jimmifli
June 11th, 2006, 8:56:01 PM
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=3e56ee81-27c8-400e-a2b5-7c58be8b03aa&k=91548
The Comeback Kid
Al Gore is back in Washington and back on the campaign trail, two realms with which he has always had a distinctly fraught relationship
John Heilemann, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, June 11, 2006
No one ever said Al Gore inspired passion.
He was always esteemed, never beloved -- until now. Will he run again?
Suddenly many are reaching the astonishing conclusion that it might be a good idea
The houselights dim. The audience quiets. And Gore, up onscreen, begins to teach. An Inconvenient Truth, in case you haven't heard, is a feature-length treatment of a slide show Gore has been honing for nearly two decades.
For much of that time, he was virtually alone in the political class in fretting about global warming. But that was before what Gore describes as our recent "nature hike through the Book of Revelations." Before the record-breaking heat waves, the melting glaciers, the drowning polar bears. Before the droughts, the typhoons, the tornadoes. And, oh yes, before Katrina.
Gore professes no pride in having his warnings so vividly vindicated.
"I wish that what I wrote in Earth in the Balance" -- his bestselling 1992 jeremiad on the environment
-- "had been proven completely wrong," he tells me during one of several lengthy conversations. "I don't find satisfaction in being right about such a dangerous threat."
Maybe so, but it would take either superhuman insouciance or acute amnesia for him not to relish the resurgence he's currently experiencing. When Gore decamped from the capital to Nashville five years ago with his wife, Tipper, the move was seen as a kind of Nixonian exile. The Washington Establishment viewed him with a mix of scorn and pity. In the eyes of Democrats, he was the rightful heir to the White House who'd simultaneously let the prize slip through his fingers and be swiped from under his nose. The results for the country would prove calamitous -- and Gore was to blame.
And yet tonight all of that seems a very long time ago.
When the movie ends, the assembled panjandrums emit a warm ovation; at the cocktail party afterward, they slap his back, congratulate him on his recent cameo on Saturday Night Live, sing hosannas to the New Gore. Suddenly, the former vice-president no longer seems an entirely tragic figure but a faintly heroic one. Suddenly, many Democrats are wondering if he will run again in 2008 -- and reaching the improbable, nay astonishing, conclusion that it might be a good idea.
more.....
The Comeback Kid
Al Gore is back in Washington and back on the campaign trail, two realms with which he has always had a distinctly fraught relationship
John Heilemann, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, June 11, 2006
No one ever said Al Gore inspired passion.
He was always esteemed, never beloved -- until now. Will he run again?
Suddenly many are reaching the astonishing conclusion that it might be a good idea
The houselights dim. The audience quiets. And Gore, up onscreen, begins to teach. An Inconvenient Truth, in case you haven't heard, is a feature-length treatment of a slide show Gore has been honing for nearly two decades.
For much of that time, he was virtually alone in the political class in fretting about global warming. But that was before what Gore describes as our recent "nature hike through the Book of Revelations." Before the record-breaking heat waves, the melting glaciers, the drowning polar bears. Before the droughts, the typhoons, the tornadoes. And, oh yes, before Katrina.
Gore professes no pride in having his warnings so vividly vindicated.
"I wish that what I wrote in Earth in the Balance" -- his bestselling 1992 jeremiad on the environment
-- "had been proven completely wrong," he tells me during one of several lengthy conversations. "I don't find satisfaction in being right about such a dangerous threat."
Maybe so, but it would take either superhuman insouciance or acute amnesia for him not to relish the resurgence he's currently experiencing. When Gore decamped from the capital to Nashville five years ago with his wife, Tipper, the move was seen as a kind of Nixonian exile. The Washington Establishment viewed him with a mix of scorn and pity. In the eyes of Democrats, he was the rightful heir to the White House who'd simultaneously let the prize slip through his fingers and be swiped from under his nose. The results for the country would prove calamitous -- and Gore was to blame.
And yet tonight all of that seems a very long time ago.
When the movie ends, the assembled panjandrums emit a warm ovation; at the cocktail party afterward, they slap his back, congratulate him on his recent cameo on Saturday Night Live, sing hosannas to the New Gore. Suddenly, the former vice-president no longer seems an entirely tragic figure but a faintly heroic one. Suddenly, many Democrats are wondering if he will run again in 2008 -- and reaching the improbable, nay astonishing, conclusion that it might be a good idea.
more.....