Newsweek's Fineman: Selfless Oracle? (Gore; Fineman calls him "endearing")

[Pirate Smile]

Selfless Oracle?
Al Gore is at his most appealing when he isn't running for office. But that doesn't mean that the former veep has left politics for good.



Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 12:35 a.m. CT May 24, 2006

May 24, 2006 -

-snip-
Gore has a certain aura of nobility about him these days—a mixture of rue, acceptance and lofty goals that makes him almost, well, endearing. As I talked to him at the East Coast premiere of the documentary film about him (“An Inconvenient Truth”), I wondered whether his newfound sense of peace and purpose meant that he had given up the idea of ever running for president again—or whether that is precisely what, in an indirect, Zen-like way, he’s doing. My answer to my question: he’s available if fate decides to befriend him.

-snip-
Gore is depicted as a guy who learned to love the land, who was exposed to the pioneering work of an environmentalist at Harvard and who, seeing his older sister die from smoking cigarettes, came to despise the misuse of science in the name of commerce. Now he’s found his life’s calling in his missionary work: an itinerant preacher dragging a black wheelie and an Apple laptop through airports as he summons mankind to repel the Forces of Doom.

-snip-
So why would he even fleetingly consider politics again?
For one—to paraphrase a slogan once applied to Barry Goldwater—in his heart, Gore knows he’s right. He’s been ahead of more curves than a NASCAR driver: the concerns about global warming, the implications of the rise of the internet, the need to be wary of deadly friction along the faultline between Islam and the West, his early and deep opposition to the launching a war in Iraq. It’s an impressive record.

“The reason people don’t like Gore is that he has been right so damn many times,” James Carville told me with an appreciate laugh.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12953239/site/newsweek/

[Dudley_DUright]

1. A little late to the party there Howard

Some of us knew all of this before the 2000 selection when you were hooting at Gore during the debates with the other press "Heathers".

[dennis4868]

2. and lying that....

Gore said that he created the Internet.

[Gloria]

3. It called me to read Margaret Carlson's recent "love letter" about

Gore.
Wasn't she the one who made some flip comment during the 2000 race about how easy it was to mock him? (or something to that effect)