By Brian Beutler
Hi. I heard Ezra's invited us to tear up his Al Gore piece. Neat!
Here goes: I think Ezra, like many of us, picked up on a real change in the public disposition towards Al Gore, but has gone a step further and given us a how and a why. It's actually pretty compelling explanation. But I'd go no further than that.
The problem is here:
Long-standing associates of Gore's say his appetite for a second campaign seems to depend, at least partially, on whether he judges it an issue-based endeavor that allows him to continue speaking out on matters of substance or just another round of dodging media-narratives and churlish characterizations. If Gore's experiments in disintermediation pan out, the 2008 campaign may prove a very different undertaking from 2000's....The Internet may well have reinvented Gore, but for Gore, the issue may be whether it's done the same to politics.
Personally, I think that's unlikely--or rather, the Internet has probably not reinvented politics to a sufficient degree. Yes, millions of people watch unfiltered Gore--and like what they see--but if his campaign is to be entirely "disintermediated", that number needs to be tens of millions, and they can't all be MoveOn.org perusers. Since that's just not the case, he'd need to get back on TV, give public speeches, hold press conferences, and basically do all the things that the media saw do six years ago and that got him tomahawked.
But let's pretend that politics is--thanks to Gore--entirely new and that the new election-medium will be fully "disintermediated". Well, then, what's good for the Gore is good for the gander. Other Democrats can (though maybe without his facility) play the same game. And, more significantly, so can Republicans. If the Gore running in the primaries is the new, shimmering Al Gore--the Al Gore that might win the overall election--then he can be filleted by Republican apparatchiks; as he can be if he actually wins the primary and as he was by plugged-in and unplugged conservatives alike when he recently denounced American treatment of Arabs in front of a crowd of Saudis.
You might get the impression from reading Ezra's article that, if the 2008 campaign is new and disintermediated--a Gore-invented campaign--then it'll be a steal for him. But it might just become the reanimated Gore's own Frankenstein.
Oh yes. And Joe Trippi's "hundreds of millions" ballpark is overstated to my eye, unless if by "hundreds" he actually means "two-hundred or so". The Kerry and Bush war chests were in the $150-200 million range, if I remember right, and it seems unlikely that he'd double up on that or more. But this raises an interesting question. Even if Gore nets three, or four, or five-hundred million dollars, what on earth does an Internet-based campaign need so much money for, unless it's to pay for fully-mediated TV commercials and appearances on the stump? Just some thoughts. Answers, Ezra?
