Ezra Klein has a lot of thoughts about my motives in my Gore column. I’m not sure whether it’s worth getting into the weeds here. Rather than try to deal with everything he throws up in the air, I’ll just make a couple points about what my “motives” are, since Ezra seems so interested. First, I do not believe Gore ever spent a summer in France as a teenager to study existentialism (if someone can point me to any evidence to the contrary, I’m all ears). I think Gore said it because he’s got an inexplicably weird need to show off intellectually, particularly when it isn’t necessary and not quite true. And Arianna Huffington has a quite explicable need to suck-up to powerful men she feels she can use, so she bought it. I do believe that he worked his family farm — there is ample corroboration for this in several respectable biographies. I’m not trying to “dredge up” anything in the sense Ezra insinuates, I’m merely trying to state plainly that there is no “new” Al Gore, rather there is a new burning desire to see Gore in a new light and that this Gore boomlet is an embarrassing example of liberal herd-thinking sparked by a genuine and legitimate fear that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable Democratic nominee as well as a burning desire to lend credence to Gore’s environmental crusade.
Ezra and others call this a “Gore backlash” as if it’s some sort of irrational or unfair reaction from conservatives to refuse to buy the latest round of hype about Gore. I think this is silly. Simply because various people at Tapped, The New Republic, the Huffington Post and elsewhere have worked themselves up into a full-blown crush on Gore they seem to think it’s sleazy or illegitimate for Gore’s critics to not change their minds about the man. Considering how Ezra, also a smart guy, talks regularly about Bush and various other Republicans, I’m at a loss as to how he could think what I wrote qualifies as a “smear.” If or when the press starts writing favorably about Bush in the next six months, I look forward to labeling any “recycled” criticism of Bush as a “backlash” as well.
On one point, however, I think Ezra’s got a small case. He writes: “Goldberg didn’t seem to notice that the quotation marks ended before the line about Gore’s fluency. That was Huffington’s compliment, not Gore’s boast. Goldberg implies the opposite — all the better to smear with.” That’s a fair enough gripe, as far as it goes. But I think Ezra fails to appreciate that my contempt was aimed at both Gore and Huffington. I am dubious that Gore’s French pronunciation is in fact perfect. But I am sure that Huffington — in full swoon — would not hesitate to say it is.