Well, maybe the Clarke thing will have legs. I particularly like this passage in a Salon Interview with him:

Q: Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by [former national security advisor] Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

A; They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.

They had a preconceived set of national security priorities. I would add, as Gore has already touched on since last year, that they have a preconceived set of ideological priorities across the board, whether it be domestic issues, the economy, national security, the lot. The Democratic party cannot be so neatly pigeonholed because it is a party that looks at the facts and draws conclusions, not the other way around.