Gore Debate Heats Up

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Write
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:59 AM

The Al Gore coverage drove me nuts.

Put aside the global warming issue for a second--every television show on the planet had some version of "Now that he's won the Nobel Prize, will he jump into the presidential campaign?"

And then the correspondents and pundits would come on and say: "Eh, probably not. I don't see it. Too late for Iowa. No groundswell for Gore. Not unless Hillary gets hit by a bus." And on and on.

In other words, it was a phony premise, everyone knew it, and yet all kinds of segments and shoutfests were built around it.

It would be one thing if there were a void in the Democratic field, or Gore was dropping hints, or his staff was quietly suggesting that he was looking at the primary calendar. But there was none of that. Television simply dusted off the same scripts used when the Gore movie won an Oscar and asked, Will he? Will he? Could he? Should he?

Aside from that exercise in empty blather, there is a more serious discussion going on--about the extent of the global warming problem and what conservatives see as the politicization of the Nobel. And beyond that, some media types are making a not-so-subtle contrast between the 2000 presidential rivals and how life has worked out for them in the ensuing seven years.

At the Carpetbagger Report, Steve Benen focuses on the right's reaction:

"I saw the first few minutes of Fox News Sunday and was struck by how angry the conservative Republicans were about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. These guys don't just ignore the scientific evidence, they lash out wildly at Gore, the Nobel committee, the scientists, everyone who dares to think differently than they do.

"Bill Kristol disparaged Gore and the Nobel prize itself, saying 'it's a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator.' Charles Krauthammer insisted the award goes to 'people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush, and that's why [Gore] won it.'

"These pundits were obviously bitter and incensed, much the same way National Review's Iain Murray was late last week, when he suggested Gore share his award with Osama bin Laden, 'who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance' in a September video harangue. (Apparently, to accept global warming is to embrace a terrorist philosophy.)

"It's led Paul Krugman to ask a good question: 'What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?' "

All right, cue the Krugman column:

"Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

"And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job -- to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for -- the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

"The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the 'ozone man,' but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, 'the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.' And so it has proved.

"But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening."

For Salon Editor Joan Walsh, it is--and I'm using the technical term--a nyahh-nyahh moment:

"It's like the best revenge fantasy ever, come true: Everyone who was ever mean to you, who wrote you off or sabotaged you? That nasty high school guidance counselor? The catty New York Times columnist? The partisan Supreme Court justice? Well, they can kiss your Oscar, your Emmy or your Nobel Peace Prize, because you won all three! In the same year!

"I'm sure Al Gore doesn't think that way. But I do. I find myself a little dispirited by Gore's well-deserved win. I feel like it's the universe telling us what a broken political system we have: This is the man who could have been, should have been, our 43rd president, but our political elites did him in. Especially the media elites, who chased stories about a blue dress and earth tones at the close of the 20th century, abetting the selection of George W. Bush, a man whom history is almost certain to judge our worst president. And he still has an additional 15 months in office."

Okay, let's swing the camera over to the right, and National Review's Jay Nordlinger:

"A word -- only a word -- about the Nobel Peace Prize. It was debased a long time ago. They gave it to Le Duc Tho. They gave it to Arafat. They gave it to Joseph Rotblat, a classic fellow-traveler. They gave it to a lady who plants trees and believes that the U.S. government invented AIDS in order to decimate black people. And, during the time of George W. Bush, they have given it to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. What, they're snubbing Michael Moore and the Daily Kos guy?

"The Nobel peace committee is not so much a peace committee as a standard left-wing pressure group -- sending these Mickey Mouse 'messages.' They're like the board of the MacArthur Foundation, or the English department of Brown University or something -- there is no connection between what they do and quality. It's just straight politics, or, more accurately, ideology.

"Someone called the award to Gore 'a sick joke' -- and that's about right. The problem is, they turn around and give it to someone worthy, once in a blue moon."

How's that for a magnanimous approach?

At Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran scoffs at both the award and a Gore '08 bid:

"Let's put it this way; I doubt whether Hillary Clinton is losing any sleep over a potential Gore candidacy. She's way ahead, she has more money than God, and it's just about 90 days to the New Hampshire primary -- not enough time to pull an organization together, raise the money, and run any kind of a professional campaign. It's not that his chances of success would be small. His chances of success would be zero.

"All that aside, just what has the Nobel Committee done by giving the prize to a man a British Court called an 'alarmist' just the other day? He is a man whose major achievement -- his film Inconvenient Truth -- has been debunked even by scientists who share his fears of climate change. Other scientists have called on the former Vice President to quit being such an alarmist.

"The fact is, Gore's major 'contribution' to the global warming debate has been shown to be at the very least problematic and at worse, a shameless piece of propaganda. Yeah -- but at least his heart is in the right place.

"I can never decide whether Gore is being used by the Luddites, the one worlders, the NGO's, the anti-globalists, and the anti-industrialists as a front man for the implementation of their political agendas or whether he actually agrees with many of their ideas. The fact is, it's not about the science. It's never been about the science."

And on that subject, Danish author Bjorn Lonborg had a piece in Saturday's Boston Herald subtitled "Gore's Win is a Loss for Science." The same day's Boston Globe had a piece titled "An Inconvenient Peace Prize" by . . . Bjorn Lonborg. The exact same piece.

How does he do that?

How much of an advantage is Hillary Rodham Clinton's gender? The New Republic's Noam Scheiber raises an angle I hadn't thought of:

"This graf in Anne Kornblut's piece in The Post was kind of interesting:

" At the next Clinton stop, a town hall meeting in Derry, N.H., Leslie Harrison, 52, said the fact that Clinton is a woman is important as she considers how to vote in the New Hampshire primary. 'Men have been making a mess of things for a long time,' she said. 'A woman would be more sensitive to sending our children off to war.'

"It made me wonder if being a woman has made it easier for Hillary to inch away from her Iraq vote. Maybe people (especially anti-war women) are more likely to believe she didn't have her heart in it (whether or not that's actually the case), or even to forget she voted to authorize the war in the first place. And, if that's true, maybe her vote on the recent Lieberman-Kyl Iran amendment won't be as damaging as it could be, since voters will be more likely to believe her when she says it wasn't a vote to justify or authorize military action.

"In a sense, Hillary may get the best of both worlds here. She can compile a relatively hawkish record, which she can then emphasize in the general election should she win the nomination. But, because of people's biases about female candidates, the votes aren't as costly for her in the primaries as they might be for a man."

Rudy Giuliani seems to be hanging in there despite his well-known disagreements with religious conservatives. Fred Barnes thinks he needs to do more:

"Rudy Giuliani has a problem. It's bigger than he imagines and could doom his presidential prospects. The problem is his pro-choice position on abortion. It's one he cannot finesse by simply saying he 'would keep the balance exactly where it is now.' That means abortion would remain legal, limited only by a few minor restrictions. For social conservatives in the Republican party--millions of them, I suspect--that situation is unacceptable.

"Given Giuliani's skill as a campaigner, he might overcome the abortion problem in the Republican caucuses and primaries. He doesn't need to win a majority to capture the presidential nomination, just finish first in most of the contests. But the general election is another matter. In it, he'd probably have to get 50 percent of the vote, or close to it, to defeat Hillary Clinton or any Democrat.

"That's where the social conservatives come in. If Giuliani is the Republican nominee--and he's the frontrunner at the moment--a pro-life candidate is bound to run on a third party ticket. Richard Land, a prominent Southern Baptist leader, says the pro-life presidential effort would be 'significant.' The question is how significant."

Barnes has a little speech that he wants the former mayor to deliver.

Deroy Murdock says abortions declined in New York City during Giuliani's tenure--and disputes criticism that this is just spin.

Whither Fred Thompson? Betsy's Page says: "I'd tended to discount the line on Fred Thompson all summer long that he was lazy, figuring that that was just scuttlebutt from his opponents and that energy in a Senator was not necessarily what I was looking for. But he's been providing more evidence for that reputation since he announced his candidacy. And now voters in New Hampshire are starting to notice that he's not campaigning very strenuously for their support. And they're a state that likes to see candidates up front and personal.

"Besides participating in his first presidential debate in Michigan last Tuesday, Thompson was missing from the campaign trail. The former Tennessee senator and star of NBC's 'Law & Order' was scheduled to be in New Hampshire this weekend, but canceled. New Hampshire voters noticed . . .

"Thompson might think that he can win the nomination through some sort of innovative campaign that diminishes the need for lots of personal appearances, but substituting interviews on Fox and a few canned speeches isn't going to hack it."

Byron York has the same lament:

"Fred Thompson has had to deal with the perception that he's not fully into the presidential campaign. That perception won't go away with reports that Thompson hasn't made a public campaign appearance since the debate in Dearborn, Michigan on Tuesday:

" MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) - Mitt Romney was in Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada and then went back to Michigan. Rudy Giuliani visited Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Alabama, Washington and New Hampshire. John McCain went from Michigan to Iowa to New Hampshire.

"But where was Fred, as in Fred Thompson?"

When even conservative columnists are asking why you aren't on the trail, I'd say you have a problem.

How did Fox Business Network, which I wrote about yesterday, fare in its debut? Here's Alessandra Stanley's take:

"The mood on Rupert Murdoch's latest television venture was so giggly and upbeat that it belied its own crawl, showing sinking stock prices.

"For the inaugural show, the FBN anchor, Alexis Glick, asked Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a few perfunctory campaign questions via satellite, then went down to Times Square to interview an entrepreneur of the day, the Naked Cowboy, a guitar-strumming singer who says he earns $250,000 a year serenading tourists in a cowboy hat and underpants, and much more in merchandising and record contracts.

" 'No matter what you think at home,' Ms. Glick, formerly a temporary anchor on NBC's 'Today' show, said, giddily holding up a souvenir hat and briefs. 'You can make a small business a reality.' "

I've seen that Naked Cowboy a dozen times and just lacked the foresight to go interview him.