My opinion of Al Gore at the end of the Clinton-Gore administration and into the 2000 presidential campaign was less than fully complimentary. In hind-sight I can attribute that  to several probabilities.

Although my impression was that he was efficient and satisfactory in the execution of his job, that job was to play second fiddle to Bill Clinton. That situation didn’t lend itself to exhibiting a wealth of distinguishing attributes. Essentially he was not in the spotlight that much while he was in office and when he was running for president the press couldn’t seem to see beyond Bill Clinton.

The Press is organized around sound bites. The nature of evening news sound bites doesn’t lend itself to much exposure of substance in an individual. This means that ideas with nuance, as opposed to flash headlines compressed between ads for beer and peanuts, are almost inevitably at a disadvantage in reaching a TV audience. And one could say that sound bites were not Al Gore’s strong suit.

 Looking back on that presidential campaign in the light of having examined his recent books, I have to admit that I didn’t get to know what and how the man thought. This may have been due to insufficiency of press coverage, it may have been due to the “stiff, wooden” structure of a man being stifled to fit the “image of a candidate” as seen by misguided campaign handlers. But the person who wrote this book is a different person from that candidate back in the year 2000. I suppose being immersed in the cauldron of fire that was the 2000 election would mature a person if it didn’t kill him.

Whatever the change, I can’t find that candidate in the pages of this book. In this book, Al Gore is knowledgeable and authoritative (with help from his research team), he is analytical with a fine-grained sense of historical perspective, and he is principled in the American Experiment. He has drawn on the wisdom of experts in the fields of discussion, yet it is his voice that comes through loud and clear.

Does he excoriate George W. Bush and his administration for bumbling? With a red hot poker! Does he accuse them of lying? Early and often and with enough hard evidence to sink that “Mission Accomplished” battleship. Does he question the fundamental governmental fairness of their devotion to “faith-based,” as opposed to reason-based solutions? With force ! Does he raise the alarm about the vast harm that the Bush “go it alone” foreign policy has done to our standing in the world? You bet! Does he charge that they have damaged our national security and made us more vulnerable to terrorist attack by their “pre-emptive” war in Iraq? Yes, and he backs up the charge with reams of hard evidence.  Does he question their commitment to Jeffersonian Democracy and The great American Constitutional Experiment? With historical accuracy and incisive observational insight he shows that the Bush administration is virtually traitorous to the ideals of the Founding Fathers! Does he expose their motives as a raw grab for executive power with  Constitutional and international law-breaking as their modus operandi? It’s a resounding “yes” to this ominous question also.

But, guess what — Gore says Bush does not get all the blame for the state of our nation’s miasma! Not by a long shot. We all participated through our lack of vigilance and energy in defense of law and the Constitution. He goes into detail as to exactly how this has happened and shows how various polls confirm that much of our citizenry is ignorant and/or complacent as to how our government works and has abdicated responsibility for making it work.

He points out that we have been lulled into inaction largely by the nature of one-way communications networks that have replaced the printed word as the most common way we receive information. Without the top-down flow of information provided by radio, the mass control exerted by fascist dictators in the twentieth century would not have happened, he says. But television gets the greatest blame for our current predicament.

In addition to the top-down information flow as in radio, it is a medium that operates on our brains and nervous systems in a manner and to an extent never experienced before. Motion is an attention-grabber for humans. For our pre-historic ancestors motion could indicate the possibility that a potential mate or enemy was approaching and was often a trigger for flight or fight. Incessant motion playing to our brains for hours on end tends to induce a passive state of non-reaction. This is a far different stimulus than when reading the news stirred creative writing responses in a two-way communication. The exercise of reading and writing the printed word developed an informed and participatory citizenry who  were vigilant and energetic in policing the activities of our government.

But, not to worry. While the Internet exposes us to some of the worst that humanity can dream up, it also is a tool that is a two-way communication device. Each of us can participate in the flow of information. Our creative efforts can be published and judged by the marketplace of ideas as to its merit or lack thereof. He warns of efforts underway to attempt to divide the Internet into two-tiered pricing so that large users would pay a lower price for bandwidth than small users. Gore says this is the wrong approach and will result in unbalanced accumulations of power and wealth. It would be far better to keep it egalitarian and as free as possible.

Perhaps this and other books (An Inconvenient Truth, etc.,) are pre-cursors to another run for the U.S. Presidency by Al Gore. He says not, but apparently is keeping his options open. I have looked at this expression of his thinking and I am impressed. Contrasting his thoughtful, informed rationality to the non-informed irrationality of our current president, I am appalled at the mistake our nation made in the 2000 election.

The real positions and principles of those who have announced they are seeking the presidency in 2008, of course, are unknown and will remain so if they and their handlers can manage it. But here is a man of leadership who has laid out an agenda for the nation in this book. That agenda is: (1) to recover from the utter mismanagement and corruption of our government at home and abroad for the past six (eight?) years, and (2) to face the dual and eminent challenges to life on this planet that are known as global warming and the energy crisis. None of the current contenders for the job has come close to such a definition of his/her thinking. I hope Al Gore runs for President of the United States in 2008. Read this book and  I think many of you will voice that same hope.                          

© 2007 R. Leland Waldrip