I voted for Gore when he won and would gladly do so again in '08. He would be a far stronger candidate than Hillary. I just don't see he gaining momentum in actual primaries. She's hot with fundraisers and inside the Beltway types but her right-wing brand of Demoractic party politics will play no better than Joe Lieberman's tied for third (actually fifth mr. math) Iowa performance in 2004.

Gore could do that, it seems to me. He's comfortable with a remarkably broad spectrum of people. The question i have is whether he has the requisite fire in his belly to make a real run for it.

My concern with Him and Hillary and all the other already-a-majorstar-but-i-want-to-run-anyways is that they seem like dilletantes. I mean running for president is like going away to the peace corps. there really isnt anything else in your life. its all you do, for like 2 years, at least. and thats just the campaigning part. McCain, Hillary, Gore, Kerry, Edwards, all the Senators (Gore used to be one, remember) are too often talked about as bering courted to run, not being out there hungrily craving the nomination.

That's why Im always more interested in the smaller fries who are pounding the pavement. Biden, etc... the ones that are always pushing.

Am I the only one (and complete nerd) who remembers that he was involved in a plagiarism scandal in the late 80's? No way would I vote for him. I remember it pretty well. I was about eight years old, and my mother sat me down and explained to me about intellectual property and how even members of congress can't copy their homework.

We have a problem here--our party has no clear leaders who don't have a senate voting record to be held against them. And corn-fed America won't vote for a woman.

I took an American voting behavior class in college, and the main conclusion was that people vote based on their pocket books. But I'm to much of a cynic to believe that. The masses vote based on god and a xenophobic need to cling to a way of life that they feel is under attack (who the hell is attacking the way of life of white Americans from butt-crack nowhere?) This is why communities in the boonies have huge homeland security budgets while inner city kids have school lunches cut.

Now what in the name of god and the xenophobic need to cling to the white American way of life under attack does the democratic party offer by way of an actual candidate who can win? Reason? Enlightenment? These are wanted as much as people want to adopt the metric system.

The problem is that the democratic party is seen as a party of intellectuals (wow, I'm sure you all have heard this before, but every time I contemplate it, I have to pause at the absolute ridiculous truth of such a statement). So we need to find someone who's dumb enough to win. I don't think Gore fits the bill here. Except for his desire to tear down all the dams on the Columbia (which supply power to what, the entire west coast?), he's a pretty smart guy.

Maybe the candidate we need is someone who cheats on their homework. But I'm too much of an intellectual democrat to want another idiot as president. I'll be at home on election day with Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, and a bottle of scotch to wash down the bitter taste of disgust.

It seems strange to me that on the one hand we, as a blob of a group, are vociferously unhappy with a Republican elected calss and at the same time we can seem to only see the small divisions amongst our Democratic leaders.

I mean, i read your post and my first reaction is, what candidate could ever possibly make someone like you happy?

You don't like Biden because you think he's an "idiot" who "didnt do his homework" (patently untrue by the way, guy is very intelligent, even if you choose to disagree with him, you owe it to him to learn a bit about him before you trash him personally). You hint that you dont like Gore because of a position on the dams. The one candidate ou seem to enjoy is Johnny Walker (R-Alcoholic). This is not a winning ticket....

The problem is that, of course, your sentiment is not exactly rare. Hence the joke about Democrats, firing squads and circles.

So what the hell are we going to do? Would you, or someone like you, ever get behind anybody? Did you actually get behind Clinton? Or is it time for the party to cut its losses and walk away from us?

Ah, who I'd vote for and who would win are very different people. I voted for Clinton, Kerry, and Gore, and I recognize that in terms of charisma I likely have presented them in descending order. And charisma is what appeals to uneducated voters.

Clinton was glib enough to capture attention. All three are very smart, but the latter two were not able to become society's darlings, not in the way that could get them elected. They were and are seen in the public eye as people who droned on without connecting to average Americans.

Please do not translate my disgust that there are no clear charismatic and intelligent Democratic leaders in the country with an inability to rally behind a Democratic candidate. If you read carefully, I never said that Biden himself was an idiot, just a plagiarist; in my field, inappropriate attribution is a heavy sin. My point was that our trend as a country in the last two elections is to elect idiots because they have mass appeal. Since I do not think that most Democrats are idiots, our party has a problem.

Finding a candidate that makes me or you personally happy is not the real issue here (Hell, I'd vote for Hillary Clinton, but I don't think the idiot masses will tolerate a woman president). The issue is finding an intelligent candidate with enough charisma to win. And in this, we have a problem that goes beyond minor petty differences in our brand of Democratic ideals.

Your message seemed a little odd to me because of what on first glance it implied. I don't agree with every Democratic candidate's platform. I should hope that this is the case with most voters, even voters with your cheery optimism. And for the record, I liked Gore a lot--he was genuine, intelligent, and would have done wonders for the environment (even though his position on dams is myopic). But this begs the larger question: should I just accept wholeheartedly a candidate because he/she happens to be in the party under which I vote--as a measure of blind faith, for god and Pharaoh?

Such blind faith is the hallmark of what some call "Idiot America." And here then is the paradox: How can a party, whose strongest hope of winning is through advocating informed voting, successfully appeal to the masses without resorting to blind faith tactics? Forget the masses—if I must have blind faith in our party, how then can I strive to be an informed Democratic voter?