David Remnick on Al Gore (for President)

I just read the following short piece in The New Yorker while eating a burrito for lunch, and I had to post it here for all to read. This is part of my ongoing "Al Gore for President" campaign scheme. -Walt

from The New Yorker -- Talk of the Town
by David Remnick

Issue of 2007-03-05
Posted 2007-02-25

“Saturday Night Live” is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was “down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars.” The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.” Even the national pastime was in danger. “But,” Gore added hopefully, “I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, ‘We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!’ ”

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate. The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his. But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq; the fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?

In increasing numbers, poll results imply, Americans are disheartened by the real and existing Presidency, and no small number also feel regret that Gore—the winner in 2000 of the popular vote by more than half a million ballots, the almost certain winner of any reasonable or consistent count in the state of Florida—ended up the target of what it is not an exaggeration to call a judicial coup d’état. Justice Antonin Scalia routinely instructs those who question his vote in Bush v. Gore to stop their ceaseless whinging. “It’s water over the deck,” he told an audience at Iona College last month. “Get over it.” But it is neither possible nor wise to “get over it.” The historical damage is too profound.

And yet, despite the burden of injury and injustice, Gore, more than any other major Democratic Party figure, including the many candidates assembled for next year’s Presidential nomination, has demonstrated in opposition precisely the quality of judgment that Bush has lacked in office. Gore’s critiques of the Administration’s rush to war in Iraq and of the deceptions used to justify it were early, brave, and correct. On the issue of climate change, of course, he has exercised visionary leadership. With humor and intelligence, and negligible self-pity, he dispensed with the temptations of political martyrdom and became a global Jeremiah. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, he waged what was at first a fairly lonely campaign to draw attention to the problem; now, as a popularizing propagandist, he has succeeded in registering it as a crisis with nearly everyone, from field-tripping schoolchildren to reality-dubious members of the Administration. With his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore made the undeniability of the crisis a matter of consensus; thanks largely to him, an environmental issue will be an electoral issue. His secular evangelism has earned him an honored night at the Academy Awards and—almost as glittering—a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

For the moment, Gore has absented himself from the 2008 Presidential race with a deliberately provisional explanation: He has no plans to be a candidate. He doesn’t expect to be a candidate. (Or, as he satirized his language for Jay Leno when talking about his future in the movies, “I just want to clarify: I have no plans to do a nude scene. I have no intention to do a nude scene. I don’t expect to do a nude scene. But I haven’t made a Shermanesque statement about it.”)

Gore’s reluctance is understandable. The balloting in Iowa and New Hampshire is nearly a year away. He is in no rush. He may have shared Bill Clinton’s love of policymaking but not his relish for full-immersion politicking. In the view of former aides still close to him, Gore can’t lose by staying on the electoral sidelines. While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama start competing––warily at first, and then, inevitably, taking direct aim at one another’s weaknesses––Gore can stand unbruised, nursing the lingering glamour of his popular margin in 2000 and, perhaps, demanding by quiet inference that we take stock of a distinguished public career that began three decades ago, when Gore was a twenty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran freshly elected to Congress.

If only to take an honest man’s word for it, Gore’s entry into the race is unlikely. Clinton, Obama, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd—the field already provides a pool of talent and a range of possibilities infinitely more encouraging than the status quo. Moreover, the nomination and election of any one of the first three would take America a long way toward keeping the unfulfilled promise of “We the people”—not least because the appeal of all three is based only incidentally upon gender, race, or ethnic heritage.

If the next few months produce an obvious and relatively intact nominee, fine. Gore can stay active in his new role, and perhaps carry that role further, as a kind of climate czar in a Democratic Administration. But, as someone once said, stuff happens. The campaign may get nasty quickly. Clinton’s Iraq position may prove untenable in any of its iterations. Obama’s youthful charisma may look like inexperience after prolonged exposure to electoral gamesmanship. David Geffen might grow claws. A year is a very long time in politics, especially in the circular shooting contests that the Democrats so often convene.

There will still be Gore, patient and untrammelled. In any case, he will not have embarrassed himself. Post-lock-box, he has developed a keener sense of that. When the writers at “Saturday Night Live” suggested that he take part in a sketch featuring some scatological themes, Gore demurred with a combination of ironic self-preservation and his customary good judgment. “I’m sure this is funny,” he said, “but at the end of this I want to have some bread crumbs left leading back to my dignity.”

Link