Could Liberal Elitist Al Gore Win Nomination?

Yes, absolutely, no doubt, because that is precisely what Time 's Joe Klein says and that makes it true. You see, back in the old days, the national nominating conventions were very important. Since humans had no means of communicating long-distance until 1994 or so, each party's leaders would gather in some fancy saloon in, say, Ohio, and smash whiskey bottles over each other's heads until they decided on a good presidential nominee. And this is why Al Gore will finally win the presidency at this year's Democratic National Convention.

Since Obama and Clinton will continue to pulverize themselves for the next several months, with no actual news happening, both will reach the convention without the 2,025 necessary delegates, and most Americans will hate them. And then Al Gore becomes president. Actually, hold that last thought and let's go back to the first, which the New Yorker 's George Packer explains with the Scientific Method.

What we are witnessing is a controlled experiment in modern campaigning: eliminate policy differences between two candidates; space out the primary schedule so that it remains empty for seven weeks, thereby creating a political-news vacuum in which the candidates and their supporters continue to give speeches, hold press conferences, or blog nonstop; and subject every word to the scrutiny and amplification of the twenty-four-hour news machine. The predictable result is that two appealing politicians will quickly start to lose their lustre, until, by the time Pennsylvania gets to vote, on April 22nd, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will seem like the smallest, meanest, dirtiest, lowest, most dishonest candidates ever to run for office in the United States.

A quick round of applause for George Packer, everybody. Moving on: when the convention starts and the party will be polarized between these two very hated candidates, that is when Al Gore will solve global warming, says Joe Klein:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume--and this may be a real stretch--that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party--and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

Fine, sounds good, let's do that, and let's work out the details in the next week or so, screw August. It would be funny because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been campaigning for 15 months, and Hillary would get nothing, Barack would ride "bitch seat" on the ticket, and we'd have a white male as the nominee after all.

Or we could establish a farming colony on Mars.

 Is Al Gore the Answer? [Time]