rangerBlog - December 3rd, 2007

08:28 pm - Who'd want this job?

I've been trying to figure out for awhile why I want Al Gore to run for the United States Presidency.

It's not idealism-- that'd be Obama. It's not environmentalism- I'm not an evangelical about Global Warming. It's not foreign policy-- frankly that'd be Clinton... I think she can handle a lot of the forien policy problems the US faces decently as long as she's not pretending to be a hardass to compensate for her womanliness.

It finally hit me-- the reason I want Al Gore to run for President is because Al Gore doesn't want to be President.
No one voluntarily subjects themselves to the process of running for President unless they need it, almost always for the wrong reasons.

Bush needed to be President to prove something to a distant authority figure he could never please. We saw how well that worked out.

Clinton... there's a nasty streak of revenge to her need. Her family got badly shafted for eight years, and she probably feels cheated in a lot of ways and wants to 'do over,' correcting all the original mistakes. That's not great as motivations go... but it's not awful either. And Hillary wears most of her issues on her sleeve (the man she married.) That said, I feel like her 'insistence' on becoming President set back in 2002 has been seriously worn down by the Bush administration into genuine alarm about where the world is going, and (at least partially) replaced by a desire to save the baby from the train.

So Obama... what's his malfunction that he'd want such a job? It could just be youthful idealism... but he's very controlled. I don't know what his internal demon is, and that worries the hell out of me. The emotion-over-time processes that creates Presidential candidates is identical to the one that creates serial killers, and sometimes it's really hard to tell the two groups apart. (John Edwards, I'm looking at you.)

Anyway- yeah. Gore wanted to be President because he was Vice President, a role he was chosen for as a compromise to balance Bill Clinton with voters. And 8 years out he flees from the idea.

AL Gore is sane enough not to want the job, that makes him okay in my book.