MUST READ!!! First-rate profile of Al Gore in current New Yorker...

[VOX]

The profile is well-done and highly entertaining. Beyond that, it reveals how savvy Gore really is to the current media situation. The article states that he regularly checks out mediawhoresonline.com and truthout.com, so I wouldn't be surprised if he reads DU, too.

Al seems to be getting and more liberal with the passage of time, and not having the restraints of office or candadicy. I sincerely hope that Kerry-Edwards is getting input from Al!

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040913fa_fact

THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN
by DAVID REMNICK
Al Gore lives on a street in Nashville.
The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-09-13
Posted 2004-09-06

<snip>
He bookmarks the Internet to some of the more expected outlets—the Times, the Washington Post, Google News—but also to left-leaning sites like mediawhoresonline.com and truthout.com. From his reading, online and elsewhere, he has grown more convinced that, in the wake of the Goldwater collapse, in 1964, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, American conservatives were determined to “play a long game” and organize themselves, ideologically, financially, and intellectually, to win national elections and carry out a conservative revolution. Gore is interested in a memorandum written at the request of a committee chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by a Virginia attorney named Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and dated August 23, 1971, just two months before Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. The Powell memorandum portrays the American economic system as “under broad attack” by well-funded leftists, who dominate the media, academia, and even some corners of the political world. The memo describes a battle for the survival of free enterprise, and calls for less “hesitation” and “a more aggressive attitude” on all fronts. The memo was marked “confidential” and was distributed to chambers of commerce and leading executives around the nation.
As a Supreme Court Justice, Powell turned out to be a moderate, but the conservative movement did help its favored candidates, not least Ronald Reagan. I asked Gore if he thought that Hillary Clinton, in the midst of the Lewinsky period, had been right to raise the spectre of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
<snip>
“One consequence is that there is an emergent triumphalism among market fundamentalists that has assumed an attitude of infallibility and arrogance that has led its adherents to be dismissive and contemptuous of values that are not monetized if they don’t fit into their ideology.”

What’s missing? I asked.

“Families, the environment, communities, the beauty of life, the arts. Abraham Maslow, best known for his hierarchy of needs, had a dictum that if the only tool you use is a hammer, then every problem begins to look like a nail. Translating that into this discussion: If the only tool you use for measuring value is a price tag or monetization, then those values that are not easily monetized begin to look like they have no value. And so there’s an easy contempt, which they summon on a moment’s notice for tree-huggers or people concerned about global warming.”
<snip>

[mccormack98]

1. Gore's the best. He will always be my president.