Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

A wise man once said that timing is every thing in life. That's certainly true for great athletes, great playwrights, too, and ditto for great comedians. And that's what worries me about Al Gore. He's a nice enough man, but it's tough enough to be a great political leader no matter what attributes you bring to the table. But without timing, it's well nigh impossible. So lets look at the record:

· Remember when Gore grew a beard? (By the way, it was just before images of the wispy, bearded Taliban began to pollute the media.). The guy was nearly a century and-a-half off the mark! For heaven's sake Al, the last successful bearded president was A. Lincoln! Clinton shaved his beard off while still in college. That's timing!

· When the Democratic primary process was at its full fury and the outcome still up for grabs, Mr. Gore assessed the field and came up with Howard Dean a nano second before the guy imploded and disappeared without a trace. Now, that's not timing!

I am going to let my readers in on a secret even though I run the risk of being considered paranoid by some of the doubting Thomases amongst you. I have good reason to believe that a computer program exists somewhere that is supposed to flag potential terrorists when they pay cash for a first class one-way ticket from, say, Riyadh to Washington. But instead, by some computerized mishegas, flags me instead. And it matters not whether I'm going round trip from West Palm Beach to Tampa or from Miami to London and that I booked the flights eleven months in advance and paid by American Express. I'm met at every gate with a: "take off your shoes, loosen your belt and open your luggage, mister. There's a security alert today!"

And it always gets worse when I have to make connections in Atlanta, which inevitably requires I run a gauntlet beginning with (ticket verification, please) a golf cart trolley ride and ending with three (may I see your driver's license, please) stops on that intra-terminal subway and has always at least one escalator ride to get to (may I see your boarding pass and ID, please) my gate. One time I quipped to a flight attendant who had witnessed my usual shoe/belt rigmarole, that I seem to have more problems getting out of Atlanta than General Sherman did.

"Oh, I don't know about that." she quipped back. "He had to burn it down to get out!"