Al Gore, Unleashed

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By David Michael Green, Posted by Rob Kall (about the submitter) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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A third reason Gore would be a formidable candidate is because he is smart, and, oh, how refreshing that would be after eight years of the Slogan Boy on Permanent Vacation, the president who doesn't even read newspapers but relies instead on his aides to learn what is happening in the world. (You remember them, right? Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, Paul Wolfowitz?) Gore is not just smart like Clinton the policy wonk, or Carter the nuclear engineer, but he is philosopher-of-history smart. He has a keen sense of America's place in a historical and global context, and a better understanding by far than anybody prominent in the political arena of what the challenges of the future entail. The easiest place to see that is in how he got environmentalism and the Iraq war right while so many continue even to this day to get those questions wrong, with disastrous consequences. But those were easy calls. What's harder is seeing the future now, and determining what America needs to remain prosperous, and what the world needs from American leadership in order to transcend the massive global challenges we all now face. Gore is light years ahead of anybody else on these sorts of issues, in part because he's one of the few political figures other than Newt Gingrich (who of course gets it wrong) even thinking about them.

As if those aren't reasons enough to like Gore in 2008, one of the best is that he is right on the issues. If I have to vote for another mealy-mouthed self-serving Democratic punk once again, I ... won't. Is it too much to ask for a candidate with the integrity, guts and intelligence to have rejected Bush's tax cuts, his disaster in Iraq, his Social Security raid, and his other attempts to hurl America off a cliff? Not only is Al Gore one of the few big-league Democrats who was on the right side of those issues, he was so early and passionately, at a time and in a way which looked a lot like career suicide to the DLC hacks of this world (talk about taking (a former) one to know one). Gore was a rare voice of sanity among America's political class, at a time when it was desperately needed. As the ship of state teetered perilously in the direction of fascism, where were the leading figures of the 'left' party in America? Where were the patriots when we needed them most? I'll tell you where. They were getting briefed by the likes of Bob Shrum on focus groups and polling data, that's where.

Which brings me to yet another reason to support Gore in 2008: What is the alternative? Hillary? Besides the fact that I never understood why anybody was ever so in love with (or so hated) her, other than as another twisted manifestation of America's gaga celebrity culture, she is also the very definition of the Democratic Party's problem. Calculated triangulation is no way to win an election, even if your opponents aren't vicious street-fighters from the Atwater Academy of Politics, the electoral version of the School of the Americas. Just ask John Kerry, our next alternative. After the trainwreck of the last campaign, I can't even think of Kerry without going apoplectic, veins bulging from my temples. And so I won't. Suffice it to say that I hope he will have the decency to do the right thing in 2008, and stay home.

Who does that leave? Joe Biden? Bill Richardson? These guys have all the steel of fresh spaghetti and all the charisma of stale sauce. John Edwards? Mark Warner? Please. I don't know if Mario Cuomo still has it in him, and I could get moderately excited about a Russ Feingold candidacy, but nobody can touch today's Al Gore for the total package of brains, passion, resume and guts.

I'm not wedded to Al Gore the person. Like I said, it would have been hard for me to imagine writing this column with respect to his earlier incarnation. But my gut tells me that Gore has learned what Democrats by and large have not. Namely, that you actually have a lot better chance of not going down if you go down swinging. And that, anyway, what's the point of capturing the White House if you're not going to do anything with it other than give it away to Wall Street in between chasing interns around the desk?

If Gore sells out, forget him forever. I'm willing to give him this second chance because of circumstances and because of the courage he's been showing me, but certainly never a third. But I don't think he will go astray. I think he's crossed an ideological and personal Rubicon. People running for president following the cautious, triangulation-style strategy of either Clinton or of Kerry don't lay down bright red markers of fire-glowing ember like Gore has. There's no going back now, and I sense he likes that just fine.

And so do I. I could be way wrong, but I think that Al Gore has become the candidate so many of us have been craving for so long - for most, across a lifetime. Someone, that is, who is liberated from the caustic all-consuming desire simply to be president that animates so many candidates. Someone who can therefore campaign as a true patriot. Someone who mixes empathy, courage, passion, honesty, experience and intelligence into a formidably attractive candidate whom voters can affirmatively vote for, as opposed to choosing simply for lack of alternative.

Today's Al Gore - the real Al Gore - reminds me of no one so much as Warren Beatty's fictional Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, a man about to die, and therefore liberated from the need to play the game any longer, with refreshing and delightful results.

Gore is not about to die, of course, but in some ways he already has. They took everything from him, and he strikes me now as someone ironically unburdened in the process. Gore won the presidency, and they stole that from him, leaving him us with the American Caligula instead. Along the way they took his public reputation from him, to boot. Now Al Gore seems like a man set free, as anxious to serve the country as he is to atone for his past failures at living up to his own standards of honesty and courage, and as ready to rumble as is necessary. The guy's not playing beanbag this time.

Howard Dean was probably pretty close to being that candidate in 2004, but when Kerry started aping his line on Bush and the war, Democrats figured they could get both the good politics and the resume in one package, and were fooled into going for the junior senator from Massachusetts. There is every reason to believe that could happen again with Hillary Clinton, but one of the best chances of avoiding that fate would be a Gore candidacy.

I therefore hope, for all these reasons, that Al Gore runs in 2008. He is just what the Democratic Party needs, and a revived, progressive Democratic Party in power is just what the country and the world badly needs as well.

Run Al, run. Run for our lives. Run hard, say what you know to be true, and don't look back.

Run as if the fate of the nation and the world depends on who is next chosen to lead the world's only superpower, lately and dangerously gone pathologically amok.

Because it does.

David Michael Green (pscdmg@hofstra.edu) is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles, but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.

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