Might the emails be grounds for impeachment?

[merrily]

94. Thank you so much, karynnj.

Was Gore serious in 1988, or was that part of the plan for 1992 and beyond, to begin to get Gore known nationally and perceived nationally as Presidential timber?

With Bubba, Hillary, Lieberman and others, Gore had been a founding member of the DLC. This anecdote may (or may not) have been about something that happened in 1989, but I believe that Bubba was always supposed to be the first DLC POTUS. Gore, with a famous political and liberal surname, and a Senator from Tennessee in his own right, was a near perfect running mate for the Governor of Arkansas, including from the standpoint of a Southern Strategy, which Democrats desperately needed by then.

A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born. With Clinton as its leader, the New Democrat movement that sprung from the DLC over the next decade would change the course of the Democratic Party in the United States and of progressive center-left parties around the world.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/recruiting-bill-clinton/281946/

My personal opinion is that this is spin, at least as to timing, if nothing else The DLC, which was founded in 1985 as a conservadem organization, did not just have an epiphany after the 1988 election to decide that being a conservadem was the way to go. Bill Clinton, a founding member of the DLC, hardly needed to be recruited in 1989, whether it was to head any political organization of which he had been a member since about 1985, or to be President, which his own words tell us he wanted to be since he went to Washington as a high schooler and shook JFK's hand.

Then again, I don't trust Al From as far as I can throw him.

Anyway, my point is, I don't know how seriously Gore was running for POTUS in 1988. I think the agenda all along was for Clinton to be the first DLC President. After all, being Senator Fulbright's mentee since high school and working in the Democratic Party for decades, it was his turn.

I don't like to speculate about what imaginary or dead Presidents would have done. Ironically, Democrats who were in office at the start of World War I, World War II, the Korean "Police Action," the Bay of Pigs, and the Vietnam "Era," have, since at least the anti-Vietnam movement, been defensive about being weak on defense. They have taken measures to counter that, including appointing Republicans as Secretaries of Defense, as did both Bubba and Obama.

After having been drawn into the Bay of Pigs, JFK became leery of the CIA and the Pentagon and had his brother to weave him through potentially mutually assured destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Democrats, starting with Johnson seemed to have forgotten all those lessons and, thanks to some turd, we lost RFK and no one has replaced him.

Anyway, the inexplicable defensiveness of Democrats on the (snort) "defense" issue may have led Gore to do something precipitous after 911, rather than avoiding war, nas most seem to assume he would have. Heck, even Sanders voted for the Afghanistan War. That'll teach those tribal farmers to go into Pakistan and turn Ben Laden over to the US!

Anyway, we'll never know. And, as nice as it is to imagine that Gore would most certainly done better after 911, I also think it's potentially dangerous to America to assume that we know exactly how imaginary (even real) will behave. Inasmuch as it's moot anyway, I don't see a reason to engage in a way of daydreaming that I consider potentially dangerous.

Sorry. As must be obvious, the imaginary President thing is a pet issue of mine. That's my only excuse, such as it is, for rambling about it. Come to think of it, the DLC is also a pet issue, so you were smack between Scylla and Charybdis, you poor thing.