The Fantasy Years

Al Gore’s inability to be anyone else than himself, particularly someone less annoying, is the former Vice President’s most enduring and nettlesome problem according to one Alan Ehrenhalt, writing a review of Gore’s book ‘The Assault on Reason.’
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Al Gore possesses a skill that no other American
politician can match – or would want to. He has a
consistent ability to express fundamentally reasonable
sentiments – often important ones – in ways that annoy
the maximum possible number of people.

After lauding Gore for speaking out against the war, his efforts to raise awareness of global climate change and his use of technology to enhance civic participation, Ehrenhalt gives us this:

Even as a citizen activist, however, free from the burdens of office and campaigning, Gore nearly always manages to sound like Gore.

And what does Gore sound like? “Smug and self-centered” and “unable to consider even moderately differing points of view.” So it’s with great irony that a review of Gore’s book, which is by and large about the alarming decline of American political discourse, a decline that gives us caricatures of the personal rather than the substance of the political, concentrates on Al Gore’s presumed personality.

Ehrenhart unwittingly proves Gore’s point. And the man who was dismissed as too “wooden” and “robotic” to ever be president, and characterized as a “serial exaggerator” by his opponent’s spinmeisters, a man whose personality is mischaracterized – like many Democrats of recent years – suffers yet another attack.

Like millions of others , I don’t care about a politician’s personality ticks if they can lead and if they have integrity and if they have vision. If these traits come in “man desperate to display his erudition at every possible moment, appropriate or not,” so be it.

This sneering attack on Gore reminds me of a time in Clinton’s presidency, or on the road to it at least, when his opponents mocked him for having said – or admitted, as the spin goes -to once owning a pickup truck with Astroturf in the bed.

I touch on this in an upcoming chapter of The Fantasy Years since it is such classic Clinton-era negative press because ya know, how could a man who owned a pickup truck with Astroturf in its bed ever be a suitable president? Think about it: how could this ever be?

From everything I know of the ex-VP’s book, the themes of The Assault on Reason and the themes of The Fantasy Years overlap. Considerably. The Fantasy Years is about the irrational caricatures of political beliefs, -personalities and -history that grew through the 1990s, clouding sensible debate, and dissociating cause from effect in the American political mind. The Fantasy Years is about how the rightwing media machine created a generation of Rush-listening, Fox-watching post-modernists for whom objective reality ceased to exist. Oh, it’s also about people’s lives filled with personal triumphs and daily despairs.