By James Bowman on 5.29.07 @ 12:08AM
Qualities that make Messrs. Carter and Gore two of a kind.
There seems to be a recurring bifurcation in American political
life between those who would rather be right and those who would
rather be president. The longer the debate over the Iraq war goes
on, the more often I keep coming back to Senator Jim Webb's reply
to President Bush's State of the Union Address earlier this year.
As I mentioned
in my column of last January 29, it struck me at the time that
Senator Webb was one of many Democrats who seemed to equate
effective leadership with being right -- that is, with
predictive foresight in a given case, as in foreseeing the perils
that would attend the occupation of Iraq. But intelligence and
perspicacity are just two among many valuable qualities in a
leader, and very far from being the only things that matter. What
about virtue and fortitude? Determination and resolve? Courage and
honor? Any fool can be right in foreseeing danger. It takes a rarer
quality to lead when, as now, danger is unavoidable whatever we
do.
Now comes Jimmy Carter, who was so good at foreseeing dangers
that he never committed American troops to dealing with any of them
-- apart from the Desert One fiasco -- and instead spent the
miserable four years of his presidency bleating about human rights
to those who had nothing but contempt for him and the
once-formidable power he had no wish to use nor any idea how to use
it if he had. Because President Bush lacks a little of Mr. Carter's
Falstaffian discretion when it comes to fighting America's enemies,
the latter professes to think that "this administration has been
the worst in history." Gosh, Jimmy! Did you come up with that
zinger all by yourself, or did you steal it from the bumper
sticker? You'd think that the Christ-like former president would
blush to be nothing but a conduit for this well-worn leftie
talking-point.
As Gerard Baker says in the Times of London, "Being
told by Mr. Carter that you're the worst president in history is
like being told by William McGonagall that your poetry stinks." But
at least the former president showed some sense of delicacy in
pulling back a bit when he said that he had been "careless" with
his words and wished "not to criticize any president personally."
By contrast, the former vice president, Al Gore, is so eaten up
with bitterness that in his new book he doesn't scruple to
characterize the man he lost the 2000 election to as (according to
Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post) "a
lawbreaker, a liar and a man with the blood of thousands of
innocent lives on his hands" -- and all because he thinks he's so
much smarter than he is.
It takes a certain amount of -- what shall we call it?
self-confidence? self-importance? self-righteousness? stupidity? --
to title an attack on your political opponents The Assault on
Reason. What really makes it funny is that such intemperate
language purports to be in the service of a larger critique of the
debasement of political discourse! Why beholdest thou the mote that
is in thy brother's eye, brother Al, but considerest not the beam
that is in thine own eye? He proclaims himself the champion of
"reason, logic and truth" -- not to mention "reality" -- against
the general decay of these qualities in the country and the
specific denial of them by the Bush administration. And all this on
the strength of what? Why, that two thirds of the American people
now agree with him rather than President Bush about the wisdom of
fighting in Iraq! Doesn't that mean that he was right?
No it doesn't, actually, but it's close enough for government
work. I have always thought that there is a bit of a
self-contradiction in this sort of argument. On the one hand, Mr.
Gore is trying very hard to persuade us that the President is a
fool, an idiot, a cretin. Anybody could have foreseen what
a disaster Iraq would be. It was, according to him, "a decision
that was not only tragic but absurd." On the other hand, he, like
Senator Webb, seems to expect us to be stupefied with awe at his
own intelligence and foresight when, on his own showing, anyone
only marginally less stupid than the President could have seen as
much. Mr. Gore goes even further than Senator Webb by claiming not
only that he foresaw the disaster of Iraq but that he could have
foreseen the disaster of September 11th, if only anyone had thought
to ask him about it in advance. For what else are we to make of his
criticism that the Bush administration ignored "clear warnings"
that could have prevented the terror attacks?
As so often in the past, Al Gore appears not to want to
do anything in particular but only to impress us with how
bright he is. He has never stopped being the schoolboy with his
hand in the air, the apple polisher and suck-up who needs to be
told by the teacher how clever he is. Nor is there ever any
shortage of those who are prepared to tell him. "His revenge is to
have been right about a lot of things," writes E.J. Dionne in the Washington
Post: "right about the power of the Internet, right about
global warming and right about Iraq." Some people this side of
cretinism might argue with the political intelligence of scolding
people for being too much afraid of terrorists and not enough
afraid of global warming, but let's leave to one side the question
of whether he was actually right about any of these things. The
real point is that he imagines that the only thing in life better
than being right is letting people know that you are
right. In this he is again like Jimmy Carter, whose policy on human
rights was only to let everyone know how he cared about them.
Neither man has ever learned that being right without the
will or the capacity for action is the cheapest form of
self-gratification.
topics:
Global Warming, Law, Iraq, NATO
