What Should Have Been
Regular readers of this blog know that I've long maintained that, whatever failings he may have had as a candidate, Gore would have been an excellent President. Reading through the ins and outs of the Clinton Administration, Gore frequently was a forceful and decisive Vice-President who repeatedly showed the ability to use good judgment and make good decisions, often prodding President Clinton to take more decisive action.
I've also thought, although this can never been proven, that 9/11 might not have happened, or might have been prevented, if the presidency had not been taken away from Gore. He almost certainly would have listened more to Richard Clarke's warnings, given his history of working closely together with him during the Clinton Administration.
However, it is undeniable that the last 5 years would have been dramatically different if Gore had been president. I haven't seen Gore's movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," but I hear it is great. I was struck, however, by some of the comments made about Gore by David Remnick recently in the New Yorker in connection with the movie:
Last week, Gore dropped by a Broadway screening room to introduce a preview
of “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dressed in casual but non-earth-tone clothes, he
gave a brief, friendly greeting. If you are inclined to think that the unjustly
awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst Presidencies of this or any
other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore. He is the living reminder of all
that might not have happened in the past six years (and of what might still
happen in the coming two). Contrary to Ralph Nader’s credo that there was no
real difference between the major parties, it is close to inconceivable that the
country and the world would not be in far better shape had Gore been allowed to
assume the office that a plurality of voters wished him to have. One can imagine
him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions
and explaining them in the language of a confident adult. Imagining that
alternative history is hard to bear, which is why Gore always has the courtesy,
in his many speeches, and at the start of “An Inconvenient Truth,” to deflect
that discomfort with a joke: “Hello, I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next
President of the United States.”
Those inclined to be irritated by Gore all over again will not be entirely
disappointed by “An Inconvenient Truth.” It can be argued that at times the film
becomes “Death of a Salesman,” with Gore as global warming’s Willy Loman,
wheeling his bag down one more airport walkway. There are some awkward jokes, a
silly cartoon, a few self-regarding sequences, and, now and then, echoes of the
cringe-making moments in his old campaign speeches when personal tragedy was put to questionable use. (To illustrate the need to change one’s mind when hard
reality intrudes, he recalls helping his father farm tobacco as a youth and then
his sister’s death from lung cancer.)But in the context of the larger political moment, the current darkness, Gore can be forgiven his miscues and vanities. It is past time to recognize that, over a long career, his policy judgment and his moral judgment alike have been admirable and acute. Gore has been right about global warming since holding the first congressional hearing on the topic, twenty-six years ago. He was right about the role of the Internet, right about the need to reform welfare and cut the federal deficit, right about confronting Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since September 11th, he has been right about constitutional abuse, right about warrantless domestic spying, and right about the calamity of sanctioned torture. And in the case of Iraq, both before the invasion and after, he was right—courageously right—to distrust as fatally flawed the political and moral good faith, operational competence, and strategic wisdom of the Bush Administration.
In the 2000 campaign, Gore was cautious, self-censoring, and in the thrall
of his political consultants. He was even cautious about his passion, the
environment. That caution, some of his critics think, may have cost him Florida,
where he was reluctant to speak out on the construction of an ecologically
disastrous airport in the middle of the Everglades and Biscayne National Parks.
But since the election––especially since emerging from an understandable period
of reticence and rebalancing—Gore has played a noble role in public life. It’s
hardly to Gore’s discredit that many conservative commentators have watched his
emotionally charged speeches and pronounced him unhinged. (“It looks as if Al
Gore has gone off his lithium again,” the columnist and former psychiatrist
Charles Krauthammer wrote after one such oration.)
It may be that Gore really has lost his taste for electoral politics, and
that, no matter what turn the polls and events take, an Al-versus-Hillary
psychodrama in 2008 is not going to happen. There is no substitute for
Presidential power, but Gore is now playing a unique role in public life. He is
a symbol of what might have been, who insists that we focus on what likely will
be an uninhabitable planet if we fail to pay attention to the folly we are
committing, and take the steps necessary to end it.
