Despite her problems with projecting a consistent or even human character, Hillary has certainly proved thus far that a woman can play in the big league in American electoral politics. She's resoundingly surpassed the first serious woman candidate for president, Elizabeth Dole, who took to wandering like an officious inspirational speaker through the audience, a bold tactic that quickly became cloying. In the two major debates thus far, Hillary has projected mental alertness and speed, as well as a wide-ranging knowledge of public policy.
For many Democrats like me, however, Hillary's history of prevarication, rigidity and quasi-divine sense of election is profoundly unsettling. And who exactly would be running the government -- that indefatigable buttinski, Bill Clinton? Spare us! But Hillary's intricate experience with the Washington bureaucracy makes Edwards (toward whom I've been leaning) and Obama (whom I may shift to) look like shaky tyros. After eight years of managerial ineptitude under Bush, will the general electorate realistically choose a work-in-progress like Edwards or Obama who needs so steep a learning curve?
Nevertheless, Hillary's abundant negatives don't make a Gore candidacy any more attractive. Sure, all the über-journalists who've mixed with Gore are dazzled by him. Big deal! Personal charm and a silver tongue in private don't make a president, who must be a public performer on the world stage. Whatever his high ideals, Gore is a mass of frustrated yearnings and self-defeating vacillation. Raised in a bubble of wealth and privilege, he has never fully emerged from his senator father's judgmental shadow. Women (wife, daughters, wifty hired hands) have to buck him up and prod him in this direction or that.
What exactly were Gore's achievements in his eight years as vice president? What steps did he take at the time to shape public policy on global warming? What did the Clinton administration do to win U.S. adoption of the Kyoto accords? (Answer: next to nothing.) What political role did Gore play in the world after leaving office? There are some mighty big blanks in Gore's record.
As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore's preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents -- telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he's trying to manipulate.
Toronto's National Post has been running a fascinating series by Lawrence Solomon on global warming dissidents, who don't get much press in the U.S. My own philosophy about earth's titanic, humanity-dwarfing operations is contained in a curious video I recently found on YouTube.com. Clips of volcanic eruptions and magma flows are set to the abstract "psychedelic" music of a California rock group, the Danbury Shakes. This eerie fusion of lurid natural images with a distorted, clashing soundscape is richly evocative of a 1960s vision that has been lost. The '60s revolution, as I've argued elsewhere, was about much more than politics. Fanaticism about global warming reduces the eternal terrors of nature to a banal political melodrama.
Back to the White House: I winced when President Bush at a press conference last month said, in reference to terrorists wanting to harm us, "These are the words of al-Qaida themselves." Nearly six years after 9/11, is it possible that the commander in chief of the American military still doesn't understand the meaning of that Arabic phrase? "Al-Qaida" isn't plural, like "Boy Scouts" or "Rotarians"; it literally means "the foundation," a loose consortium of scattered cells (against which conventional warfare is helpless).
The embarrassingly limited knowledge of the Middle East possessed by this administration when it recklessly launched the Iraq invasion will be the subject of endless future histories. The president naively relied on arrogant advisors with their own covert agendas, above all Vice President Dick Cheney, who despite his impaired health and recurrent medical emergencies, remains the obstinate mastermind of our continued, costly presence in Iraq. This administration has morphed into Salvador Dali's horrifying 1936 painting, "Soft Construction With Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War" -- a barbaric spectacle of rage, self-destruction and decay.
Next page: Paris worthy of respect? Absolutely
