seeing as how the entire continent divides us. I have been woefully oblivious of the news except for the Rosie/Elizabeth dust-up on The View (my mom watches the show and is, therefore, intrigued by this broohaha) and the lost whales in the San Fransisco Bay. I don't fault myself too much for being an un-knowledgeable citizen shirking my civil society responsibilities; after all, this is why there is vacation.

But, alas, vacations are not always truly vacations. In the process of waiting for one of my committee members to call me back about a paper that I am writing, I looked up what was going on in the world at the Washington Post. Luckily for me, today is Eugene Robinson's column in the post. For all of you who have never read his work, I believe that he is one of the smartest columnists in America and often writes about stories that other columnists ignore or writes about the more "common sense" angles of stories that other columnists treat as "horse-race" analyses.

Today, Robinson chose to write about the buzz surrounding Al Gore's run for office. Rather than focusing on Al Gore's weight as a factor about whether he would run, Robinson &mdash shock of all shocks &mdash decided to focus instead on his intelligence. I mean why would any one want to focus on that? Unfortunately, because intelligent people will have a difficult time getting elected:

Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.

While the entire column is worth the read, here is the part that I found particularly important:

Leave aside the question of whether Gore is even thinking about another presidential run, or how he would stack up against the other candidates. I'm making a more general point: One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades.

When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.

Huh, what an interesting concept...It would also seem to apply to columnists in the nation's papers of record &mdash too bad Eugene Robinson doesn't have the same notoriety as Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman.

UPDATE:While Maureen Dowd certainly deserves much criticism, I must also be fair and acknowledge that she has a very intellegent and well-written column [sub. required] this week on why President Bush can no longer be trusted on the war in Iraq.

Maureen Dowd: High School 'Queen Bee'

What does Maureen Dowd do when she wakes up in the morning? I mean, seriously, her latest column is about how Al Gore can't win because he is to fat (not to mention she repeatedly ignores the fact that he has said that he isn't running, that she cites no sources - even ones that might not be credible or anonymous - that indicate that Gore is running, or that the only information that she actually cites is an interview with Diane Sawyer which she watched on her T.V.

For those of you who don't want to pay to see the NYT article, here are the particularly "interesting" parts of the column:

"I'm not a candidate," he told Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America." "This book is not a political book. It's not a candidate book at all."

Of course, his protestation was lost given the fact that he was sitting in front of a screen blaring the message "The Race to '08," and above a crawl that asked "Will he run for the White House?"

That stupid Al Gore, I mean he goes from losing the 2000 election because of his brown suits to not being able to tell network executives not to put "Race to '08" when he is doing an interview on their network. Oh, but, wait!!! He does tell them on the show, for the next line in Dowd's column is:

He is so fixed on not seeming like a presidential flirt that he risks coming across as a bit of a righteous tease or a high-minded scold, which is exactly what his book is, a high-minded scolding. He upbraided Diane about the graphics for his segment, complaining about buzzwords and saying, "That's not what this is about."

So, one would think that Dowd would think that this was the right thing to do, but, no, actually she continues:

Diane was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: "Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, 'If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he's running.' Lost any weight?"

That poor Diane, just trying to do her job as a reporter and this man, Al Gore who obviously can't be trusted because he lied about inventing the internet and being the inspiration for "Love Boat", is now trying to not not run for President while not not not having a discussion about real political matters while not running for President which is why he shouldn't have the crawl beneath his name but not supposed to say that because he's not running for President. Make sense?^[1]. So how does Al respond?

Laughing obligingly, he replied: "I think, you know, millions of Americans are in the same struggle I am on that one. But look, listen to your questions. And you know, if the horse race, the cosmetic parts of this -- and look, that's all understandable and natural. But while we're focused on, you know, Britney and KFed and Anna Nicole Smith and all this stuff, meanwhile, very quietly, our country has been making some very serious mistakes that could be avoided if we the people, including the news media, are involved in a full and vigorous discussion of what our choices are."

He explained to James Traub of The New York Times Magazine that TV induces a sort of national trance because the brain's fear center, the amygdala, receives only a fraction of electrical impulses from the neocortex, and couldn't resist lecturing about the amygdala -- "which as I'm sure you know comes from the Latin for 'almond.'"

Huh? If Dowd isn't going to be a real reporter and schedule an interview with Gore herself (shock! why should she do that?), then she can at least listen to what he says on the boob tube. Oh, but she is too busy recounting what another reporter told her (seriously, why is she on the Times's payroll). And, what was her purpose in bringing up this conversation with Mr. Traub? So she could discuss a separate conversation she had with Mr. Traub:

Mr. Traub said that, as he followed the ex-vice president around, the Goracle was "eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn't know when his next meal will be coming."

That's right! We can't vote for Al Gore -- he's too fat! The only image that comes to mind is the high school popular girl who whispers behind people's backs loud enough so everyone can hear, "Do you know what she did last night..." or "I heard that he ate, like, an entire cow last night". So, you heard it from her lips: Britney broke up with KFed, Anna Nicole Smith died and Al Gore is too fat to be President. And this is the New York Times!!!

Oh, and in case you are interested (Dowd, playing the role of "Mean Girl", lowers voice and audibly whispers): "That Barack, he's too skinny. I mean, God, I would rather vote for Rudi, he's soooooo much cuter and more manly:"

Barack Obama is as slender as an adolescent and exercises constantly, but he still sometimes seems strangely tired on the campaign trail.

I'm glad that the nation's paper of record has such high political discourse.

[1] I would like to note that this confusion is not due to selective quoting. Every quote to this point is taken from subsequent paragraphs in the column.

Global Warming Hullabaloo

I was watching the Oscars with E and her roommate. We started joking around that it would be funny to see Al Gore waving from his SUV while talking about saving the earth from global warming.

It turns out that we weren't really that far off. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a libertarian think-tank cited Al Gore's electricity bill in this report.

Now, the debate has turned to carbon offsets and whether that makes up for Gore's $30,000 a year electricity bill. Now, those people at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research should like this kind of proposal, as carbon offsets are a "free-market" "solution" for global warming - so it shows you just how partisan the crazies are, and how out of touch limousine liberals can be.

While Al Gore continues to maintain that his lifestyle is not the issue and that his "net carbon footprint" is zero, the fact that he consumes FAR more his fair share of carbon emissions is exactly the problem. Technology is not going to save us or the earth; only changing our behaviors and consumption will really work in the end. While I don't think that Al Gore is a hypocrite, I do believe that he is being disingenuous. As long as he is taking up as much energy as he does, and as long as the Oscars continue to be the lavish affairs that they are (for example, how many people carpooled in their limos on the way to the Oscars?), neither is truly "green"; both are just "less bad" than they would have been otherwise and distract us from viable solutions.