GEORGE HAS MORE ON GORE

GEORGE HAS MORE ON GORE IN OH-FOUR: Robert A. George on Al Gore & Democrats on National Review Online:

The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” That was one of the memorable lines in Al Gore’s “comeback” speech last weekend at the Florida Democrats’ state convention. The statement was made after Gore had unleashed a laundry list of particular Bush-administration offenses. It is an excerpt from Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” Yeats, of course, was referring to the Messiah. Guess we have an idea of how Gore sees himself. Some hardworking speechwriter gets points for selecting that one.

George thinks that Gore has more of a shot than Patrick Ruffini does–in fact–he views him as both the “best” and the “worst” candidate the Democrats can muster up for 2004:

This is why Gore can also be the “worst” 2004 candidate. What do the “accomplishments” of the Clinton-Gore administration mean when it’s clear that the nation was vulnerable to a horrific terrorist attack? The war on terror was barely mentioned by Al Gore last weekend. It was a rhetorical omission that ironically matched the Clinton administration’s lack of focus on bin Laden: The attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. military barracks in 1996, American embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. Links to al Qaeda were evident in all these cases. Yet, Clinton only launched missiles when his political career seemed to be at stake.

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