How Desperate Are Democrats?
Power Line - Tuesday March 17, 2015
by Steven Hayward
With Hillary Clinton’s campaign of entitled inevitability looking increasingly like certain doom for Democrats in 2016, is there a Plan B? As Noemie Emery argued with her usual panache in the Weekly Standard, the Democratic Party imperatives of gender and identity politics compel it to look for a woman or minority to succeed Obama, but the roster is very thin and unpersuasive. What’s a desperate party to do?
Well, guess who’s tanned, rested, and ready? Yup. The trial balloon appeared in the New York Times yesterday: “The New Optimism of Al Gore.”
Why not? He’s already got his Nobel Peace prize, and he got his before Obama, so he’s clearly qualified. True, it is hard to tell at time whether the Timesstory isn’t just very droll satire, but this is the Times, and they don’t do that sort of thing:
. . . Slides have been very good to the former vice president of the United States, almost president, environmental activist and now successful green investor. His slide show on the threat of climate change, presented in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award. His efforts to spread the word about global warming earned him, along with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel Peace Prize. His was a dire call to strenuous and difficult action. . .
Over the last year, however, the prophet of doom has become much more a prophet of possibility — even, perhaps, an optimist. Still an object of derision for the political right, Mr. Gore has seen support for his views rising within the business community: Investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar is skyrocketing as their costs plummet. . .
Wrong and wrong, but never mind. . .
He smiles and says proudly, “There are 10 vegan restaurants in Nashville now.”
So he’s got Michelle’s vote at least.
Mr. Gore is continuing to spread the word. Last month, at the end of an optimistic talk about climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he and the singer Pharrell Williams announced a Live Earth concert to be held on all seven continents on June 18. The concert will include a moment, Mr. Williams told those at the forum, when “we are literally going to have humanity harmonize all at once.”
Just curious: what will the carbon footprint of that global concert event be I wonder?
There’s more in this very long story, but with all of Gore’s surplus hot air, he can float the Hindenburg of trial balloons.
Postscript: The WSJ’s James Taranto is on the case, too: “Gore More Years!“
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