What Goes Around v. Just Going Around and Around

The speculation lately that Al Gore may be ready to try it again despite his denials may or may not prove true. What's more interesting to me is that, if he is successful, it will be the result not of focus grouping and polling and Dem consultants but of reading reality correctly, standing up for the right paths to prepare for it, and then letting history catch up to him.

History is made of the flows of events produced by complex human interactions, like all complex adaptive systems difficult to predict but with clearly discernible and highly repeating patterns. Individuals facing the resulting ebbs, flows, and tsunamis of history can either try to be whatever the fad du jour says, such as the Crockett caps, disco, Urban Cowboy, etc., etc., up to the low risers and muffin tops of my various decades, or can choose a set of standards that withstand the inevitable backwash of these insanities. It turns out that some sets of standards stand up well within all discernible patterns, or that some standards fit given patterns better than others. The same goes for leadership. You can try to catch every popular wave and most often have your board flip you before you hit the shore, or you can hold out for your consistent standards and know that, for particular waves, those standards are the only way to arrive standing up.

Let me be less dense. One of the popular stories of history is how Winston Churchill overcame years of failure to be the rock upon which England stood to prevent Nazi domination. Before and after, he wasn't the right man at the right time, but at that time, in that flow and pattern, he was the right man. As much as I don't buy into Ronald Reagan's "greatness," I accept that he was able to overcome previous failures to gain the White House because he held firm to a set of views that Americans came to feel, after years of disagreeing, fit the times. And with his current reemergence as the one national political voice with credibility on what will be the issue of the rest of our lives--the interplay of environment (especially water), energy, and global warming--Gore stands poised to bring to the table what no one else can. No Republican can speak coherently and consistently to the problems facing us, and God knows that Hillary, Warner, Edwards, (please help us) Kerry, et al. have nothing but crashed surf boards to show for their understanding of how to ride the waves.

That doesn't mean that Gore will do it. He actually may be in a better place from the outside critiqueing and guiding than stuck back in the crap hole of Beltwayism. But by 2008 we may finally as a nation be ready to get serious and mature and deal with what we should have done when Jimmy Carter called us to action and we opted for a hair-dyeing B-actor who piedpiped us down this myopic and forlorn path we're on. And, if we are, there's only one person who believably can say "follow me, I know how to get out of this." Let's just make sure FL has ballots that let people check the name they want this time.