Al Gore: Still Phony After All These Years

Remember those first few years after the 2000 election, when it seemed that no one, not even Democrats, wanted Al Gore around anymore? To the New York Times’ Bill Keller, Americans had rightly written him off as “an opportunist, a phony.” Joe Klein called him “stiff and synthetic and multifarious,” a “dreadful candidate” who “never seemed reliable enough to be president.”

When Gore refused to go away, the catcalls became worse. In 2004 he made a 6,600 word speech about Abu Ghraib, referring to “Bush’s Gulag,” demanding the resignations of Rice, Rumsfeld and Tenet, and saying things like: “One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox, “It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” Dennis Miller told his CNBC audience, “At one point I respected Al Gore, but I think he’s lost his mind.”

Since then a number of circumstances, from accelerating Arctic melting to America’s struggles in Iraq, have helped bring Gore and his causes back into public esteem. His resurgent popularity has inspired comparisons (by himself among others) to Churchill’s triumphal political re-emergence in the late 1930s – except that Gore now has a star status only a modern media could have pumped to life.

According to a profile earlier this year in New York magazine, Gore “has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember – calculating, chameleonic, soporific – from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who ‘found his voice in the wilderness.’”

Not to be outdone, Time recently called Gore “a natural born teacher,” and an “improbably charismatic, Academy Award-winning, Nobel Prize-nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command” – a description almost unimaginable a few years ago.

Gore has been asked to run for president in 2008, but he says he prefers to stay where he is, opinionating, consciousness-raising, making bundles of money, and basking in the warmth of global adulation. As his unabashedly worshipful Time profiler, Eric Pooley, put it, “There’s an even deeper issue here, and with Gore, it’s always the deepest issue that counts. What’s at stake is not just Gore losing another election. It’s Gore losing himself – returning to politics and, in the process, losing touch with the man he has become.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt assured Pooley that Gore had gone “through a difficult personal transformation in order to achieve greatness.”

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Considering how swiftly the air was forced out of the Gore balloon six and a half years ago, it seems only right to wonder at this sudden reinflation. Are we are now seeing a “new” Al Gore, unhampered by all the constraints of politics, an Al Gore who says smart things and uncompromisingly sticks by them? Or is he the same old multifarious opportunist who says one thing and does another? (more…)