Al Gore is looking good on the cover of The American Prospect. His already widely praised film - An Inconvenient Truth - is set to come out in May. And as Ezra Klein tells it, Al Gore is busily re-inventing a whole lot more than just himself.
I've pasted a small excerpt below, but if you, like me, are hoping Gore will return in 2008, to claim what is rightfully his, you'll want to read the whole thing.
The New New Gore
"Five years ago, Al Gore was the much-mocked pol who blew a gimme with his stiff demeanor and know-it-all style. Today? C’mon, admit it: You like him again."
So it was a shock when, in 2002, [Gore] dispensed with the equivocating and endorsed a full-blown single-payer solution to health care, going further than even Bradley had dared. When he unleashed a blistering assault on the proposed invasion of Iraq, decried the corporatization of American media, and endorsed Dean, it became clear that this was not the Gore of yore.
None of this has passed unnoticed. On the blogs, in the magazines, on the op-ed pages, and across the punditocracy, “Gore 2008” is simultaneously a rallying cry and a guessing game. Handicapping his rise has been one of the few unifying activities in contemporary political life, with everyone from Arianna Huffington to Tony Blankley to Dick Morris talking up his chances, and Gore asymptotically approaching, but never actually offering, a Shermanesque rejection of the enterprise.
To be clear, there is no sign that Gore is preparing for a campaign. His spokesperson, Josh Cherwin, assured me that “there is no ’08 story.” MoveOn’s Wes Boyd notes that Gore has not parlayed his association with MoveOn into a fund-raising list. He has built no personal Web site, and Markos Moulitsas Zunigas, founder of DailyKos, the largest progressive political blog, noted in an e-mail that Gore has made no effort to engage with the netroots save for his association with MoveOn. “I’m personally focused on elections,” he wrote, “and in that regard, he’s yesterday’s news and will remain so unless he decides to reenter electoral politics.”
In past years, the moment at which Gore had to make that decision would have been rapidly approaching. When Gore decided to sit out the 2004 election, The New Republic reported that many of his associates blamed the grueling, crushing fund raising the campaign would have demanded. Not so now. Planned or not, Gore’s alliance with MoveOn and Dean’s army of online volunteers has ensured him unique access and affection among one of the richest, most easily activated cash sources in the Democratic Party. Trippi estimates that a well-timed entrance, under certain conditions, could raise Gore $50 million almost instantly, and hundreds of millions more if he won the nomination. “Remember,” he told me, “McCain in 2000 has 40,000 people sign up on the web and raises a couple million bucks. A few years later Howard Dean raises $59 million. The next [netroot darling] is going to be as exponential as Dean was to McCain.”
And it could be Gore, if he wants it.
Read the whole thing
See Draft Gore and Gore tv, or Current tv.
Al Gore Global Warming Film 2008 President Gore Tennessee Gore Democrats Media American Prospect
