If there's a good day for Al Gore on The Washington Post
op-ed page, it should be Tuesday. Columnists Richard Cohen,
E.J. Dionne, and Michael Kinsley are all thoughtful
liberals. So, did Gore get a boost this Tuesday? Not at all.
All three were laying wreaths around his coffin.
Cohen wrote about Gore's "fractured campaign" and Dionne
followed just below about "the agony for Gore" before
closing with the uninspired "if Gore pulls the election
out." Kinsley's column was an ironic look at where the Gore
campaign went wrong, "another Gore mistake was his almost
frightening willingness to follow the advice of media
commentators." These three aren't the only ones of course;
the entire media seems to have given up on the vice
president and even one of the icons of neo-liberal
journalism, Joe Klein, spent an entire article in this
week's New Yorker on an analytical obituary of the vice
president and his campaign.
Of course the Gore campaign has had troubles; but the race
is still virtually tied and the battleground states that
will ultimately decide the race are very much in flux. The
media of course could change that if conservative pundits
continue to promote Bush and attack Gore while liberal
pundits join them for the latter. Bush is one of the most
flawed candidates of my lifetime and yet the people who can
write most persuasively about his flaws seem fixated on
competing with each other over their almost self-fulfilling
analyses of why Gore lost.
