One important measure of a leader is what he wants us to pay attention to. While Al Gore is calling our attention to "an inconvenient truth," G.W.Bush wants us to be preoccupied with an all-too-convenient distortion. While Al Gore tells us about something we all need to know and act on, Bush tells us about something that we'd be better off thinking less about.

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The American people, and media, are notoriously able to maintain their attention on one thing -or at most a few things- at a time. So what a leader chooses to call the public's attention to is a major indicator of the nature of that leader.

Here, as at many other junctures, the contrast between Bush and Gore -between the future we got from the 2000 election, and the future that we didn't- could not be more dramatic.

Two Leaders Contrasted

On the one side we have Al Gore calling our attention to "An Inconvenient Truth."

The truth to which Gore is directing our attention concerns the problem of climate change. And it is inconvenient because if we acknowledged what an increasingly strong scientific consensus is telling us it would require us Americans to change our irresponsible ways. Either that or to knowingly consign future inhabitants of this planet to some very hard -perhaps even catastrophic- times.

Gore has seriously studied this problem, and he recognizes that this is really something we need to look at, We need to look at it even if we'd rather not, because it is our moral obligation to recognize the consequences of our actions, and our inactions, because our own fate and especially the fate of our descendants hinges on whether we look at this inconvenient truth.

And then on the other side we have George W. Bush.
In the almost five years since the devastation of 9/11, this president has used his bully pulpit to call our attention -more than to anything else, indeed perhaps more than to everything else put together- to his "war on terror."

What does this tell us about the kind of leader George W. Bush is for America. The answer is: nothing good; indeed, something very scary.

It is not that the problem of terrorism is phony. There are indeed people and organizations out there that wish to do this country harm. And in an age where the technology of destruction has developed to the point that it has in our times, the desire of terrorist groups to inflict destruction and pain upon us must be taken very seriously.

No, the problem is not that George W. Bush is directing our attention to something unreal. The problem is that there is no national need for us as a whole people to be focused on that particular piece of reality.

The Misnamed "War on Terror"

A good and responsible leader would call our attention to the "war on terror" only to the extent needed to help us understand our situation and to support the allocation of the necessary resources to meet the challenge. Some problems can be very important or ambitious -like the Manhattan Project, or like putting a man on the moon by the end of the 60s- without the public needing to be focused on them, or in some cases even to know about them at all.

The war on terror is mostly a problem of that kind.
A war like World War II legitimately needed to be the focus of much of our national life. That's because, in that time of crisis, there was a need for the whole nation to rally behind the war effort- enlisting in the military service, accepting the rationing of vital resources, working in the factories instrumental to the waging of total war in a struggle for national survival against other powerful nation states. The whole of the people had a vital role to play.

But the "war on terror" is a wholly different kind of struggle, and its challenge needs to be met in a wholly different way.

It's not really a war at all in the sense that we've known it through history. The threat posed by a group like al Qaeda is in no way like the threat posed by Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Stalinist Soviet Union. This is not a struggle of one great nation state against another.

Rather it pits a relative handful of people, organized in a loose network of secret movements containing hidden cells embedded in countries (most of them unfriendly to it) around the world, against virtually all the nations of the world, including all the great powers. A covert organization consisting of thousands of people with perhaps a few hundreds of millions of dollars of resources, and with no territory under its control, is opposed by nations representing billions of people, in command of trillions of dollars in resources, and in control over virtually the entire globe.

In the struggle against a group like al Qaeda, most of the important work involves international cooperation to gather intelligence so that the secret cells embedded across the planet can be unconvered and destroyed. An essential project, but not one that requires anything of the general population.

Most of it is scarcely a matter for the military (though this administration's unforced decision to invade Iraq -quite peripheral to the "war on terror"-has created a military problem), for this is not an enemy to be defeated by armies or by our arsenal of advanced weaponry.

The challenge posted to us by international terrorism is less like the wars we've known, and more like if an asteroid threatened to strike the earth some time in the future. We'd certainly want to see to it that the right people were recruited to attack the problem and were given all the resources they need to keep the asteroid from hitting the earth. But, as imperative as that effort would be, it is not what we'd be talking about all the time, or thinking about all the time.

Indeed, a good leader would challenge his people not to let this danger cast a large shadow over our lives and our collective conversation. Let us deal with the problem intelligently, a good leader would say. Let's set our fears aside, and go on and do great things in other arenas.

But this leader wants us always thinking about his war, and his role as a "war president," our commander in chief. To what end?

Political Gain for Him, A Price Paid by the Nation

Because the American people cannot serve the cause by getting all riled up about "the war on terror," a leader who works to keep them afraid and focused on a threat they can and should do nothing much about does his people a great disservice.

That's how a lot of people came eventually to understand the various colored "Alerts" the government issued. "What are we supposed to do with this information?" many Americans came to wonder. And the answer to that question was: nothing, really. (Not like with Gore's inconvenient truth, which challenges us to work to transform some of the ways we live our lives.)

And then out of this perplexity some people who noticed that the announcements of greater danger were strangely correlated with the political need of the administration to change whatever was the damaging subject of that moment. Raising the alarm -maybe it's not about our security, but about the leader's own quest for political advantage.

But it's not just the colored alerts. That's just one piece of a larger pattern.

Why direct our scarce national attention onto a problem in whose solution the people have little role to play? A whole tapestry of evidence shows clearly that the administration has wanted people focused on the war on terror, and in a state of fear, so that public opinion could more readily be manipulated into supporting, or at least not opposing, this regime's dismantling of the system of government that has always defined us as a nation.

The drumbeat on this "war on terror," creating an otherwise useless state of fear in the public, has served the regime as an all-purpose justification the assault on the legal and constitutional system. We need to tear all that stuff down -FISA, the 4th Amendment- these leaders want us to believe, so that they will be better able to protect us against our terrible terrorist enemies.

We are a nation at war. That's their story, and they're sticking to it. And they hold onto power by trumpeting this distortion of reality, and by having George W. Bush posture as the "war president"- who gives a disproportionate number of his talks in front of people in uniform, who emphasizes his role as commander-in-chief more than as president, and who, of course, directs our attention to a "war on terror" that, we're told, will last as far as the eye can see.

All this fear, that meets no national need. All this diversion of our attention, for no national purpose. Just a political purpose gained at great national cost. And meanwhile a great many of national problems that we SHOULD be talking about never get a place on the agenda.

The Wrong Fork in Our National Road

So in Bush v. Gore we now know how very much was at stake.

On the one side was a leader who would call our attention to "an inconvenient truth," something we don't want to hear but must attend to. On the other side was a leader who would call our attention to an all-too-convenient distortion; a leader who would focus our whole national consciousness and life around a problem that required no such response- except to aid in the leader's own quest for unchecked power.

Let us hear some more inconvenient truths about the dangers we face.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.