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Just finished an article for Salon.com about Al Gore’s reemergence onto the political scene. It posted a couple of hours ago.

I’ve been writing about Al Gore for about three years now and I have to say that the pieces just get harder and harder to write, or rather the process of writing them just gets increasingly vexed. Partly that’s because the range of the possible gets narrower. At the end of 1999 you had a sense that maybe Gore could bust out of his shell and be the person he is in small groups, etc. etc. you know the story. By now, however, after he’s busted out of the bubble and been recaptured by it time and again, you pretty much know that it’s probably never going to happen.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong.

Listening to staffers and friends talk about Gore over the last several days I kept thinking of a story a baby-boomer I know told me once about getting his father to share a joint with him at some undisclosed point in the late 1960s — this of course would be in the pre-TPM era (BTPM).

I don’t remember all the details precisely. I doubt this friend of mine does either. But the long and the short of it was that the baby boomer’s father lit up and proceeded to wig out. He gets all scared and everything. So then the baby boomer is trying to calm him down, walk him through it, etc. (figure that the father was born in maybe 1910). And so the father is laying there on the couch or something and the baby boomer is saying, “Just let go, just let go.” And the father says “I don’t think I can, I’ve been holding on too long.”

This story has always had a certain poignancy for me because the younger of the two men later told me that he thought it was one of the most honest, truest things his father ever said. And having known the older man, I suspect that’s right.

When I was speaking to various Gore-ites over the last couple days there was this line I kept hearing: that if Gore could just go by instinct and not think about everything so much, not consult a slew of experts for every decision but just go with his gut, that stuff would be okay.

But you get the sense that he can’t let go either. He’s been holding on too long.

No matter how much grass he smoked in the 1970s.

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