Al Gore Unleashed

Link: Al Gore slams ‘trivialities and nonsense’ in news media.

Many have opined that Al Gore is absolutely not running for President because no Presidential candidate in his right mind would write a book like "The Assault on Reason". I can’t really speak to that in detail yet, because I haven’t finished the book, but I can say that such an argument is absolutely daft.

It is true that one would not write a book like "Assault" if one were planning on running a campaign in the mold of the mush-mouthed, triangulating, third-way Democrats. One would not write a campaign book like "Assault" if equivocation were your stock in trade. Indeed, campaign books are widely known for their vagueness, navel-gazing, lack of any but the most soft-focus policies, and an avid avoidance of anything approaching controversy.

This was why many were so struck by Obama’s often overly frank personal revelations in his earlier book, written and published before the Presidency was a realistic goal. His openness is a large part of what people found refreshing about him, and it largely disappeared behind glittering generalities in his second book.

But what if you were so concerned about the fate of the republic that you needed to rip the lid off the current political order, stir it up, and accumulate the political capital for real and lasting change? What if you didn’t just want to climb into the White House at any cost, burdened by whatever compromises it took to get there, but instead you only wanted it on your own terms? What if you realized that the Presidency was only worth having if you could accomplish your political vision without compromise? What if you needed to lay out that vision in a way that people would engage it on the merits, not as a political slogan, but as ethical and historical imperatives?

Would you perhaps deny any desire to run for President and submit your ideas to as wide a public as possible through the media (books, a film, speaking tours by yourself and hundreds of proxies you had personally trained) to sink or swim on their own merits? Would you insist that people address the ideas directly by denying any ambitions or ulterior motive? Would you prepare the seedbed of a renewed democratic mandate by planting your strongest, most compelling ideas and getting them growing before subjecting them to the poisons of the political atmosphere? I sure as hell would.

Our politics have become so debased that the only way to work for serious, long-term political reform anymore is to deny any sort of partisan agenda or personal ambition. Al Gore knows this; he’s seen from a painful perspective the unfolding of the tragedy we’re suffering at the hands of the GOP. Gore knows that in order to be heard, he has to seem tertiary to the Presidential follies.

And he’s succeeding.

His ideas are undoubtedly strong and unequivocal, and they are being heard, sinking in, changing minds, and genuinely reaching far more people than those of any of the official candidates. There is a brilliant madness to Gore’s method. He’s breaking through the spin and hype like no other candidate – simply because he’s not one.

There are six months remaining in which a new Democratic candidate can still step into the ring. If I wanted to make my agenda clear and have it widely understood and supported before I stepped into partisan combat, I would act exactly as Al Gore is acting now. That doesn’t mean he’s planning on running, of course, but it could be hard to tell the difference between a public intellectual with no Presidential ambition, and a public intellectual biding his time and preparing the ground for a Presidential bid that is uncompromising, idea-focused, and aiming to truly remake American politics by winning a real mandate for the Democratic party.

Only time will tell which of these Gore actually is. Despite all the rumors among Gore’s political cronies and personal friends that he is denying any Presidential ambitions in private as well, I’m sure that, at this point, other than Gore himself, only Tipper knows for sure. This mission requires the very highest degree of discretion, and any lesser caginess from Gore would only serve to prematurely tip his hand and endanger the game.