Richard Cohen's daily howler

This morning, Richard Cohen is certainly shrill:

You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him.

But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol -- ideology trumping science. It may be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this movie than Bush ever did by beating him in 2000.

Now, a pundit can change his mind; can be impressed by an individual to the point where his attitude towards him does a complete-180. But not to acknowledge the fact that his mind has changed is ridiculous or a sign of creeping dementia. I mean, has he really forgotten that he declared Bush to be the healer-in-chief in November of 2000?

I voted for Al Gore. I did so because I have known him since he was a congressman from Tennessee. I admire his intellect, his seriousness of purpose, his capacity for hard work and study, his political values, his experience and his knowledge. That being said, I now think that under current circumstances he would not be the right man for the presidency. If I could, I would withdraw my vote. In the terminology of the moment, put me down as a hanging chad.??I still think precisely as I have about Gore. But those "current circumstances" I just mentioned change everything. Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush. ??Bush has incessantly proclaimed himself as that sort of guy--"a uniter, not a divider." The tendency is to dismiss that sort of chest-thumping as campaign nonsense, but in Bush's case it appears to be true. After all, the Bush boomlet began among his fellow Republican governors, each of whom probably thought the next president should be none other than himself.??So it says something about Bush that the governors were able to coalesce around him. Some of these governors knew Bush quite well, some hardly at all, but the fact remains that they all seemed to genuinely like the guy and respected his leadership abilities.??You hear the same sort of thing from people who worked with Bush in private enterprise. I talked with one of them once, a Democrat who disagreed with Bush on many issues. Yet he, too, praised Bush's leadership abilities, his talent for bringing order out of chaos and for reaching some sort of consensus. That man's testimony impressed me. His disagreements with Bush were real, his admiration for him profound.??Gore, on the other hand, has little of those abilities. His own party is sore at him for taking the one-two punch of peace and prosperity and running a race that is still not concluded. His performance was as erratic as his uniform-of-the-day: earth tones on Tuesday, business suit on Wednesday. The country sensed that either he did not know himself, or what he did know the country would not like.??Gore is hardly a political natural. He appears stiff, robotic, insincere even when he is not, and paradoxically unable to mask his ambition. He is the intimate of few people, almost no one's good buddy, and not comfortable--or is it just plain not good?--on television. But TV is as essential to the modern presidency as a white horse was to monarchs of old.??Could Al Gore rally the nation? Maybe. Could he go over the heads of Congress and get the country behind him? Maybe. I think, though, that Bush would be better at those things--and better, too, at restraining GOP Dobermans like Reps. Tom DeLay and J.C. Watts Jr. At the same time, it's not likely that a President Bush would be able to appoint Supreme Court justices ideologically similar to those he says he admires, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Simply put, he ain't got the votes.??John F. Kennedy won by a hair and under questionable circumstances, and yet his presidency was never considered illegitimate. Within a relatively short time, his approval rating hit an astounding 83 percent. But Kennedy was a man of manifest political talents, not to mention charisma. Bush is no Kennedy on a lot of levels--particularly his lack of intellectual curiosity--but Gore is almost Kennedy's antithesis. No one has ever applied the word "grace" to him.??I realize that one-term presidents can become two-term presidents, so it is not just the next year that matters. I realize, too, that Bush and Gore have real differences in their approach to government--differences that matter greatly to many people.??But what matters at the moment is the moment itself--a mere tick of the historic clock that could, if things continue, just stop it dead where it is. History does not guarantee that things will be as they have been. The first and most daunting task of the next president is not a tax bill or a Social Security plan but--as it was when Jerry Ford succeeded Richard Nixon--the healing of the country. I voted for Gore because he was the better man for the job. I can't help thinking that he no longer is.

As I said, Cohen can change his mind, and obviously he is paid lavishly to be a contrarian. But he was, as Ezra Klein wrote, spectacularly wrong on pretty much every point he raised. In 2000, he knifed Gore in the back and put "the moment" ahead of the long-term interests of the country, the planet. In fact, as Bob Somberby has long maintained, Cohen couldn't get enough blood out of candidate Gore. Not to acknowledge those words now, while -- even as he applauds Gore -- repeating the commontariat's claim that Gore is boring and "cloying," is insulting to his readers and to Gore.

I mean, in November of 2000, Cohen thought that the most important qualification for being president was being someone you'd want to have a beer with. My god. Nevermind the inherent contradiction here:

Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.

As Cohen himself might write, "It's baloney, more or less."

Gore is no fool. He knows that he cannot win with "support" from idiots like Cohen or snarkettes like Maureen Dowd. He may be Cohen's hero today, the one man between us and environmental end times. But let Gore embark on the campaign trail and you can be sure every myth, lie, and insulting aside about Al Gore will be resurrected in a heartbeat. Taking down candidates like Gore is what they do. And then they bravely bemoan the consequences, though with nary a mention of their role in getting there.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the real "Daily Howler" has much more to say about this "dumb ass."