Top 10 Reasons Gore Should Be Our 2008 Nominee

Photo credit Martin Schoeller

Al Gore's powerful new movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, opens on May 24th. He's been getting significant postive media coverage on his lecture tour talking about the serious consequences of this growing crisis. For several years he's also been giving passionate, bold and blunt speeches about the damage being wrought by Junior Bush. He's castigated in no uncertain terms Bush's crusades against the constitution, civil liberties, privacy rights and just about everything else that matters to Americans with an ability to think beyond right-wing slogans and propaganda.

Accompanying all this is a snowballing interest in convincing Gore to make another run at the presidency in 2008. I'm definitely in the bunch that believes Gore may be the best candidate for the job. The consequences of our continuing assault on the planet's viability will be escalating with each passing month. To deal effectively with this crisis, we'll need a leader willing to fight for a complete change in our current paradigm. We no longer have the luxury of relegating environmental considerations to the bottom of the heap. To survive as a species, we'll need to change how we live, how we see ourselves in the scheme of things, how we interact with each other and with nature.

Al Gore is one of the few politicos out there who seems to get it. Able to absorb and accept the facts about our planetary crisis, he seems perfectly matched to imagining creatively constructive ways to deal with the realities -- to convincingly present solutions. Most of the other potential Democratic candidates for president seem to me to be stuck in neutral, mired in the status quo, unable to clearly articulate the challenges we face or to rouse our citizens to action on a grand scale. They lack the "vision thing," apparently preferring the false comforts of denial, clutching the fabricated complacencies of business as usual.

Times like these require big thinkers, thinkers who can see over the near horizon, thinkers with genuine conviction and passion. As Gore has moved beyond the devastatingly bizarre and likely illegal circumstances of the 2000 presidential race, he seems to have rediscovered his true nature. He seems liberated to think and speak in no-holds-barred, concrete terms. To move beyond the programmed cadences of politico-speak and consultant-think and recapture his lively sense of wonder, rekindle his intellectual courage and reconnect with his deep-seated values. That's how it seems to me anyway.

Apparently I'm not alone. Nina Burleigh at Huffington Post has listed her top ten reasons why Al Gore should be our nominee in 2008. She also lays out a clear case on why Hillary should remain in the Senate and forget about presidential dreams:

10. My dad, the Midwestern bellwether, thinks Al Gore can win.

9. Gore doesn't pander to the religious vote, and he has forcefully and eloquently spoken out about separation of church and state.

8. He is courageous. Gore has consistently called the current administration out on its radical agenda, extremism and criminality.

7. By 2008, energy conservation will be an American obsession, not just with the so-called liberal "elite." Gore, the public conservationist, drew ridicule talking about it in the days of petrol plenty, sounds pretty smart now.

6. By 2008, global warming will be a mainstream concern. Gore was talking about global warming back when it was still science fiction. He's starring in a movie about it, coming to multiplexes along with "Over the Hedge."

5. The Iraq War will be universally understood to be a disaster by 2008. Gore opposed the Iraq War first among his peers, and forcefully, in 2004.

4. Gore is squeaky clean, untouched by corruption. No lost billing records in his linen closet, no Enron or Abramoff staining his campaign finance reports.

3. He can fight. He seems to have recovered his vitality, after the apparently spirit-draining years in Washington, the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency.

2. We CAN forgive him for selecting Joe Lieberman as his running mate, as long as he doesn't ever do it again.

1. He actually was elected President. If international election monitors had been running the show in 2000, imagine how different the world would look today.

Bonus point: He's related to Gore Vidal. He could make his cousin Secretary of State. Okay. A girl can dream.
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Also good reading on this topic: 'The Resurrection of Al Gore' in the May 2006 issue of Wired and today's Wall Street Journal article, 'Al Gore Might Yet Join 2008 Contenders.' To keep on top of this issue, go sign up at Al Gore in 2008 or Draft Gore 2008.