Gore's Y2K Election Strategies
By Sara McPeak
jemcpeak@mc.net
January 1999

News Flash: Gore Makes It Official: He'll Run in 2000

Although no official announcement has been made, Al Gore is making plans to run for President in the year 2000. Following are some of the strategies and theories that he has chosen to exemplify his campaign in preparation for that run. We can only hope that Gore's errors in judgment will jump out and grab the attention of the American electorate.

--Loyalty Above All Else--
Al Gore has changed his strategy regarding the White House under fire. This is obvious in his recent strong defense of the chief executive under what he terms partisanship attack from the House. In August, when Clinton was admitting that he misled the nation, Gore was vacationing in Hawaii. In broad contrast during December, as the impeachment snowball grew, so did Gore's efforts to support Clinton in open statements to the press and inpersonal appeals to individuals.

Gore has obviously chosen to be loyal above all else.

Loyalty is just one of the traits he hopes will enhance his image as a straight shooter if he is to have any hopes for a Y2K presidential bid. But how can blind loyalty make any sense in the roller coaster political, moral and legal upheaval surrounding Clinton?

The one constant in this confusion is the certainty that Clinton lied under oath. No one has been able to refute that fact. The House of Representatives impeached Clinton based on that fact; and yet Clinton refuses to acknowledge that fact in the face of the dramatic irony that the country knows the truth.

Certainly the blind loyalty of Al Gore for his President ignores the fact of perjury and the interpretation of this kind of loyalty can only be that it is contemplated for political gain. Is democratic partisanship more palatable than republican partisanship? Yes, it is, if you are a loyal democrat. But no matter how loyal Al Gore is to his President, nothing can change the truth. Aligning with President Clinton is akin to defeatism.

--Fighting Foreign Government Corruption--
The Malaysian incident discussed in our December Gore Watch was an attempt by Al Gore to expose government corruption in a foreign land and to take up the cause of protesters wanting to overthrow a corrupt foreign government. Because of the Clinton administration's lack of a definite and strong foreign policy, no backdrop was in place which might have prepared the way for a more sensitive policy speech in Malaysia. And so Gore's direct approach failed and this became an international incident. Evidently, that fiasco was just a prerequisite to a continuing pursuit of identifying foreign country human rights violations and crooked politicians in foreign lands as Gore now has new plans on the horizon to host international talks on fighting government corruption.

In a December 7, 1998, Wall Street Journal article, Gore's past associations were mentioned as possible deterrents to his accountability in the area of routing government corruption:
"...the issue has its political risks for the vice president. One problem is that anyone who declares holy war on corruption risks being labeled holier than thou. In Mr. Gore's case there are two specific problems: One is his close relationship to former Russian prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who has been linked to the dark elements in the Russian oligarchy. The other is the continuing U.S. campaign-finance controversies. Election funding-related corruption currently isn't on the conference agenda."
And what about the corruption at home? Our own President will possibly be tried by our Senate next month on impeachment charges of lying under oath and obstructing justice, for heavens sake! Shouldn't our government rid our own institutions of such violators before we attack the global corruption zones?

--Practical Idealism--
Practical idealism is the Y2K theme which Vice President Al Gore has suggested for his all-but-declared presidential election bid. It was coined in response to rival Gov. George Bush's theme of compassionate conservatism.

Practical idealism conjures in one's mind abstract philosophical ideas which should be discussed and weighed against values, morals and mores. But Mr. Gore explained his practical idealism as "navigating between political poles of the past -- labor versus management -- and rejecting false choices like that between protecting the environment and fostering development."

It sounds to me like practical idealism is not a route to truism but yet just another political cover-up in order to appear to be accepting both sides of an issue.

Perhaps Al Gore should apply his practical idealism in the matter of his incessant predictions of global warming. Ignoring the practical sphere of his theme, Gore refuses to recognize scientific research reports which contradict his ecoalarmist forecasts. In the November 2nd issue of

Insight on the News", it was stated:
"Al's worldview enthusiastically is shared by Dick Forrister, a rock-hard Gore man who heads the White House Office of Global Climate Change. Recently he told a Washington meeting of the prestigious Energy Institute that critics who disagree with the official view of global warming are clowns... NASA scientist James Hansen recently has argued that the reason dramatic warming didn't show up as he had forecast was because the soil and vegetation are absorbing carbon dioxide at an increasing rate. That makes the planet greener, not browner. Accounting for Hansen's work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this lowers 21st-century warming to about 1.25 degrees. Forrister called this frivolous as well."
How can Gore suggest such a lofty sounding theme as practical idealism to the electorate and coincidentally expect us to accept the idea that scientific investigation (especially that done by scientists funded by the U.S. government), if it disagrees with Al Gore, is simply frivolous and those conducting it are clowns? Facing such a constant flow of contradictions of his global warming concerns, Gore must simply accept the practical fact that he is wrong.

Editor's Note: In an interesting sidenote that Sara's too modest to mention, she and NASA scientist James Hansen went to high school together in the 1950s. James Hansen was salutatorian of their class, and guess who was valedictorian? You guessed it! Our own Sara McPeak, Rightgrrl! Gore Watch expert and extraordinary refuter of bogus environmental claims. :)


This article copyright © 1998 by Sara McPeak, and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of its author. All rights reserved.

Algor(e)ithms!