Did anyone see that SNL skit last night "Palm Beach". They did it as a soap opera, funny as hell.
Also, I was reading that conservative rag The Boston Globe
this morning, and I think they nailed it in their focus section regarding why Gore can't stop now (quote "He can wave goodbye to 2004") Byline by Scott Lehigh.
Within the text of this article, they already started to do a post-mortem on the campaign that Gore ran (win or loose).
To quote:
For 2004 Why not Gore? Because the Democratic Party wants to win -- and without the vice presidency, Gore doesn't look like a winner.
Some Dems would undoubtedly believe Gore was robbed of a victory that a manual recount in Florida would have confirmed.
"But others, and these tend to be the professional Democrats, say, 'Hey, with prosperity and the nation at peace, we shouldn't have needed a recount. He should have won in a walk,'" says Stephen Hess, a senior fellows in governmental studies at the Brookings Institute.
One national Democratic consultant predicts that support for a Gore encore will fade quickly if he emerges the loser this year. "Alot of smart people are going to say, 'He blew Arkansas, he blew Tennessee, he blew all three of the debates, he targeted the wrong states'"
After all, had he won his own state, a place Gore was so confident of carrying that he let precious weeks in September pass with no TV advertising, or Arkansas, where the campaign high command allowed President Clinton to appear only in the closing days, or even New Hampshire, Gore would be the president. Or even West Virginia, where even Michael Dukakis triumphed in '88.
Running the worst race in the best of times, Gore surrendered a staggering 12 states (and 103 electoral votes) that Clinton won in '92.
That cross-country weakness is only the geographical manifestation of Gore's problems as a candidate.
Unlike Clinton's '92 campaign, Gore's lacked a cogent, coherent set unifying ideas. In the end, he settled on an odd and unconvincing populism, which deconstructed this way: After 8 years of Clinton-Gore leadership, our unprecedented prosperity has transported us to the very gates of Shangri-La--where we've been set upon by a ruthless cabal of special interests.
As the robot on "Lost in Space" used to intone: "Warning! Warning! Does not compute."
But the single most damning fact of his campaign is this: A supposedly accomplished debater, Gore went into the first of three with a lead of 5 points or so over Bush.
After facing off 3 times with Bush, a candidate whose record and experience as Texas governor the Gore campaign had disparaged for months, the vice president had lost his lead and, in some surveys, trailed.
Not a bad review of Gore's campaign. Not sure what the same review of Bush's campaign would be, but I won't get to see much of that up here in Boston, it's so staunchly republican...hehe. But I would be interested to hear some of the Reps. critiques of Bush's campaign also. (Registered Independent here).
Cobra
