John Podhoretz, on Al Gore: "I found myself feeling a strange sort of admiration for Al Gore. Doesn't it seem as though his 2000 loss, devastating though it must have been for Gore, was a huge liberation? As a politician, Gore never seemed comfortable in his own skin. The warmth and amused intelligence people insist he displays in private were never evident in public.
Instead, for the most part, he seemed calculating and false, going through personae the way Joan Crawford went through her wardrobe — the conservative Democrat, the national-security expert, the suffering solon trying to get the Gulf War right, the shameless utilizer of family tragedy, the killer NAFTA debater, Ozone Man, the Guy Who Kissed His Wife on Television, the fiery populist decrying the powerful, the sighing debater, the extraordinarily gracious conceder. Since that concession, Gore has let himself loose in all kinds of ways. He no longer has to pretend, as all politicians most. He is clearly happiest and freest as an autodidact preaching populist pseudoscientist. And everything has gone his way. He's gotten rich off Oracle stock. He's started a cable-television network. He's written a bestselling jeremiad. He has starred in a hagiographic documentary. He promoted a worldwide rock concert. He offers unrestrained Hyde Park rants about those he disagrees with using rhetoric (brown shirts, etc.) he could never have deployed as president. Whatever else you can say about Gore, he has clearly been having the time of his life."
True. And even though I don't agree with much of what Gore says, hey--good for him that finally he's free at last, free at last, lord God Almighty, free at last. Which is why it's well-nigh impossible to see him going back to being a politician.
