Gore is managing his non-campaign for President *brilliantly*

Every time he is interviewed, the first question out of anyone's mouth is: "Are you running?", and then he makes some noise about this and that, oh, he says it would be a really good platform for effecting change, but I really don't like the horse race, etc.

He never shuts the door, so he keeps the question out there, the shiny soccer ball for the horse race-obsessed lobotomy victims in the press.

Then he gets to talk about substantive issues, which of course the media otherwise would ignore in favor of how his poll numbers stack up against the other candidates, if he were announced. He gets to expound on the environment, on fiscal responsibility, on Iraq, on the Constitution and legality, on illegal wiretapping, on scientific fact over ideological dogma, on the importance of making good decisions, and how good decision making might come about in this country.

He is playing the media like a fiddle.

He knows if he were "running", they'd stop listening to what he was saying. So, he teases them enough to keep their little hamster brains running on their little wheels, and gets to put his IDEAS out there.

In his public appearances, instead of a head-on attack of these criminals, which would put him in the "crazy" Democrat category (to the media, there are only two kinds of Democrats: "crazy" ones who actually tell the truth about things (see Dean, Murtha, Kucinich, Michael Moore) and "wimpy" ones who won't say too much about the corporate agenda and can just be dismissed as "Republican lite" (see Dukakis, Gephardt, Biden)), he takes this thoughtful approach: "Gee", he says, rubbing his virtual beard, "why IS it that the US keeps making these stupid decisions?"

This is a brilliant way to approach it. First, it takes as a PREMISE, not something that needs to be argued, that we have been making stupid and bad decisions, and then gets everyone pondering why that is. It focuses obvious attention on the bad decision makers, and also the enablers in the media and the mostly-slumbering citizenry. The political will to improve our decision-making grows out of this conversation. It implicitly condemns CheneyCo while simultaneously looking at the brighter future beyond them.

Frankly, I don't know how his strategy could be any smarter. He clearly is the first Democrat to really THINK about the problem of the media and come up with effective jujitsu against it (as opposed to just capitulating to it, as the Congressional Democrats just did). This alone puts him miles beyond most of the other candidates, for whom media coverage will just blow them along like paper boats in a storm.

Gore has learned a lot. AND, he has tape of thousands of people begging him to run. This, finally, is a Democrat who gets it concerning the media.

Go Gore!