Don't get me wrong here.
It would be a profoundly better World in so many thousands of ways if Al Gore had been permitted to take possession of the Presidency in 2000 (which he factually won by a half-million votes).
I loved his smart "We're for the people, they're for the powerful" slogan in 2000 and wish more Democrats boiled campaigns down to that very clear and understandable framing of the contest.
I admire and respect Al Gore for his amazing breadth of technical vision: on the Environment, on Technology, his heroic crusade on Global Warming, his sound economic sense, his leadership on cutting government waste, his outspokeness and outrage about the fraud of the Iraq War, and his many, many other leadership initiatives that have been part of his career from the 1970s to 2007.
However, over at The Free Press, an article was written that raises some fair and reasonable questions about Gore's political accumen and his self-participation in his own demise (along with our own).
This dicussion is not meant to take cheaps shots at Gore, but merely to ponder the reasons why someone who is as smart and as ethically centered as Al Gore is, was even capable in the first place of these unwise and self-injurious mistakes.
"First, he was an important party to the complex but catastrophic Telecommunications Act of 1996. This Clinton-era corporate goodie bag enabled a huge spike in the monopolization of the electronic media Al Gore now decries"
The article recommends that Gore speak out forcefully in favor of both restoring the "Fairness Docterine Equal Time" provision and also reversing the whole pro-monopoly give-away that has squashed the acceptable range of public discussion seen on TV and any true news programming diversity (aside from, of course, the Internet which they now want to take control of as well). But just what the hell did Bill Clinton and Al Gore think they were accomplishing by signing on to the Telecommunications Act of 1996? And just when is monopolization ever a good thing for the public interest or in the interest of consumers?
"Second, Gore was victim of the theft of the election of 2000, but he also enabled it. In the entire history of the United States, few events have more deeply damaged our democracy than the stolen Florida vote count and warped Electoral College outcome that followed. But amidst the carefully choreographed chaos of the Florida 2000 vote count, the Gore campaign inexplicably asked for a recount only in four counties, rather than statewide. This was a miscalculation of epic proportions. In recent years it's been proven that Gore did win the legitimate Florida statewide vote count, and would have prevailed with a full and honest recount.
The Florida 2000 recount was sabotaged by Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, as J. Kenneth Blackwell did again in Ohio 2004. In both cases, a very sophisticated GOP apparatus aided by key technicians from partisan voting machine companies, has been bound and determined to steal the presidency at any cost.
Gore's actions on the 2000 recount might be discounted as a stategic failure. But they were followed by something much much worse. In January, 2001, the Black Caucus of the US House demanded a Congressional dialogue on the seating of the Florida delegation to the Electoral College.
Tragically, Gore prevented this from happening. As the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress gathered to ratify the election, Gore repeatedly gaveled down those Representatives demanding a discussion of the theft of Florida's decisive electoral votes. This very ugly, politically catastrophic moment is forever memorialized in Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11".
I never understood the whole 4 counties thing. This horrific Warren Christopher led strategy allowed the clearly cheating/supressing party, Bush-Cheney, to instead transform itself into "the victims" by giving the appearance that Gore was trying to "cherry-pick" for votes, in just favorable counties, rather than attempting to seek the customary redress for a close election of a Statewide recount. It made no sense.
Now, I know that Katherine Harris intimidated the Gore campaign by declaring in advance that "there would not be time for the counties to comply with a Statewide count" by the time of the certification date (which legally could be extended anyway), but that initmidation alone should not have mattered. It was just a tactic. For if Harris failed to accept a Statewide recount, the Florida High Court would have had to overrule her (no Antonin Scalia on that Court) and more importantly there could be no easy logical objection to what Gore was doing that either the U.S. Media could run with or that would be plausable to the public.
It would have been far more difficult for the U.S. Supreme Court to interfere and shut the whole thing down in that more clear and less ambiguous senario. In the end, all that the wrangling over the 4 county thing did was make Gore look like his campaign was also playing games and waste valueable time that shortened the window of opportunity to go back and seek redress by the Statewide count.
"Staff from the office of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone have said Gore told those Senators inclined to join in that he would not recognize them if they tried."
What is most sad about this is the report that Sen. Paul Wellstone wanted to come to Gore's defense but was stopped by no one other than Al Gore himself. Why would Gore not want the Congress to do the work of trying to look into and catch the vote crimes and delegitimize the appointment of Bush to the Presidency? Even if it was too late to overturn the installment of Bush into the White House, the exposure of this fraud would help to consign Bush to only one-term in office and also help prevent further Election gimmicks and theft in the years 2002 and 2004 (which we know was fraught with similar injustices).
Finally, one wonders just how Gore, the man forewarning the public "We're for the people, they're for the powerful", was simultaneously associating himself and placing his own fate in the hands of people like Warren Christopher, Joe Lieberman, Bob Shrum, etc. rather then a more competent and loyal group of trusted advisors.
His other mistakes obviously were: a) distancing himself from Clinton's record and Clinton's campaign stump skills (at a time when the vast majority of the Country had Lewinski fatigue, clearly liked Clinton, and did not want to keep the issue alive by prosecuting Gore for it), b) winning just two of the three debates against Bush on points, but losing perhaps all three of them on theatre or style, and, c) failing to defend himself when attacked, in Dukakis-esque fashion (also true for Kerry in 2004), over
the "I invented the Internet" smear - words which he never actually said.
For all his obvious accomplishments, there is something in Gore's personal makeup that does not respond well to intimidation or to the glare of intense Media criticism and leads him to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
His new found success as a author & movie writer and communicator has been impressive, along with his well-prepared poltical speeches in 2002, 2003, 2004.
But what happens if Gore decides to get into the race and actually run?
Will he retain the fire in his belly and draw a line in the sand and then stay put on his side or will he once again become a more politically ambiguous figure with the self-defeating tactics that comes with taking too many cues from the National Media?
We have just now recently seen Al Gore go on PBS and surprisingly capitulate that George Bush and Dick Cheney should not be Impeached! (this, even as he is trying to promote his "Assault On Reason" book which itself contradicts that premise). So which is it then? The Al Gore of those MoveOn.org speeches that railed away against the criminality of the Bush-Cheney administration, or, the suddenly timid Al Gore that seeks to let it all pass and dismiss the concept of holding even Dick Cheney, a man at 18% in the polls, or Bush, publically accountable? Does the rule of law and upholding the U.S. Constitution only then apply in books and not once you sit down and start talking in a TV Studio?
Is Gore now going to call up Dennis Kucinich and advise him not to rock the boat about Cheney's Impeachment as he did before with the late-Sen. Paul Wellstone when the American public was robbed of their voting rights?
How can you be both a crusader and an appeaser at the same time?
How can you huff and puff about the rule of law and lament Constitutional violations in books
and yet say a big, "...never mind.." when the subject of Congressional action is raised?
There seems to be a contradiction here with Al Gore. It's like he knows what the right thing to do is, but inevitably, he steps on his own message and even self-inflicts an undercutting of the whole mission (on topics not directly related to Global Warming).
Is this a wilting under pressure? If Al Gore were to get into the race, which Al Gore would we see?
Yet another politician standing up there declaring "Impeachment is off the table" and willing to backtrack or concede all too easily and all too voluntarily and all too pre-emptively, or,
the firey, fearless Al Gore of those MoveOn.org speeches (2002, 2003)?
A tale of two Al Gores