May 31st 2007
From The Economist print editionAl Gore has more to lose than to gain from running for president...
Formidable or not, Mr Gore should resist such siren voices (wanting him to run for president). He may have been in the business since he was 28. He may have run for president before he was 40. But he is the very opposite of a natural, like Bill Clinton or Mr Obama. He looks horribly out of place in the political bear pit. And he consistently sells himself short as a politician—emphasising expediency over vision even when vision might have been in his interest, as when he all but ignored global warming in 2000.
Mr Gore lost an unlosable election in 2000 (yes, he won the popular vote, but the election should never have been close). He had eight years of peace and prosperity behind him. His opponent was an inexperienced scamp who could not name the president of Pakistan. But Mr Gore sighed his way through the first debate and painted himself orange in the third. He could easily have solved the Monica problem by promising to be Bill Clinton without the blow jobs; instead he embraced a silly “people against the powerful” populism.
...
At last, the real Al GoreMr Gore always gave the impression that he was in politics out of duty rather than vocation—his father, a self-made Tennessee senator, dearly wanted his son to be president. But that ambition became a prison for Mr Gore. It forced a natural introvert to spend his time with people and turned a natural didact into a deal-maker. More important, Mr Gore has found his real calling at last: as a public intellectual cum polemicist cum elder statesman. He is not a perfect polemicist. His style is on the stodgy side. His latest book goes over a lot of well-tilled ground about Mr Bush's “faith-based policies”. He sometimes comes across as eccentric—as when he lambasts television for killing public discourse, then celebrates the internet as its potential saviour. A few minutes online, reading the zealots on either the right or the left, should have been enough to explode that illusion.
Nevertheless the whole package is compelling. Mr Gore brings a unique qualification to his writing: the fact that he has operated at the highest level of government. He writes like somebody with something important to say. He packs his argument with facts and illustrations. Above all, he has a genius for getting his message across—button-holing leaders the world over, producing different versions of his book for children and young adults, training more than 1,000 “climate messengers” and generally refusing to let go of the bone. “Those who believe all his garbage are going to be excited to death,” Trent Lott, a senior Republican senator, sneered during Mr Gore's recent appearance before a congressional committee. But a surprising number of Republican backbenchers were quietly excited.
Enoch Powell, a British politician, once remarked that “all political lives end in failure because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” In one sense Mr Gore's career ended in spectacular failure—the presidency ripped from his grasp. But in another he won a rare chance at an afterlife. He is the country's conscience on its gas-guzzling ways. He is also the president America never had. Better, surely, to be a presidential might-have-been than just another member of the 2008 freak show.
More:
http://economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9261616The only problem I have with this article is that it claims that Gore doesn't have the political charisma to win the election, but I can see where the author is coming from. Nonetheless, the rest of the article couldn't have casts Gore in a more positive light. I guess he is just beyond all the political bullshit in this country.
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