I’ve said time and again that politics has become too crass is this country. Which makes me a strange bedfellow with Richard Cohen over the way Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean:
Gore owed Lieberman the courtesy of a call. The endorsement would still have carried punch if it had — God forbid — leaked prematurely. It would still have represented a repudiation of Lieberman — not to mention many of the moderate positions Gore once stood for. For the sake of surprise, Gore — and by association Dean — showed how squalid politics can be.
But where I see no hope for any improvement, Cohen disagrees:
I don’t blame Dean for what Gore did. But when I saw the two of them together — the ungrateful Gore, the flinty Dean — I thought that what Gore had brought Dean was not his endorsement but his baggage. The spotlight was on the two of them — but somehow it shone brighter on Lieberman.
We’ll see.
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