Tom Friedman really wants to "Turn the Election Green." In today's New York Times he writes that addressing energy and environmental questions
will require a carbon tax, or really serious cap-and-trade system, or tighter mileage and efficiency standards -- i.e., sacrifice -- we need our candidates to be talking about such things in the campaign so they have a mandate to act if elected.
He wants to
elevate the issue during the campaign to a level that forces everyone to put a serious energy/environment platform on the table and builds a real mandate for the next president.
Great idea. The only problem is that Friedman doesn't go on to mention the one thing that is guaranteed to put energy and the environment at the top of the campaign agenda where it belongs, Al Gore running for president.
Friedman also wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine two Sundays ago, The Power of Green, in which he said
Bush won't lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately, today's presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you're a fool or a fraud.
Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue.... Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children's opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.
Incredibly, the Al Gore isn't mentioned once in this long article.
Let me connect some dots for Mr. Friedman.
Al Gore is without question the leading advocate for action on the climate crisis and energy sustainability in the U.S. if not in the world. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Al Gore has strong support for president among Democrats. He's polling a strong third against other potential nominees despite not being an announced candidate, and his support is rising.
Al Gore is not now a candidate and is hesitant to run. Ken Silverstein summarized what is known about Gore's intentions as well as anyone in Harper's.
I asked that person and two other political consultants for their nutshell take on whether Gore was likely to run and, if he did, how hard it would be to ramp up a serious campaign.... The consensus among them was that no one, including Gore, knows at this point whether he'll run or not. "I know a lot of people close to him and none of them have any idea what his plans are," one of the Democrats said.
So we have a large number of voters who want Al Gore to run and a reluctant candidate.
In a democracy a draft is when a large number of citizens organize so effectively that they convince a reluctant candidate to enter an electoral contest.
I hope Mr. Friedman will keep this in mind the next time he writes about greening the presidential election, but I'm not holding my breath.
In the mean time, let's work seriously to draft Al Gore for president for the sake of the environment and our nation.
Read about how a Gore Draft would work in Drafting Al Gore: "It could happen".