I'm among the Gore skeptics who has been pleasantly surprised with his recent turnabout from milquetoast New Democrat to barnstorming, albeit priveleged and late-blooming, populist. The guy clearly has developed a strong moral compass and a courageous sense of outrage at the Republican destruction of our republic. Good for him.
Hopefully, this is all an encouraging sign that Gore might see the light and apologize for his championing NAFTA twelve years ago, when he took up the wrong side in the NAFTA debates against Ross Perot. NAFTA was a key step in undermining of wage and labor standards in America over the last decade. Unfortunately for all of us, Al Gore bears a lot of the responsibility for that legacy.
We need a Democratic Party that not only appeals to the Rust Belt swing states when an election comes around, but actually
fights for the economic well-being of the working class after the campaign volunteers all go home. The corporations already have total control of one party. Why should they control two?
Many of us enthusiastically backed Howard Dean, despite his support of NAFTA, because his reformist position on that and other "free trade" issues was well-reasoned, though flawed, and at least somewhat off the farm in terms of what was acceptable to the corporate overclass. I could conceivably get behind Gore in the same way if he's courageously in the right on every other issue and if he backs down from the blindered, Friedmanite dogma of "free trade" as panacea.
Of course, any public figure who opposes globalization and wage depression in recent years has been attacked and marginalized by the corporate MSM for being outside the mainstream. That line of argument belies the fact that nobody actually supports globalization except for economists and rich uncles who play golf all day. Everyone else is bullied and mocked into resignation by non-stop corporatist propaganda. Yet there remains a potential voting majority out there that has been turned off by the identical trade positions of the two parties, who will vote for living wages, made-in-the-U.S.A. and anti-globalization if given the chance in a general election.
Have we finally reached the point where a major, viable candidate can be on the right (and majority) side of the battle between the leisure class and the working class? In the age of internet fundraising and small individual contributions, I think we have. It's now or never.