Chicago is so cool! D.C. has great pizza, people! Dan and Josh are right: we are lame. Why do we even bother anymore?

Seattle is the best of all possible worlds! Anyone who disagrees should go someplace else! Someplace not quite as perfect! This city is dipped in starlight and rolled in diamond dust!

I'm confused: what is idiotic about not asking the exact same question everybody else is asking all across the country, that he has yet to answer to anyone's satisfaction (i.e., with a "yes")?

Do you really think if someone in Seattle had asked we would have heard something different? I think it reflects well on our city that no one asked the question, knowing full well they would get the same answer everyone else has gotten every day.

Someone should ask him why he didn't carry his home state in 2000.

THAT is a question I'd like to hear him answer.

40 years later:

"I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all I can."

Why didn't you ask the question, Dan?

Please, this is just a chance for dan to tell us how cool chicago is. and he's right. chicago is my kinda town.

asking it over & over isn't going to make up gore's mind. "i undertake the training to refrain from saying that which is not true or useful".

the seattle way is this: we show celebrities respect, and leave them the fuck alone.

I did ask him -- at the signing, with Frizzelle. Like I said yesterday, I want people to put the question to him wherever he goes because I want him hounded into running, if that's what it takes.

And when he was here, and four dumbfucks asked him four dumbfuck questions, I was going to shout it out -- but he dashed off the stage after dumbfuck question #4.

We should ask why? He's not running. He's too smart for that and too happy being held up on a pedestal everywhere he goes for "solving global warming."

I wouldn't run either.

@1 For the record, DC has crappy pizza. NYC has awesome pizza, but DC, ick.

KUOW is airing Gore's Town Hall speech tonight at 8.

Before Al becomes last year's news when the elections roll around in '08, we should really make the most of this Era of Gore.

*spoiler alert* - Starwars overkill has warped my science-fictionalized mind.

The United States of GORE (from a surname meaning "triangular" -originally referring to someone who lived on a triangular piece of land.)

Sept. '07--Density proponents have been having wetdreams ever since the US has condensed its populace into a new triangularly shaped nation. A borderwall was constructed amazingly quickly due to the hard work of inmates energized by having their penises sucked by Paris during her short prison stay.

The borders extend from NYish to Tennessee to LAish and back.
Al is headquartered in Knoxville, home of a wonderful little World's Fair back during the NFL's strike season- '81? Their answer to the Space Needle, a Gold Dome thing, satirized in a Simpson's episode where either Homer or Bart cause it it crash down, is the "oval' office.

Gore Vidal oversees all social and military operations from Hoboken. Gore Verbinsky houses the movie-making sector from the Inland Empire...

and that's just the prologue!
GORE in '07!

good god, the last thing we need now is more gore. can we *please* put the past behind us and move on? pretty, pretty please?

Well, since you did ask him, what you're really saying is "What is wrong with all of you?"

What is "wrong" with many of us is that we think that Gore, while being an effective senator when in office, and an intelligent and moral person, is a terribly ineffective at running for office.

I think too many people are being swayed by the narrative of the true winner, betrayed, but on the comeback trail. I know that he's polling well now. I don't think that would last. Some combination of media disdain, awkward phrasing, and idiot advisers would turn his image back into that of Gore2000.

Dan, it is very possible that others asked Gore during the signing the same question, you don't really know. You are complaining that Seattlites didn't start cheering, so the real question should be, why didn't you (or other Stranger staff there) start the cheer leading during the speech? The reason that you all did not change "Run Al, Run," is probably the reason that everyone else did not.

From an interview with Bob Herbert:
"You know," he said, "I don't really think I'm that good at politics, to tell you the truth." He smiled. "Some people find out important things about themselves early in life. Others take a long time."

and

"But what politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply."

Dan, you have a thing you do when it comes to national politics; you focus on your own goals. Which is fine (sort of) for a private citizen, but you’re kind of wasting your Pop Culture Icon superpowers. Gore can’t win for the same reason Howard Dean couldn’t win. There are too many soundbytes of him sounding like a lunatic, and the right-wing media is too good at exploiting that kind of thing to discourage swing voters. Remember what happened to Howard Dean? He got fucked because he was a Governor so, unlike Senators and Congressmen who are largely ignored unless they’re running for president, he had a lot more statements on the public record that could be used against him. Gore has too many opinions and he’s stated them too publicly. Those opinions can be sampled, strung together by topic, and used like precision missiles to alienate specific sectors of the electorate. It’s fucked up that going on record as anything other than a pandering sycophant is enough to totally alienate the entire Midwest, but it’s also a fact of life.

But you know, whatever; if I could get anyone to listen to me I’d be the one with PCI superpowers. Carry on with your single-minded obsession.

Isn't that the Trib and not the Sun-Times?

I hate pedantic editors in the comments section as much as the next person, but this seemed more important than an unintentional grammar error.

Can somebody explain to me the whole LaRouche-hates-on-Gore-now thing? Not that I expect it to make sense or anything...

What is wrong with us?

It's simple. Chicago has a monorail and they keep extending it.

We have a monorail and we keep voting and voting and voting and voting - and do nothing.

So we never ask the big questions that matter.

What 10 and 14 said, Dan. Seattle knows better, knows he's been asked that question 47635 times and that asking it again is pointless, and he knows that he can accomplish a lot more in the private sector than to try and multitask his global warming crusade onto the other duties of running the country and figuring out what to do about the damn Iraq War.

And besides, your political writers said it themselves: we're entering an age where groups and organizations, not politicians, are who's getting things accomplished.

Damn Gore, anyway. He ran a shit campaign in 2000. Yes, they engaged in horrible chicanery and stole the damned election (I do believe that - hell, I KNOW that), but if he hadn't run such a crappy campaign, there's no way in hell the election would have been close enough to steal. It should never have been that close against a failed Texas governor who was a joke to every thinking person.

(Immediately my mind goes to Adlai Stevenson's remark when told he'd have the vote of every thinking man and woman in the United States. "Unfortunately, I need a majority.")

His repudiation of one of the smartest campaigners in the last 30 years (treating the Big Dawg as if he had leprosy) was political idiocy. If that's his idea of campaigning, he'll never win another election, so perhaps not running is the best thing.

Don't get me wrong. I think he's head and shoulders above the entire field of candidates so far, and I'd vote for him and doorbell for him, and work my ass off for him if he ran. But goddammit, I don't want any Democrat running a limp, lame-ass campaign like 2000 ever again. Kerry made the same fucking mistake in 2004, and I'm still pissed at him, too.

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