Joe Klein: Al Gore for president

How quickly Joe Klein reminds us that we don’t have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to presidential candidates in the Democratic Party this year, but a “downhill slide” towards not having a nominee at all.

His most recent column for Time is garbage, and I have to wonder who’s paying him to write it. The basic premise is that Obama and Clinton are each such horrible candidates that we should start looking for someone new, someone fresh to jump in… like, say, Al Gore.

Seriously, he wrote that.

After repeating the CW that Hillary can’t win, he moves on to Rev. Wright:

Democrats will soon learn how damaging that relationship might be in a general election. They’ll also see if Obama has the gumption to bounce back, work hard—not just arena rallies for college kids but roundtables for the grizzled and unemployed in American Legion halls—and change the minds that have turned against him. The main reason superdelegates have not yet rallied round Obama is that the party is collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how he performs in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks? What if he can’t buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses all three states badly and continues to lose after that? I’d guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy—and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

What if he can’t “buy” a white working-class vote? Is Klein implying that Obama won Iowa based on votes just from snooty whites or people of color? Why is he going to lose North Carolina, where he’s significantly ahead, or lose Pennsylvania and Indiana so badly that it costs him the nomination? Why are white votes the only important ones in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina that each have large communities of color?

And is he implying that he knows anything about “grizzled and unemployed” Americans?

Of course, when read as analysis on the future of the primary process, it doesn’t sound very intelligent. But when read over a subtext of “Democrats are always losers,” then it starts to make sense. He doesn’t really have much evidence that Obama’s going to lose, but who cares? Democrats always lose, even when they win.

But then we get to the best part of the column, where Klein has decided that Democrats had better start looking elsewhere because Obama and Clinton are such losers:

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.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely … and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, “Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.” A congressional Democrat told me, “This could be our way out of a mess.” Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. “I don’t know that he’d be interested, even if you handed it to him,” said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June.

And, like, what if aliens landed and abducted all the superdelegates and like Indiana stopped existing because of a witch’s hex, so, like, there just aren’t enough delegates to go around. Would there just be no nominee and McCain would win?

This scenario is so outlandish that I can’t even begin to imagine how much time he wasted putting it together. It’s funny that he even mentions some people straight up telling him that it’s stupid and he decided to publish it anyway.

It’s especially funny considering that he said Clinton winning via superdelegates would be something Democratic voters would never “forgive” her for, but apparently this acid-fueled fantasy would do just fine by Democratic voters. Because the “elders of the Democratic Party” stepping into the process, rendering all those primaries and caucuses void, pulling in someone who’s expressed no interest in running all primary season, and then getting 100 party insiders to back their plan and getting Obama to give up on a legitimate victory is exactly what the people want. But a woman who’s been in this contest for a year and a half winning a few superdelegates at the last minute, that’s the thing that’ll drive the party apart?

I’m not pretending to be able to predict what would happen if Clinton did win by superdelegates. A lot of people would be unhappy, I imagine. But the fact that Klein can’t see that people would be even more unhappy under his scenario speaks to either a failing in logic, an incredible lack of judgment, or a lack of familiarity with the way people have related to this primary process.

Or it could just be plain sexism and racism, grasping this late in the primary season for the closest white man to save the party.