The president is not you drinking buddy and should not be one. I don't care how stiff or loose or funny the president is. I don't care about make-up or wardrobe. I don't care about charm and backslapping and charisma -- whatever that is. I don't care about "leadership", either. We are not sheep.
Here's what matters:
- ability to work hard
- ability to focus on multiple issues at the same time
- discipline , ability to control emotions (No Don Juans like Clinton)
- relentless curiosity
- ability to learn quickly and analyse information quickly
- detailed knowledge of the federal government and all of its procedures In other words you have to know everything about this:
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/tree- detailed knowledge of foreign countries, their population, politics, economy, military strenght etc.
- detailed knowledge of short-term and long-term threats, ability to find the the line between naivete and paranoia (not exactly something Bush and the neocons can do)
- detailed knowledge of our own military and defense capability, history of US military interventions, ability to assess risk-benefit ratio in various geopolitical crisis situations
- ability to think ahead and see various disaster scenarios, both manmade and natural, before they happen. This also depends on knowledge. You have to look systematically for expert analyses which describe disaster scenarios.
- ability to see the potential of technological and scientific advances
- willingness to listen to opposing views, no matter what someone's party affiliation is, and ability to suppress personal feelings about the source so that you can judge the proposal on its own merits
- willingness to communicate with the public on a frequent basis
- ability to communicate with the public in a non-emotional, pragmatic, articulate way
- rejection of mass manipulation using photo-ops, "damage control", smear campaigns, TV or radio ads, rejection of simplification. No soundbites, no slogans no "talking points".
- willingess to follow the rule of law, even if you don't like the law or you think it's just plain stupid
- willingness to respect separation of powers, the congress' investigative and oversight authority, even if its in the hands of the opposition party
- willingness to appoint competent individuals to various government positions, rejection of the concept of "political favor"
This is just a short list. But when it comes to actual governance and not just silly campaign tactics and "I feel your pain" melodrama these factors are far more important than any ideology let alone personality.
Now think about this list then think about Gore and compare him to other pols you know.
Can you say, with a reasonable mind, that there is anyone who is better qualified than him?
I posted this in another thread a week ago. I can't find it anymore so I repost it.
It was written by a guy named Richard on another board before the 2004 elections.
It's a very good summary which explains why Gore is not your average pol.
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Here are a few things why no other candidate comes even close to Gore on my list.
(Note: none of these comments were made by a Gore fanatic. These are unbiased opinions.)
"If you take a longer-range view, the outcome that Gore was pushing -- take the warheads off these land-based missiles, that single-warhead missiles are the route to stability on land -- what Gore was pushing for became conventional wisdom 15 years later."
Michael Krepon
Founding President of the Henry L. Stimson Center on Gore's 1983 arms control proposal
"Becoming an expert on nuclear arms gave Gore a national, and even international, reputation. Not an easy thing--can you name a junior congressman?"
Nicholas Lemann
“Gore Without a Script” The New Yorker, July 31, 2000
"January 1983, Washington: I had just gone to work for Arkansas congressman Bill Alexander, who slipped me into a turn-of-the-year issues workshop being held for newly elected Democratic members by returning Democratic congressmen. Two of the recognized masters on hand were Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin (later to be Secretary of Defense under President Clinton), who held forth on arms control and weapons policy, and Jake Pickle of Texas, who was equally respected on the ramifications of Social Security. The format permitted some relatively junior members to come in behind their elders and elaborate on the finer points of a subject, however. One such presenter was a dark-haired, earnest-looking beanpole named Al Gore. As a native Tennessean, of course, I recognized him to be the son and namesake of former Senator Albert Gore, who had been narrowly defeated for reelection back in 1970, an early casualty of the Republicans' Nixon-era "Southern Strategy." The younger Gore, a Harvard grad who had served in Vietnam and worked as a reporter for The Tennessean, was now representing his populist father's old congressional district in Middle Tennessee.Presenting meticulous, closely reasoned analyses of both weapons policy and Social Security, Gore proved more illuminating on those subjects than either Aspin or Pickle, the recognized experts, had been."
Jackson Baker
The Heir Apparent, The Memphis Flyer, May27-Jun2, 1999
"I think the short answer to that, at least in my judgment, is yes.I think the Clinton administration's decision making on many, not all, aspects of foreign policy and national security matters has been rather focused on short-term political and public relations matters. And let me say a word about, from my perspective, Vice President Gore's style of decision making, which I think is rather different. I first met him about 20 years ago when he was in the Congress, when Leon, whom I also didn't know at the time, called me.I had just gone back to law practice from being Under Secretary of the Navy, not an admiral. Leon asked me if I could come up to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressman Gore to talk about something I had worked on in the Pentagon, and I said, oh, you mean Navy matters? He said, no, when you were there before. I said, well, when I was there before, I was a lieutenant in the Army.What's this about? He said, well, it has to do with Code 50. Now, Code 50 was a computer program that was used for force exchange calculations in planning U.S. strategic weapons. So I went up to the Hill and really a rather modest office, to put it mildly, there is Congressman Gore in his shirtsleeves with a large stack of computer printouts. Leon is sitting next to him and they are poring through the printouts.And I said, "Can I help," and he said yes.He said, "I'm very dissatisfied with the studies that get done in the government on arms control and strategic planning.It doesn't seem to me they emphasize survivability enough and every time they do a study, they say it derives from this old Code 50, and I understand you used to program this. Can you help me understand the assumptions and the model so we can get a model written that is more along the lines of what's important rather than what's not important?"
I said, "Well, Congressman, you broke the code. That's what it's all about, is understanding the half-dozen or so key assumptions in these models and let's see if I can remember.This was 15 years ago." So we pored through this for close to an hour and he took careful notes on a yellow pad, and after he understood the half-dozen or so key assumptions in the Code 50 model, he said, "Thank you very much," and I got up and went back to my law firm. I remember thinking at the time, this is a different kind of Congressman. I had experiences in the administration, both working with the Vice President on the intelligence budget, working on matters related to Africa, and seeking his advice in my own resignation, which suggested to me that he is a man of substance, precision, and discipline in making decisions.I don't agree with him on everything, but I must say I think that on matters of foreign policy and national security policy, it would just be my personal prediction that you would see far more focus on long-term objectives and on substance in a Gore administration than you have in a Clinton administration."
James Woolsey
former CIA director answering the question: Would the Clinton administration policy have been better if Gore had been in charge?
Wednesday, June 14, 2000, American Enterprise Institute
"Gore has never shied away from tough foreign policy decisions. When he decided it was in the United States' strategic interest to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, he joined just nine other Democratic senators to vote in favor of the Gulf War. In Bosnia and Haiti, Gore decided the humanitarian and pro-democratic imperatives of putting a halt to mass murder and dislodging dictators off the Florida coast were legitimate reasons to send in U.S. troops. As it turns out, Gore was right on all three counts. Can you think of another politician with a similar track record?"
Alexandra Starr
The Stiff Man Has A Spine ,The Washington Monthly, September 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 8
"As tens of thousands of people were gathering in the stifling morning heat outside the city library to hear how the Democrats planned to fix it, Gore was inside the Arkansas Governor's hotel suite persuading him to take a stand on a Balkan dictator most Americans at that point had never even heard of. Within days, Clinton was attacking George Bush for being soft on Slobodan Milosevic and calling for military action. He had started down the road that seven years later led to Kosovo."
Karen Tumulty
The secret passion of Al Gore, Time, May 24, 1999
"He went ahead and went to Iowa. But once he got there, Gore--who had studied airline security as vice president, before anybody cared about it; who always took his CIA briefing; who could pronounce names like Osama bin Laden and Hamid Karzai at a time when most Americans could not locate Afghanistan on a map--Gore stood before that rabidly partisan crowd, and pronounced George W. Bush "my commander in chief."
Liza Mundy
Mr. Resident, The Washingon Post, November 17, 2002
"The guy genuinely does look seriously around the corner and into the future on a lot of issues a lot people don't pay attention to. In the early 1980s he was studying climate change and early global warming when that was not on people's screens. In the early '80s, he was also very interested in changes in computer infrastructure, in what he called the information superhighway. He would talk in congressional hearings about the day when everyone would have PCs in their homes. At his best, there's almost a prophetic edge to the guy."
Bill Turque
Newsweek, Author of "Inventing Al Gore"
"Back in the '80s, Mr. Gore was the only national political figure who understood what the Internet could mean to America's future."
Jaron Lenier
computer scientist and a pioneer of virtual reality
Al Gore: Internet Pioneer, Washington Post, April 21, 1999
"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development." ... "The Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value of high speed computing and communication and for his long-term and consistent articulation of the potential value of the Internet to American citizens and industry and, indeed, to the rest of the world."
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
designers of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
"It is the case that Al Gore was perhaps the the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country (and later the world). In 1986 I chaired the Computer science and Telecommunications Board and Gore was our dinner speaker at the National Academy of Sciences. He spoke about the importance of a National Information Infrastructure. At the time he was a senator from a fairly small Southeastern state and I was amazed at his national vision. He has continued to be a national leader in promoting the importance of the internet for commerce and education."
Joseph Traub
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~traub/"Al Gore has been one of my heroes for the last decade. I became aware of him around 1990 when he started being quoted a lot by the engineering types working on internetworking issues: He was the first legislator who actually appreciated what the Internet was all about, and he helped guide the 'net through a very tricky transition. When the 'net got started in the 1970's, every computer scientist who heard about it was jazzed, but only a very select clique could get to touch it: The hardware for the internet was these special computers called IMPs (I think that was short for Intelligent Message Processors) built by Honeywell, and outfitted with software and some minor hardware modifications by Bolt Beranek and Newman,and engineering company in Cambridge, Massachussetts. In order to get one of those, you had to be a research institution with contract funded research for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. I think the rental for an IMP was something like $100,000 per year, which had to be paid out of the overhead on the research contracts, so small colleges need not apply!
Around 1980-82, the ARPAnet had grown to include major military posts, defense contracting companies and most universities that had any defense research contracts at all. It was now carrying several different classes of traffic:
- administrative traffic for the military
- administrative traffic between the military and its contractors
- and acting as a testbed for research experiments in protocol development.
During this period, TCP was developed, and the network switched from the original NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Shortly after that, the network had grown so large that it had run out of numbers for the IMPs (the hardware allowed 8 bits for the IMP number) and it was split into two separate networks connected by some routers called "mail bridges":
- network number 10 - ARPAnet
- network number 26 - MILnet
This split also helped calm the fears of some military people who were worried about sharing a network with potentially subversive students. This fear is why the connection between the networks was called "mail bridges" implying that only the relatively safe e-mail could get across. Despite the name, however, those were really full-fledged routers, providing a completely seamless
connection.
With IP installed, and the newly invented ethernet allowing for affordable campus networks, the major universities started attaching campus networks to the ARPAnet backbone, using VAX-11/780 mini-computers with the network-aware version of UNIX that ARPA had paid University of California at Berkeley to develop.
Many of the smaller universities wanted to participate, but did not have any military reaserch contracts to qualify them, so they banded together to build a compatible network running TCP/IP over X.25 (Telenet, Tymnet). This was known as CS-NET (for Computer Science network).
By 1989, the university-to-university traffic had dwarfed the military traffic, and the DoD wanted to divest itself of the overheads of running the network, so they asked the National Science Foundation to take over. Around this time, the NSF had started a program to build - I think it was 9 - national supercomputer centers, and needed to link them with the potential users at universities. They rented a bunch of 56 kbps lines - of the same kind that ARPAnet ran on - and installed a bunch of routers built out of inexpensive PDP-11/23 minicomputers, using a software package called FUZZBALL, developed by professor Dave Mills of University of Delaware. This created a second backbone, parallel to the DoD-sponsored ARPA backbone. Since NSFnet had no military funding, there was no longer a requirement for military contracts to be connected, but since it was paid for by tax dolllars earmarked for reasearch in the national interest, it was not available to businesses, except in support of government paid research.
It was at this point that Senator Gore stepped in, and basically brokered a deal where NSF stopped paying for the network, and instead gave the universities money to buy network services.
This made it possible to start network companies to compete with NSFnet and its regional affiliates. Several of the NSF-funded affiliates re-invented tehmselves overnight into for-profit ventures. NYSERnet became PSI, for example.
Without this visionary plan, there would not have been a commercial Internet. Because I had seen how elegantly Senator Gore pulled off this very good thing, I was happy to see him run for president,and even happier to see him join forces with Bill Clinton. I still think Al Gore is the better man."
Lars Poulsen
http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/"If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later."
Marc Andreessen
founder of Netscape, on Gore's Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 that helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers led by Andreessen created the first browser
"In the early days of the Web, he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."
Phillip Hallam-Baker
former member of the CERN Web development team
"Say what you want about Al Gore, but when it comes to difficult, complex matters of public policy, he has an impressive record of calling it right when others called it wrong. As a senator, Gore was the only Democrat to vote in favor of the Gulf War. He didn't "invent" the Internet, but he did sponsor the congressional spending bill that allowed it to expand outside the Pentagon. He was one of the hawkish members of Clinton's inner circle whose early advice to bomb Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing was both morally and strategically right. He was also a fiscal hawk who argued that cutting the deficit would lower long-term interest rates and lead to prosperity--a policy that worked beyond everyone's wildest expectations. He headed up a commission on airline security, whose recommendations, had they been followed, might have helped prevent September 11.
But more than anywhere else, it is on the environment that Gore can claim to have what every leader needs but few possess: vision. Before the rest of the world had ever heard the term "global warming," Gore was holding the first congressional hearings on the subject--in 1980! "
Stephanie Mencimer
Weather tis Nobler in The Mind, The Washington Monthly, July/August 2002
"When you get back to the vision issue, I believe that Gore has it within him to be an incredible president; he has it within him to be a truly great president, because he's sane, he's balanced, he's normal in a way Bill Clinton is not, he has a grasp of substance, he has a clear vision about the environment and about its centrality in our universe. He was 15 years ahead of anybody in understanding the consequence of global warming. And he's got a clear sense of where he wants to lead the country."
Dick Morris
political consultant and former advisor to President Clinton
"I actually think he's done a great job. I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation."
Lois Gibbs
,the Love Canal resident who brought the issue to public attention, talking about Gore on CNBC's "Hardball," Dec. 1, 1999
"Al Gore was the first member of Congress from a tobacco state to take on the tobacco industry on health officials in any meaningful way. Whatever else you think of the guy in 1983 that was not something that was good politics, and it was something that took real personal courage. No doubt about where he is on the issue today."
Matthew Meyers
former head of the Coalition on Smoking or Health
"And to his credit, he also led the way in strengthening the language on health warning labels on cigarette packs. And so, you know, in spite of what happened later in his career, that really was unusually brave I think on his part to do that in the early 1980s."
Bill Turque
Newsweek, Athor of "Inventing Al Gore"
"For many scientists, however, the selection of the 44-year-old Democrat as Clinton's running mate immediately made sense. Far more than other lawmakers, Gore during his career in Washington has gained a reputation in the science community for being concerned, knowledgeable, and articulate on matters of science and technology. Researchers of various disciplines interviewed by The Scientist attest to this, saying they are impressed that Gore is well versed in scientific areas as diverse as space science, supercomputing, and biotechnology."
Barton Reppert
Researchers, Pro And Con, Cite Gore's Science Acumen, The Scientist, August 31, 1992
"I have interacted with him a number of times, at many conferences. And he is surely the most knowledgeable major politician in terms of his actual scientific knowledge."
F. Sherwood Rowland
atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Irvine and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a leading expert on atmospheric ozone depletion
"I think that in general, it's very difficult to find members of Congress who are as well-versed on those issues."
Allen Goldhammer
chief scientist at the Washington, D.C.-based Industrial Biotechnology Association, on Gore and biotechnology
"One reason Gore's always ahead of the curve is that he reads so much. The names he drops are not those of celebrities, but of authors."
Jake Tapper
"I'm not peaking too early", Salon.com, Aug. 4, 1999
"Well, there are two statements that are unquestionable. One is, he was deeply involved in the decision-making process that brought Alan Greenspan and kept him in the Federal Reserve system and also that brought Rubin into the Secretary of the Treasury's office, which has resulted in a good economic system, there's no doubt about that. Secondly, he was not involved in any way in the elationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. So, the two factors that you questioned me about are inherently separated and not related."
Jimmy Carter,
answering the question: doesn't he have a fairly subtle task ahead, both stepping into the spotlight himself but still wanting to run on a record?, PBS, August 14, 2000
"Whatever the merits of running as a populist during a boom, Mr Gore's campaign is now looking more far-sighted by the day. Even the briefest reading of the press cuttings produces some choice quotations. Mr Gore gave warning that his rival was being bankrolled by “a new generation of special-interest power-brokers who would like nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits”; that these special interests were determined to “pry open more loopholes in the tax code”; and that “when powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process.” The people who would benefit from Mr Gore reining in the corrupt moguls would be “the small- and medium-sized companies that are playing by the rules and earning profits the old-fashioned way.”
...You might imagine that the Democrats would be falling over each other to praise their prophetic candidate-that the airwaves would be crackling with the sound of loyal senators claiming that, if only the Supreme Court had sided with Mr Gore rather than Mr Bush, the corporate scandals that are engulfing America could have been averted."
The Economist
A prophet without honour?, Jul 11th 2002
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So again. Name one who knows better than Gore how to govern at the federal level.
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