A couple months back, one of the recommended diaries here was about the home movies of Al Gore made by Spike Jonze. It's still
here if you're interested. The video shows an Al Gore who was completely unseen in 2000, an affable, down-to-earth, completely comfortable-in-his-skin Al Gore. The kinda guy you'd like to have a beer with.
Since watching that video, I've paid more and more attention to Al and am very excited about "An Inconvenient Truth", opening here on Friday. Today's Globe and Mail (a slightly right of the Canadian centre paper) in Canada has a fascinating article about Al and this movie.
Gore knows what people think, and to disarm it, he introduces his lectures on the environment by saying, "Hi, I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States." In person, he's disarming and pretty much everything that George W. Bush is not. Tall and thick-set, the 58-year-old Gore has gracious Southern manners and tends to talk in long, professorial sentences. He is informal and articulate. He stands up and shakes hands before and after a hotel-room interview, with more thanks and compliments. He has a sense of humour. After a recent screening of his film in Toronto, when a woman asked about some of the religious right's support of anti-environmental measures, he politely disagreed, citing more than 80 evangelists who have petitioned the U.S. president on environmental concerns. But he noted that there were small groups who welcomed the destruction of the planet when the elect would ascend to heaven and the rest of us would burn in hell, "which I suppose, from their perspective, is an added benefit."
For me, this was the one sentence that sums up Al:
In person, he's disarming and pretty much everything that George W. Bush is not. Tall and thick-set, the 58-year-old Gore has gracious Southern manners and tends to talk in long, professorial sentences. He is informal and articulate. He stands up and shakes hands before and after a hotel-room interview, with more thanks and compliments. He has a sense of humour.
The article tackles the so-called bias of the media and the need to present both sides of an issue, no matter how ludicrous the one side may be:
There is one slide on Gore's PowerPoint display which tends to draw more attention than any other: It's a chart that shows the difference between the scientific community's views on global warming, which is viewed as a virtual certainty, and the popular press, which, in 55 per cent of its articles in American newspapers, considers the issue questionable.
Read the whole article. As the recent straw polls showed, Gore is the overwhelming favourite here. Hopefully America sees this same man.