ShareThisPoor old Al Gore. Even the North Koreans, who are badly in need of anybody they might propagandize about, don't want him around, preferring his former boss, Bill Clinton. In all the back channel negotiations that led to the release of two young journalists from the possibility they would spend the next 12 years making big rocks into little ones in some miserable Kim Jong Il prison, the one thing made clear was that it couldn't be effected by the former vice president of the United States.
Why? Well, the North Koreans said it was because the TV channel for which the two women worked when they were captured was founded by Gore and to let him manage this situation would just be wrong. There may have been other reasons, one of which is that a former president trumps a former vice president every time, but who really cares? So there was Gore forced to greet the freed women in the shadow of Clinton, who generously embraced him before the cameras. It must have felt like 2000 all over again when even Tennesseans rejected him and made him one of history's rarest creatures -- a candidate who failed to carry his home state in a presidential election.
Actually, the environmental rock star who still believes he should have been president (ignoring Tennessee in favor of Florida) probably ought to be glad he wasn't tapped for the trip and missed out on the dubious honor of having his picture taken with the clearly ailing Kim who looks more like a wax dummy than the next potential nuclear scourge. In fact, there was almost more life in the old cardboard cutouts of Clinton and Gore in front of the U.S. Treasury Building with which tourists could pose a few years ago.
I never had one of those street images taken, but I did go through a Gore reception line once to keep a friend company and had my picture taken shaking his hand. At least I thought I did until the elaborately inscribed photo attesting to our friendship arrived and I noticed that it wasn't I but someone I had never seen.
The Clinton-Kim photo has caused a minor dust up among those who believe it gives the North Koreans at least a sliver of undeserved legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world, which, of course is what the North Koreans had in mind when they proposed that everyone join Clinton to document the historic meeting. So what? The two women are home safely after doing something pretty stupid. They were pursuing a story in heavily posted territory where they had no business being. But they now may be the catalyst for reopening negotiations with the Peck's bad boys of Asia.
The North Koreans say that Clinton apologized for the unwarranted intrusion but the former president's wife, Hillary Clinton, who most people in this country, even those who can't identify their state's two senators, recognize as the current Secretary of State denies this emphatically. Mrs. Clinton has been openly harsh in her public remarks about the North Koreans lately but had moderated her assessments, probably in preparation for her husband's visit. She was conferring with African leaders while the event took place because her husband's trip was "unofficial" -- wink, wink -- with no policy discussions, although the two men met for three hours and must have talked about something other than a couple of minor journalists.
While this mission of mercy took place ostensibly under the auspices of Mr. Clinton's burgeoning post presidential outreach into the world of statecraft, he had received assurances before he ever left the United States that he would be bringing back the alleged transgressors. What he would have done had Kim changed his mind about the pardon or keeled over dead before he there is anyone's guess. So is what all this means.
About the only certainties are that two lives have been saved and a sliver of sunlight may have appeared at least briefly in the impenetrable gloom of North Korea.
(E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan(at)aol.com.)
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