The Washington Post has done it again. It just produced one of those carefully threaded, nicely nuanced, totally barren pieces of perfectly neutral analysis that lacks even the merits of a warm bucket of spit.
Must have something to do with George W. Bush, I hear you reckon. And you would be right.
What with Al Gore having just won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Post saw an opening for a front-page story devoted to the legacies and comparative leadership qualities of the de facto president and the man actually elected. One would think this would be a rather straightforward task, one in which the exercise of independent judgment would inexorably yield a prejudiced conclusion -- something along the lines of comparing the legacies of Idi Amin and Mother Teresa. Right?
Well, in the real world, you would be right again. The Post, however, saw this as an opportunity to strut its bad objective self; to flaunt, once again, its overweening neutrality on any issue prone to insight, and come down decisively on both sides.
Its story was exquisitely balanced, quoting a couple Bush defenders against a couple Gore advocates, finishing with one of the latter:
"It's hard to look at the disaster of the past seven years and not believe that America would be better off if he had been president," said Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff. "Perhaps he has done more for climate change as a private citizen than he could have done as president, but I firmly believe that if Al Gore were president, America would not be at war, our standing in the world would be higher, our economy stronger and our civil liberties more secure."
After seven years of Bush, such musings are beyond what's called "contingency history" -- the "What if?" history of parlor-game celebrity. After seven years of unbroken disasters both domestic and foreign -- disasters of unmitigated and unprecedented dimensions -- there is simply no question in the mind of any thinking person that we and the world would have been better off had Daffy Duck himself assumed the presidency.
One might as well ask if the Union would have been better off with James Buchanan having retained the White House; or if Germany, maybe, would have been a tad less violent had Hitler been admitted to art school; or if the Soviet Union might have been a somewhat more pleasant place to live had Stalin pursued the priesthood.
There is, simply, flatly, undeniably, no question, no debate about such things. But what did the Post conclude in relation to the alternative history of an Al Gore presidency?
"No one will ever know."
Give us, please, one of those famous goddamn breaks. No one will ever know? Everyone already knows.
And speaking of much-needed breaks, I am hereby adjusting my handicapping of a Gore presidential run.
Forty-eight hours ago my book on this was at roughly 45/55. It's now 55/45.
The tea leaves remain thorny and fastidiously inscrutable, but Mr. Gore pruned their inscrutability just a bit yesterday, saying, "I will be doing everything I can to try and understand how I can best use the honor and the recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency. It truly is a planetary emergency, and we have to respond quickly."
Sounds to me like a bid is at least on the table, but with filing deadlines fast approaching -- hence code words(?) such as "urgency" -- all the inscrutability will soon be history itself.