In a crowded Disney World hotel ballroom–just next door to Magic Kingdom–the post-September 11 suspension of partisan politics ended last weekend in a series of acidic speeches by men who want (or might want) to run against Bush in 2004. The event was mass catharsis: a way for Democrats to get past an obsession with what they believe was Gov. Jeb Bush’s theft of the election. There is a sense that the president is about to become a mere political mortal again: mired in the nasty complexities of the Middle East, his grip on the Congress tenuous, his poll numbers losing air like a tire with a pinhole leak. Back in Washington, the Democrats are just beginning to go on the attack. In Florida–the most argued-over terrain in politics–they never stopped. They loathe the Bushes, and expect anyone who might want the Democratic nomination to show they do, too.
No prob. The contenders who showed up in Orlando issued the ritual caveat–support for the president and America’s troops in the war on terrorism. Then, not surprisingly, they tore into Bush and the GOP on the full range of domestic issues. More interesting–and more significant–was the willingness of several to delve into foreign policy. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina criticized Bush’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, arguing that he had dropped the ball by not expanding the size of the international peacekeeping force. “That is an enormous mistake, Mr. President,” Edwards said. “Don’t win the war and lose the victory.” Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts planned to raise the Middle East in a low-key way, criticizing Bush for thinking that he could set aside the bloody dispute while dealing with other issues first. As written, Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s speech contained the toughest language of all, charging that the president had “muddied the moral clarity” of the war on terrorism by both “publicly and persistently” pressuring Israel not to do what we ourselves are doing to win the war. “The president risks losing the moral high ground,” wrote Lieberman, who became the first Jewish American on a major ticket when he ran with Gore in 2000.
The drama within a drama in Orlando was the building rivalry between the former ticket mates. They and their wives had breakfast on Saturday. Lieberman apparently did not give Gore a heads-up about his pending attack on Bush’s Middle East policy. Gore had been advised to do the same, but demurred. It would have been a popular move in Florida, with its heavy contingent of Jewish Democrats. But Gore has spent little time in Florida since 2000. Besides, he needed to make room for literary references designed to underscore his evident conviction that the 2004 nomination is his–and that he would very much like to have it. Gore quoted from Winston Churchill (“Never, never, never, never, never, never give up!”) and from poet William Butler Yeats, who lamented an era–we are in one now, Gore said–in which “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” It’s one of Yeats’s most famous works; the title, in case anyone misses the point, is “The Second Coming.”
