BRIDE OF FRANKENCANDIDATE

So Al Gore has officially endorsed Howard Dean for President. In Harlem. When his former choice for #2, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is also running.

Can you say "Democrat civil war?" Gore's endorsement is the political equivalent of firing on Ft. Sumter. Let the war for the soul of the Democrats begin.

In endorsing Dean, in Harlem (Bill Clinton's HQ), Gore has thrown in his lot with the hard left and repudiated his old chums in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, including the Clintons as well as Lieberman (whom Gore didn't even call beforehand). Gore called on the Dems to rally around the angriest candidate in the race, and the candidate with the second or third least interesting ideas on combating terrorism, and the highest profile candidate to tacitly endorse the Cynthia McKinney conspiracy school of political attack, and the candidate most likely to bring back the era of really big government (we've already returned to the era of big government under Bush) should he win. But Gore has also done something else here that's worth a look.

In his endorsement, Gore said that Dean was the only major candidate to get the Iraq war right. Dean was opposed to the Iraq war; a President Dean would have left Saddam standing to this very day. Which would not only have condemned roughly 25 million people to life under the bootheel of a mass murdering thug, but would have left a known terror kingpin in power, after 9-11, when the entire world suspected that thug had weapons of mass destruction. In essence, Gore said that Dennis Kucinich was closer to getting the call right than President Bush, Sens. Lieberman and Kerry (who has since flipped to opposition) and Rep. Gephardt, and in so doing Gore has also repudiated everything his own administration said about Iraq and the need to contain it or eliminate it as a threat. That's because in February 1998, the Clinton administration took a stand that is substantively identical to that of the Bush administration. So Al Gore has, in endorsing Howard Dean, repudiated his own 8 years as Vice President of the United States. Thank God for that constitutional quirk that kept Gore from taking the White House in 2000. It's clear now that he would have had no idea how to grapple with the post-911 world.

Why would he do this? Gore was as establishment as it comes in today's Democrat party--a former veep, a former senator, the guy who actually got more votes in 2000. And he has tossed all that aside in favor of the angry left. Far be it from me to read Al Gore's mind (I suspect that there is no more boring chore on earth), but a few thoughts do come to mind. Gore is at heart a lefty; his work with the centrist DLC, which was built to push the Dems away from the lefty brink and toward the political center, was all a pose. He only did it to ingratiate himself with the up and comers, and it paid off--he got the veep nod in 1992 from DLCite Clinton. It fits with what we know about Gore's loyalty to himself above principle--he infamously traded his vote on the 1991 Gulf War for face time on teevee, and ultimately voted to support the war when the GOP promised him the face time he craved. Like all Dems who run for high office, Gore chucked principle on abortion to kneel at the NARAL altar of death. Strategically, Gore may now think that the left is the future of the Democrats. That's how he ran in 2000, an angry populist outsider crusading, in essence, against himself (since he'd just spent 8 years riding the pines for Clinton). Now he is crusading against the whole Clinton administration and its legacy, literally, if you believe that Gen. Clark is a Clinton proxy meant to pull the party back to the center.

So what all this means is that the fight for the soul of the Democrats has now split the players in what is arguably the most successful Democrat administration in recent memory. The Clintons may in their heart be lefties, but they believe that that the party's future is in keeping some credible claim to the center. Al Gore believes that the left is the future, and is using his name to pull some of the center in that direction rather than pull the party toward the center. Thus Gore has chosen sides in the Democrat civil war to come, and it's Clintonite brother against brother now.

It's probably a mistake, for Gore and the party, though it's good for Dean for all the obvious reasons. Gore is probably just extending his own abrasive, arrogant personna and post-911 fog to Dean. He has all but wrecked the campaign of his old friend Joe Lieberman, and yanked the Dems to the hard, angry, anti-war left, to a position most Americans neither share nor understand. And in helping Dean solidify his hold on the nomination, Gore has put the party's future in the hands of a guy known for being an angry jerk, but otherwise not terribly interested in fighting terrorism (Dean's response to the fall of Saddam was "I guess that's a good thing").

So what about Dean, and the angry jerk mask he wears? Some might argue that that would be an asset in the war. I disagree. Imagine for a second that, after 9-11, President Bush had reacted angrily and simply shot off his mouth the way Dean does, but then done little to combat terrorism, as Dean seems to believe is appropriate. You'd have a tough-talking, non-fighting administration--exactly what the terrorists want. American credibility as a nation capable of insuring the security of itself and its allies would evaporate overnight. We would be the noisy paper tigers that al Qaeda thinks we are. President Clinton also talked tough on terrorism--he even declared war on it once--but what did he do about it? Very little--missiles lobbed at empty tents; hands-off approach when the Saudis stymied the Khobar Towers investigation. Dean just offers more of the same, but with an less temperate edge. Talk is cheap, and swaggering tough talk that isn't backed up by action is hollow and makes the world more dangerous.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan sees it mostly the way I do. David Frum doesn't. And Ramesh Ponnuru says that Dean is probably not a good shot to win in 2004, but may be the Dems' best shot. From the point of view of a party that believes discontent on the left as voiced by Ralph Nader cost them the White House in 2000, Ponnuru makes a lot of sense.