http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19140634/site/newsweek/Guys Gone Wild
The most far-reaching ideas are, perhaps not surprisingly, coming from folks who aren't in the race. Too bad, but at least the current field can read Gore and Bradley.
NEW FEATURE
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
June 18, 2007 issue - As the primary campaign gets rolling, are we going to hear big, bold solutions to our big, hairy problems? The past is not encouraging. Seven and a half years ago—in another America—Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley battled for the 2000 Democratic nomination. It got nasty, with Gore playing the heavy. As recounted in Bob Shrum's delicious memoir, "No Excuses" (which is actually full of excuses for Shrum's losing streak as a consultant), the vice president twisted Bradley's ambitious health-care plan until it looked as if Bradley had neglected seniors. At first, Bradley was too aloof and gun-shy for an effective response. Later, he overreached by comparing Gore to Richard Nixon.
Similar hostilities will eventually break out among the contenders in 2008, with fresh ideas and plans little more than cannon fodder. But there's also plenty of countervailing pressure now to confront problems with more than platitudes. Candidates are torn between the need to show some imaginative beef and a fear that if they do, they open themselves up to distortion. For a genuine national conversation on issues beyond the Iraq War, they need to overcome that fear.
Campaign operatives like to argue that worthy-sounding position papers have nothing to do with governing. Not so. While many challenges and specific policy proposals will likely be different after the election, the only way to build a mandate for transformative change is to begin laying the groundwork during the campaign. And we learn something essential about the candidates from the scope of their visions, even if the boldest ideas usually originate outside the presidential campaign, from books by people like Gore and Bradley, now liberated to think big.
Gore has a decent shot at a Nobel Peace Prize this fall, and he's greeted on his book tour with calls for him to run in 2008. A close friend and former top aide, who was unwilling to talk out of school for the record, says the odds of a Gore campaign are still only about 10 percent. The Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and enthusiastic response to his new book, "The Assault on Reason," has not kicked off any contingency planning. In fact, the very reasons he offers in his book for "reason" being under assault are the reasons why he'll likely take a pass. If you want to know how Gore has, as he says, "fallen out of love" with politics, it's all there, in the form of a jeremiad about contemporary society.
Gore starts from a trenchant premise that our means of processing information and finding rational solutions are badly corrupted by television, a theme he has been exploring since college. Without any misplaced nostalgia for a pre-TV age, he argues that the "marketplace of ideas" that grew out of the rise of the printed word and the Enlightenment has been largely supplanted by a medium best suited to stoking fear, which is, he notes, "the most powerful enemy of reason."
The human mind, Gore writes, is now nearly hard-wired to respond to emotional but fundamentally trivial human-interest stories on TV. He cites the pathetic tale of John Mark Karr, who the cable networks strongly suspected was faking his connection to the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case but covered breathlessly anyway. Gore's thesis has been further validated, of course, by the thirst for Paris Hilton's jailhouse saga.
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