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If we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth-rate military of Iraq, and then quickly abandon that nation, as President Bush has quickly abandoned almost all of Afghanistan after defeating a fifth-rate military power there, then the resulting chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.

Gore kept an open laptop at hand as we ate. (He and Tipper have matching Apple G4s. “What did you expect?” she said. “I live with the man who invented the Internet.”) He bookmarks the Internet to some of the more expected outlets—the Times, the Washington Post, Google News—but also to left-leaning sites like mediawhoresonline.com and truthout.com. From his reading, online and elsewhere, he has grown more convinced that, in the wake of the Goldwater collapse, in 1964, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, American conservatives were determined to “play a long game” and organize themselves, ideologically, financially, and intellectually, to win national elections and carry out a conservative revolution. Gore is interested in a memorandum written at the request of a committee chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by a Virginia attorney named Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and dated August 23, 1971, just two months before Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. The Powell memorandum portrays the American economic system as “under broad attack” by well-funded leftists, who dominate the media, academia, and even some corners of the political world. The memo describes a battle for the survival of free enterprise, and calls for less “hesitation” and “a more aggressive attitude” on all fronts. The memo was marked “confidential” and was distributed to chambers of commerce and leading executives around the nation.

Gore went down in the elevator with his daughter Kristin, who worked in Los Angeles as a writer for the animated series “Futurama” and had lately finished a comic novel about political Washington. Like her father, Kristin Gore healed her wounds, at least in part, under a comic bandage. Before publication, one interviewer had asked Kristin why she hadn’t written the novel sooner after the election, and she said that she wanted to avoid a book that sounded like “Sylvia Plath Does D.C.” [Al Gore kommt in den Futurama Folgen "Anthology of Interest I" und "Crimes of the Hot" vor.]