Poor/Lucky Joe

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.