The real dilemma facing Democrats anticipating a run at the presidency
in 2004 isn't the over-hyped popularity of George W. Bush. Asking Americans
if they support the president post-9/11 is like asking them if they love
their country. Of course they do. Even so, President Junior's allegedly
miraculous poll numbers compare unfavorably to Bill Clinton's during the
impeachment debacle. If that's not enough to give Republican strategists
pause, name one state that voted Democratic in 2000 which looks strong
for the GOP today. See what I mean?

      Here at the swank Hillcrest headquarters of Unsolicited Opinions, Inc.,
we haven't settled on a Democratic candidate. It's our policy to watch the horses
being saddled and catch the post parade before laying our bets. But we do know
that the single biggest obstacle facing Democratic hopefuls isn't Al Gore vs. Joe
Lieberman, or Populism vs. Progressivism, as you'd have imagined by reading the
nation's political press recently. Rather, it's the adolescent groupthink and malignant
dishonesty of the Washington press clique itself.

      All it took to bring out the worst in the vapid crowd of "Heathers" that treats our
national political discourse as a high school popularity contest was a New York Times
op-ed by Gore pointing out that much of what he'd warned us about during the 2000
presidential campaign has come to pass--growing budget deficits and Enron-style
accounting, raiding the Social Security trust fund "to finance massive tax cuts that
primarily benefit the very rich," little hope of a genuine Medicare prescription drug
benefit, the abandonment of sane environmental policies, and unrestrained greed
that has "put at risk...nothing less than the future of democratic capitalism."

      Instead of debating Gore's ideas, the "Heathers" lampooned his clothes, family
background, personality, and presumed motives. We've come to expect this kind of
thing from Democrat-Gazette editors, who mocked Gore's "soporific" prose at twice
his length without providing a halfway accurate paraphrase. Winning arguments is easy
when you get to make up both sides.

      The Washington gang was equally patronizing, pretending iconoclasm while recycling
childish gibes from the campaign. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, who spent
2000 preoccupied by Gore's CLOTHING, went to authenticity, claiming he'd "resumed
his dreary debate with himself about who he is."

      The New York Times's Maureen Dowd feigned bewilderment at a prep school grad's
professing concern for working stiffs. Evidently, she's never heard of Teddy Roosevelt,
FDR, JFK or his brother Bobby--all far better-connected than young Al, whose father
rose from Tennesseee dirt farming to the U.S. Senate. Dowd herself seems incapable of
transcending 11th grade. "Since you are not popular," she actually wrote "you must
become a populist."

      Perhaps most extraordinary was the Times's normally thoughtful Bill Keller.
He contended that Gore had actually won the election, a topic the former vice president
has avoided. He even conceded Gore's main point: "We've got an administration
characterized by blind faith in crony capitalism, a drunken spendthrift's version of
supply-side economics, and a secretive, country-club executive style."

      Gore's saying so nevertheless irritated him. "The reason more people didn't vote for
Al Gore," Keller wrote "is that they didn't like him. Mr. Gore can be an engaging man in
a conversation, but he seems incapable of making an audience want to listen to him...
During the 2000 campaign, even my 3-year-old daughter, channeler of the zeitgeist,
went around chanting the refrain: 'Al Gore is a snore.'"

      That's right, dear reader, a political columnist in the mighty  New York Times actually
quoted a three year old child! Now I had a five year-old who went around chanting
"Ray Fornton, yuck" during the 1978 Arkansas Senate race, but the only things he was
channeling were "Sesame Street" and his mother, who supported David Pryor. This must
be the inside-the-Beltway equivalent of a child evangelist, the purity of whose faith is
unsullied by reason.

      One pundit told the unsullied truth on CNN's "Reliable Sources."  Asked by host
Howard Kurtz why so many political reporters had it in for Gore, the Washington Post's
Dana Millbank responded that Gore "has been disliked all along and it was because he
gives a sense that he's better than us--he's better than everybody, for that matter, but the
sense that he's better than us as reporters. Whereas President Bush probably is sure that
he's  better than us--he's probably right--but he does not convey that sense. He does not
seem to be dripping with contempt when he looks at us, and I think that has something to
do with the coverage."

      Translation:  They envy Gore, an ex-reporter, after all, because his accomplishments
in life make them feel inferior. Hence the astonishingly mendacious press attack on the
Democratic candidate's character throughout the 2000 campaign-Love Story, Inventing
the Internet, Earth Tone Clothing,etc.--many of which rolled straight off RNC press
releases to  the front page.