At 09:38 AM 10/7/2005, you wrote:
>judy prince wrote:
>
>>Annie,
>>
>>Thanks for Al.
>
>I have a problem with Al. Mainly he's a politician. I forced myself to
>vote for him in 2000. While I detest the word "sincerity," something
>about Al had the coinage value of pyrites. I prefer not to do this
>here--but while Bush even then was a worse choice, Gore still made me
>unhappy. Weep weep, my sister died of lung cancer. Hey yo, tobacco
>farmers, I'm onena you! Sen. Bullshitter, D.-Tenn. See, maybe you have
>to live in New Jersey to appreciate the mendacity factor in politics. I
>once heard a speech by (the late?) Jack Anderson, 1974 sometime, when he
>repeated "You can't trust 'em, you can't trust 'em." And he was right.
I think you miss on this one, Ken. Bush was a candidate from central
casting--until the extent of the disaster began to become obvious to the
many (which only seems to have happened in the past year) most of the
people believed whatever he said. Gore and his handlers (and Kerry and his)
knew that he didn't have Bush's easy bonhommie, couldn't pass for "one of
us" as Bush managed to do despite his ruling class wealth and connections,
and they never managed to find a way to overcome this deficiency. This
isn't a new phenomenon. We owe Ronald Reagan (who really was from central
casting) to the fact that he could lie believably to the camera and Jimmy
Carter was so uncomfortable on camera that he seemed to be lying when he
told the truth.
It was never Gore's ideas that got him in trouble, because not enough
people listened to his ideas. It was that he seemed less like a "leader"
than the guy who had in fact failed as the leader of every business he'd
tried to run except for his PR stint in sports.
Here's something that tall, handsome Al Gore approaches but doesn't
address: absent the serious debate of ideas in a public forum attended by a
populace capable of understanding and being concerned about the issues,
image rules. It's unlikely that there will ever again be a short,
unattractive major party candidate for president again (Nixon lost the
first time because of five-o'clock shadow, and the politicos took note.
Stevenson, before him, was ridiculed because he had a hole in his shoe).
Female candidates will be allowed to be short, but not unattractive in
conventional terms. Because politics, as Gore points out, has become the
selling of a product, and packaging counts.
Of course, we'll also never have a major-party candidate for political
office who isn't a politician--it seems a contradiction in terms. And given
our winner-take-all election system, third parties are for suckers.
Mark
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