Al Gore, Citizen Version

Six years later, mustering nostalgia for Al Gore's semi-failed 2000 presidential campaign is a bit like saying "sorry" to a man who's wheeled around and filled your upper body full of shotgun pellets: it's tough but doable. For me -- for the most part -- the 2000 campaign is a horror to look back on. It's when I first got to know George and Danger Dick, Ari, Karl, Karen, and the entire ensemble that spun and prevaricated their way to a disputed victory then, only to since govern this country into a position of a comparative weakness that is indisputable. Nonetheless, If I strain real hard, I can muster a couple fond memories of those days. I can feel some nostalgia for the final few weeks of that ill-fated race, and for one of the politicians running it.

It was mid-October of 2000, and Gore had dropped about five or six points back in the polls. The fastidious, faintly wonkish, offend-no-human and for-God-sake-stop-sighing strategy he had hitherto employed was clearly failing to ignite the imagination of the electorate. In the meantime, George Bush had been travelling around the midwest saying inspired things like: "Yeah, that's so and so from the Times: he's a major-league asshole," and "my favorite philosopher is Jesus." He was running away with it.

As the campaign approached the finish-line, Bush swaggered through the "battleground" states, beginning to feel the comfort of political momentum and the cheer of an enraptured press, saying pretty much anything he chose so long as it was carefully scripted and rehearsed and he'd already said it about a hundred times before. He became, with the help of some mighty credulous reporting, the conservative candidate with the achy-breaky heart. You could almost hear Americans slowly figuring it all out: "Well, he may be a conservative. But that's one compassionate sumbitch right there." As the campaign was winding down, he looked and behaved like someone who thought the thing was his.

But then Gore saw the writing on the polls. One night, five points down with a few weeks to go, he went to bed a guppy and woke up a tiger shark. What followed thereafter was our first meeting with Al Gore, rabble-rousing street preacher. All of a sudden, he was the Randy "Macho-Man" Savage of politics. He talked, red in the face, about Bush's proposals, why they were so misleading and what they meant for American families. He flexed his muscular know-how, preaching about what it really took to have a strong middle class in America, and how with his help, in the last eight years people were moving out of poverty in a mass exodus of Biblical proportions. He took to directly criticizing George Bush and his record as governor, remarking again and again how -- for a guy running on a platform of education -- his own state's schools were in marked disarray, with high-school graduation rates scraping the very bottom of the US barrel. I think I remember him once comparing schools in Texas to those in Guatemala -- unfavorably.

Where did this man come from, I wondered? Who was this assertive political force that appeared to at least physically resemble Al Gore? I said to my waiter, "Yo. I'll have what he's having," and held up a photo of Al working the crowd in Pennsylvania.

I'm convinced that this enlivened, seemingly desperate Al Gore was Gore the citizen, the one with little to lose, and not the politician so deeply afraid of losing it all to a creepy bunch of Texans. It was the citizen candidate who realized that he wouldn't win if he continued to play it safe, that America is righteously slow to elect lukewarm suits. His previous tactic of letting the Clinton/Gore record of increased prosperity speak for itself, of asking voters to rely on his qualifications and encyclopaedic knowledge of the universe and to please-please avoid tying him in with President Clinton's penchant for Oval Office blowjobs, had netted him a clear and increasing deficit in the polls. So he switched, almost overnight, to a campaign run on "populist" principles that spoke to the core of the country where its deepest values and its deepest fears are held (George Bush's true talent is in his ability to emote these deeper values and fears, values he's at odds with and fears he seeks to enhance, to serve his own political ends).

You win, Gore must have finally recognized, when you take the chance that your passion and your vision for America will inspire more people than it will rankle. And in the last few weeks of the campaign, Al Gore literally rolled up his sleeves and set about to undo a year's worth of campaigning by the DLC's time-honored playbook of treating voters like the profound dipshits they are.

Yeah, but it was too late.

Six years later, with America walking into a crucial mid-term and a presidential election of apocalyptic proportions two years down the road, Neil, over at Blue Voice, is asking some good questions about how it's gonna be: "What do we want to change? How can we make change happen? Who do we want to lead?"

I don't have great answers to these questions, but I think Al Gore, the citizen version, does.

Reading the right-wing political blogosphere as I'm wont to do, I'm always intrigued to know how certain politicians are represented. Al Gore is handled there with a tone of bemused dismissal. Reading further, it's clear the right would like its readers to believe that Al Gore's post-election rendezvous with private-sector American citizenship goes something like this: Gore loses election, Gore abandons razor, Gore drifts in and out of hallucinatory delirium, Gore briefly recovers to land teaching gig at Columbia school for Leftist Rebels, Gore is fired and moves to undisclosed mountainous hermitage to "find his center," Gore finally descends with his true message and life's calling which is to be a dedicated "Bush-basher." Thenceforward, Gore gives a few keynote speeches that are nothing but "personal attacks" on George Bush and that contain, "no real ideas or vision for America." Gore is a nutcase Bush-hater and no longer relevant.

But what has Al Gore really been up to? For one thing, he's been popping up from time to time to deliver seering frontal assaults on Bush's latest ill-advised policy du jour, getting some nods in the process from experts, fellow skeptics, and John Stewart; getting ignored in the meantime by all Republican and many Dem politicians; all while being proven accurate, if not downright clairvoyant, somewhere down the line. His speeches on Iraq, on the media, and on the executive branch and the rule of law, are enough to make you quiver with a case of the what-might-have-beens, or to wonder what might still be if Democrats in office could muster half the conviction and fierce eloquence of Gore. In these speeches, there's no mistaking the sharpness of his words, nor the urgency -- if you recall -- of their delivery. The Al Gore speaking here is citizen Gore, the one that came into being in mid-October of 2000, the one with little to lose and plenty to give, the one who lost. And he can still be found, every so often, swinging the political hammer with passion, hitting the nail on the head each time.

I'm not saying that Al Gore is the liberal's Moses. But he's a guy who's no longer afraid to shout his principles to anyone who happens to be listening. He's someone who feels deeply betrayed, as I do, by this president's criminal exploitation of America's shared trauma from 9/11 and its shared goal of ensuring safety at home and retribution for those who attacked us, abroad. As a citizen -- a person who in the years since his failed presidential run has taught journalism, has started an innovative and promising (though perhaps, currently lame) television network, has toured the four corners preaching to anyone who will listen about the dangers of global warming and the degradation of our environment, and has delivered a number of effective speeches further exposing the grievous nature of the current administration's faults and miscalculations -- he's worth emulating. As a politician, he may be just the type of citizen this country needs.

One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news. -- Al Gore

Preach, citizen Gore, preach!