Gore in 2008? I don't think so

Courtesy of Dick Morris, here’s a fearless prediction that Al Gore, an individual even more stubborn and personally-myopic than the mediocre junior Senator from Massachusetts, has a chance to win the 2008 Democratic nomination for the presidency. And why would his chances be better this time?  Morris thinks memories have faded, or the media brainwashing is complete:

The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency.

So what? Sure, there are folks out there that believe he was cheated. There are folks out there that don’t believe we put a man on the moon. Big deal. There are folks that believe the 2004 election was stolen too, but they’re not exactly lining up to re-nominate Kerry, are they? I think the majority of voters will decide that Al’s unstable behavior after his loss in 2000 is too much to stomach and that giving him another chance out of some type of misdirected sense of fair play is too risky.

Morris might be right, though. 2008 might be the year when the DNC decides that “electability” doesn’t matter for the nominee, and they should go with the poster-child of the angry, irrational Left. I’m sure the GOP would love to see that happen every bit as much as they were salivating over the possible nomination of Howard Dean in 2004. The nomination of Al Gore would virtually hand-deliver the Centrist vote to the GOP, unless the GOP goes nuts and nominates a candidate from the far-Right fringe.  And I don't see that happening.

I don't think this argument makes much sense either:

Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

Facts are probably going to be inconvenient for Mr. Gore, especially now that the partisan media no longer has a stranglehold on mass communications.

It’s not like Katrina was the first hurricane we’ve ever seen, and given that it was a dime-a-dozen category III storm by the time it made landfall, no climate change argument is going to make much ground with voters that aren’t suffering chronic BDS. It will also be hard for him to argue that a dependency on Saudi Arabia is a bad thing after his recent treasonous speech bought and paid for by the Saudi royals. Standing in front of an audience hostile to America and saying that Bush isn’t friendly enough with them is going to make it hard to stand in front of Americans and tell them that Saudis are bad. Playing both sides of the fence worked for BJ Clinton (William Jefferson, you pervs), but it didn’t work for Kerry and it won’t work for Al. Neither has the approachable and gregarious personality of Clinton, and neither will be able to sell the triangulation with a smile and a chuckle like he could. Frankly, despite the friendly media blackout on that speech, the GOP will get the message out and that alone will put paid to any hope of appealing to other than rabid-left voters.

Like a completely refurbished “pre-owned vehicle,” Al Gore seems to be positioning himself to Hillary Clinton’s left and as greener than John Kerry for a run at the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. His slogan might well read “reelect Al Gore.”

Yes, he probably will try to run at least partially on the “I really won in 2000, so it’s only fair to get a do-over” strategy. His delusion on this topic is as complete as that of the Kos Kidz. Unfortunately for Mr. Gore, quite a bit of analysis has gone into the results of the 2000 election, and by any fair measure it has been proven that no number of legitimate recount strategies would have won the race for him. The only recount method that would have changed the outcome required the baldest and most partisan cherry-picking of ballots, and to Al’s eventual disappointment, these were findings from studies done by the people that wanted him to win the most: the editors of the NY Times*.

* I'm going on memory on this point, but I will research this later.

Update:

I'm glad I looked that up.  There's a paragraph about it on Wikepedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2000, but they don't seem to provide permalinks for each paragraph (something that mystifies me given the length of some of the entries), so scroll down until you find "The Florida Ballot Project recounts."

It turns out there were eight different recount strategies tested.  Gore won four and Bush won four.  There can't be a tie, though, so I'm going to apply a self-serving tie-breaker: when Gore won, it was by a maximum of 171 votes and a minimum of 60.  Bush won by a minimum of 225 and a maximum of 537.  The higher number is the result that eventually got certified.  Questions about which of the different recount strategies should have been used in the final decision are certainly valid and can be debated endlessly, but obviously your position will depend on your desired outcome.  I choose, therefore, to state that the winner is the candidate with the higher average number of votes gained by recount, and that is George W. Bush. 

Regardless. I still contend that this is not a winning strategy for Gore.  I clearly remember nodding in agreement at the Sore-Loserman 2000 bumper stickers that eventually showed up after the eldction debacle had gone on far too long.  Back then, I wasn't nearly as sympathetic to Joe Lieberman as I am now.  (I wanted Joe to get the nomination in 2004 - there is a very real chance that I would have cast the first Democratic presidential ballot in my life)  The point is, whining about the past is not the way to convince me you have a plan for the future.  We had plenty of that in 2004, and it was a pointless waste of time and energy.

Also of note, as I stated the recounts were funded by newspapers, but the Wikipedia article doesn't specifically mention the NY Times. It does name the Washington Post as one of the funding organizations, though.  As they say in darts, right church, wrong pew.