this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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What the fuck is this shit? Motherfucker, I lived through these elections, and this is some boomer revisionist bull shit.
Al Gore lost because he couldn't differentiate himself from god-damned George W Bush. He was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Kerry lost because he couldn't articulate his better vision for America, and was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Hillary lost because she didn't even try to reach out to the left base. She was too centrist to beat Donald Fucking Trump.
Three ostensibly intelligent leaders who lost their elections to fucking morons because they thought that they didn't need to try very hard to reach out to progressive voters.
Any one of them would have been a better President than what we got, but the fact that they all lost means they did something wrong. It isn't the fault of the voters demanding better, it's the fault of the party failing to meet the demand.
I am fascinated to wonder who is upvoting this.
I mean, it’s true that the left base didn’t completely show up for him. Enough of them showed up that he won the popular vote and the electoral college, but if the vigorous activist left that was focused on WTO and GATT and other non electoral issues had been on the ground in the same way that Roger Stone’s machine was, they might have been able to stop Bush from stealing the election, and we might have had action on climate change back before it was too late, no global war on terror affecting hundreds of thousands of lives, no ISIS, no 2008 financial crash, and we might not have had all the failures to take US intelligence’s warnings seriously, that led to 9/11. Plus God knows what else actual forward progress.
Reframing “the US news media is so corrupted by propaganda that the average viewer can’t determine who is better between Gore and Bush, by a large enough margin to overcome a pretty blatant coup” as being all Gore’s fault somehow, is the most Lemmy-fake-leftist thing I’ve seen today, and I’ve seen someone praise the USSR’s justice system and someone else say that Biden shut down Trump’s insulin price cap.
“Too centrist”
Get the fuck out of here
You’re right about Hillary though, that part is true
You young ones won't know this, but Gore had a very different persona as Congressman and VP. Note that the only reason Clinton, a notorious draft-dodger, picked Gore as his running-mate was because of Gore's reputation as the top Pentagon-hawk. As well, Gore led centrist wing of the party that wanted to eliminate welfare and implement austerity measures.
People who say Gore would have kept us out of Iraq, or not done all the other dumb shit Bush did, don't seem to recall that politician Gore was complete polar opposite of post-political Gore we know today.
Dude I don't really wanna play the game of "let's pull on this thread and see if a bunch of conservative-propaganda-worldview stuff pops out" again, I've done it like twice in the last 2 days and it sometimes takes a while
But (a) it's like a cat with a laser pointer (b) tbh it doesn't look like this particular thread is all that long
I mean everyone knows we all look down on people who didn't fight in the Vietnam War, and in general who don't do what the federal government wants them to do. Fuckin cowards, what was wrong with them! What do you think? Clinton should have gone over and shot a bunch of Vietnamese people, amirite fellow anti Iraq War person?
Perhaps should have put quotes around "notorious". I figure most here knew it was another just another media-generated controversy.
Yeah, completely fair. I see what you mean. I think I am impatient and short tempered after talking with a series of not very nice people yesterday and today.
Regardless of that I still think your main point is made up, though. Here and here are some contemporary stories about the pick -- he voted for the Iraq War 1, but that was seen as sort of a surprise given his father's antiwar reputation. His reputation at the time was as an environmentalist and technocrat. It's important to remember that the tolerance for austerity at home and war abroad was a lot greater in 1992 than it is today; it was a much different political landscape. Gore wasn't seen at the time as any kind of hawk in either respect that I'm aware of and rereading the stories from the time I don't see any kind of inkling that Clinton had him on to pander to pro-war people or anything.
Gore voting for Iraq I was hardly a surprise, as he championed it regularly on TV. He then chastised Bush I for ending the war too early.
In the Clinton Administration, he was among the staunchest hawks. He would give speeches calling for removing of Saddam ("finish the job"). You can probably find some of those speeches with Google...cover the name over and you'd think you were seeing something from Rumsfeld or Cheney.
Contrary to myth, Iraq II was not invented by a small group of neocons. It had full bipartisan backing in Congress, and there are some who were close to Gore who believe he would have also been in support.
Here’s a speech Gore gave about Iraq War 2. You don’t need to believe whether or not he would have been in support; you can go back to contemporary speeches and find out whether he would have been in support, and he wasn’t. As you pointed out, it had pretty freaking broad support, so that made him an outlier.
Idk what you mean about “among the staunchest hawks” in the Clinton administration. It’s not the VP’s job to do policy decisions and take part in the debate about what the president’s policy should be (at least not in public). If he was making pro war statements from 1992-2000 that’s a statement of what the Clinton administration’s policy was, not what Al Gore’s policy preferences were.
He was okay with war, in general, in ways that would make him an anomaly for a progressive Democrat today, but not at all at the time. (At the time, we were still doing our own Israel-in-Gaza slaughter and torture operations all over Central and South America with, as you pointed out, broad bipartisan support with 0 of this modern level of protest or debate about whether we should be doing it.) And like I said, he definitely wasn’t brought into the Clinton administration because he was some pro war guy. I honestly have no idea what you’re even talking about with that. Anyway, I showed you the contemporary articles about why people were saying he was brought in; you’re welcome to read them, or alternatively to think what you like about it if you’re committed to your way.