Al Gore, who has won award after award during his years as the Supreme Court's designated loser-man, has now won the award which is most likely to gall his former rival, the Peace Prize. All that attention, all those prizes, and now Al Gore's triumph must make George Bush feel like the fraud from Crawford that he is. That's very gratifying for a growing percentage of this country which has come to distrust and detest Bush.
This morning, as winner of the world's biggest sign of its respect has been given to Al Gore, a poll has emerged which really knocks George Bush and his party down to size.
Likely voters have grown even more pessimistic about the direction of the country, according to the bipartisan poll. Sixty-eight percent say the country is on the wrong track, while only 23 percent say it's heading in the right direction.
That's not a good sign for the Republicans as they try to convince voters to give them a third term in the White House, according to Stan Greenberg, the Democratic half of the polling team.
"The overall mood is the bleakest I've ever seen," Greenberg says. "In our polling, it's worse than 1992 when [President Bill] Clinton came in. The country's in a change mood — in a very frustrated, angry change mood."
The same poll shows the Democrats to be exceedingly unpopular, too -- at least Congressional Dems are more unpopular than Bush.
Could Gore lead the way out of this mess? No way, says Conventional Wisdom, will Al Gore enter the race and run against Hillary. But there's another element. Some of us noticed something about Gore when he was running eight years ago: Al Gore doesn't really want to be president -- Al Gore wants to have been president. He inherited the ambition; it didn't originate with Gore himself. He later admitted it himself: he doesn't like politics.
We'll see. The poll also shows a vital new element: the growing strength of independent voters. A "none of the above" mood is sweeping the country, making it unlikely that a Republican could win the White House. But when it comes to electing a new Congress independents are leaning Republican.
