On Gore ’08

Like Ezra and Shakes, I hope that Al Gore will run in ’08, and would, at a minimum, strongly lean toward supporting him in the primaries. Neil tries to throw some cold water on the parade. He makes at least one good point, although I’m not convinced by the overall argument:

• The sound point is the media’s kneecapping of Gore in ’00; I don’t know if that would happen again, but it’s possible, and is certainly the strongest argument against his candidacy. I don’t fully buy some of the subsets to the argument, though. Worrying about whether someone will be called a “flip-flopper” is rather silly, since virtually any candidate can be called one, and some (like McCain) seem insulated from the charge no matter how apparently egregious their pandering it is. Clinton and Edwards certainly wouldn’t be any less immune. The fact that a segment of the media hates Gore is a variable to consider, but nothing more than that.

• I’m puzzled, on the other hand, by the discussion of Gore’s electoral prospects, which essentially ignores the rather salient fact that he’s already won a Presidential election. Won the popular vote, would have won the electoral college if the United States had a vaguely rational system for counting votes, and were it not for the reactionary vanity candidacy of Ralph Nader would have won a victory that was well beyond the reach of inept voting commissioners, manufactured riots, and Supreme Court lawlessness. Gore is a very rare thing among primary candidates, a literally electable candidate. It seems to me that this trumps the theoretical constituencies that Warner may or may not be able to deliver on election day. And while I agree that the netroots shouldn’t be overrated, a candidate that both the base and the party establishment can mobilize behind is very valuable. (And, as Neil says, running the guy who got the Presidency stolen from him in 2000 throws the disastrous Bush administration into particular sharp relief. The harder it is for Republicans to run away from a failed presidency, the better.)

• There are two basic criteria by which primary candidates should be measured: on the merits, and on their chances of winning. I believe that Neil places insufficient weight on Gore’s obvious virtues in the former category. When evaluating candidates, it’s crucial to remember that 1)how good a candidate someone will be in a presidential election is in many respects inherently unknowable, and 2)Presidential campaigns are determined much more by larger structural factors than by electoral campaigns. Once one crosses a certain threshold of electoral plausibility –what one might call the “Feingold line”–whether someone would make a good President is more important than trying to make predictions about whether someone is more “electable.”

Obviously, these questions are only relevant in comparison. Applying these standards, I think it’s obvious that Gore is infinitely preferable to Clinton, who’s not particularly appealing on the merits and is also pretty weak in terms of “electability.” (A centrist who’s perceived as a liberal is a model for a bad candidate. Gore has this problem to some extent, but Clinton is much worse in this respect.) I also don’t think that Warner’s theoretical (and, to me, not terribly convincing) electoral advantages trump Gore’s strong superiority on the merits. I could perhaps be convinced about Edwards, and there may be other candidates we don’t fully know about, but Gore looks to me like the best candidate for ’08 if he decides to run.

…Ugh–a reminder of hacks past and present. But, of course, since the Kleins and Matthewses will hate any Democratic candidate for President–and that goes triple if Saint McCain is the GOP nominee–there’s no point in trying to appease them.

…in comments, zuzu makes a good point: Gore’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war has to be considered a huge plus, particularly given that he supported the first Iraq war. A Clinton or Edwards running on the mushy “it was a great idea badly executed” line is likely to fare about as well as Kerry did with that. Because the war was still fairly popular in ’04 the Dems were admittedly in a bind, but by ’08 that problem will almost certainly have gone away. A strong and prescient anti-Iraq-war candidate could definitely pull significant votes in the midwest.