Here's an unorthodox idea about Al Gore: Maybe he actually means what he says. The Establishment press in 2000 was so busy making fun of Gore's alleged "exaggerations" - like the bogus story that he claimed he had invented the Internet - that they couldn't be bothered to pay much attention to what he said about the issues. Amazingly enough, he won the election anyway, by a solid majority of 500,000 or so.
Did the press do any better by the elected President (as Dean called him in introducing him today) in this morning's coverage? Well, I checked the news stories on Gore's endorsement at around 9:45 PST in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Anyone reading those stories would think that Gore's endorsement speech focused on generalities about beating Bush in 2004.
One would not have gotten a clue that Gore's speech actually focused very heavily on an issue, actually only one particular issue: the Iraq War. We have to give the New York Times credit: they did put the entire transcript on their Web site. Here's what the elected President had to say about that issue today, from Dean's campaign Web site (my emphasis):
<< Now, one other thing, I've spent a long time thinking about national security and national defense. And I've heard a lot of folks who, in my opinion, made a judgment about the Iraq war that was just plain wrong, saying that Howard Dean's decision to oppose the Iraq war calls his judgment on foreign policy into question. Excuse me. He was the only major candidate who made the correct judgment about the Iraq war. And he had the insight and the courage to say and do the right thing. And that's important.
<< Because those judgments, that basic common sense is what you want in a president. Our country has been weakened in our ability to fight the war against terror because of the catastrophic mistake that the Bush administration made in taking us into war in Iraq. >>
(Cont. in Part 2)
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