Gore '08

Via The Plank, Ezra Klein brings us up to speed on what Al Gore has been doing since he lost the '00 election by that 5-4 vote. What seemed like disparate activities -- giving fiery orations, creating a TV channel, associating with MoveOn.org, all have a unity of purpose -- disintermediation.

"I know the word fell out of favor after the dot-com collapse," mused Wes Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org, " but he's doing disintermediation. He contacted us in the summer of 2003, said he wanted to give a speech, and was wondering if we'd like to sponsor it. What we lend to it is some of that disintermediation."

Disintermediation is a big word for a type of subtraction, the sort that excludes the middleman (the "mediator"). As a dot-com term, it described producers selling directly to customers rather than working through established retail channels. In Gore's case, it describes a public figure distributing his words directly to the public rather than working through established media outlets.

The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore's friend since 1961, told me, is that "Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media." Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns -- what came out had little relation to what went in. "Gore's own view," says Hundt, " is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net"

So far, Gore shows no sign of interest in another bruising campaign, but he sure adds, believe it or not, a frisson of excitement in the otherwise dreary inevitability of the Hillary!® campaign.

UPDATE: Bob Somerby nods approvingly over Klein's piece and reminds us of those heady days, before the Mighty Wurlitzer had even found the electric outlet, when it was the leading lights of our Em Ess Em who perpetrated the flaying character assassination.