Obama: Time to Call Al Gore
Three questions are likely to absorb the chattering classes for the next week: will Al Gore run for President? Should he run? And if he were to run, how would he capture public imagination with Iowa only 12 weeks away?
My view, repeated often in these pages, is that Gore will play kingmaker and not run. Here, here and here I criticize Gore for going Hollywood and drumming up “climate emergencies” (to the point that a British judge this week ruled that “An Incovenient Truth” contains too little
Gore gets a lot of credit for raising climate issues and for not sulking into obscurity after the debacle of the 2000 election even if the Nobel Committee has made the award into a caricature. They have a longstanding and unfortunate tendency to give the award to global bureaucrats who do little to advance peace (Kofi Annan, Mohamed El Baradei, UNICEF twice, the UN refugee office twice) or to people who actually fight wars (Arafat, Kissinger, and Teddy Roosevelt).
This year they managed to do both: half the Prize went to the UN Panel on Climate Change and half to Gore. Gore is many things — but he has about as much to do with peace as Wangari Maathai, the lovely and courageous African woman who plants trees and earned the award two years ago.
If the Nobel Committee wanted to honor people who had worked for world peace, they would have honored Former Senator George Mitchell for ending the centuries of violence in Northern Ireland or any of the folks on this list who risked their lives for peace and are much more deserving of the Prize.
Now Gore has a real decision however — one that the Nobel Committee clearly intended to make more urgent. It is mid-October and Hillary Clinton, a politician who spent eight years frequently competing with Gore for the #2 spot in the Clinton Administration, is running away with the Democratic nomination. She outpolls her rivals nearly 2:1 and is within weeks of creating a Clinton dynasty rivaled in recent times only by Bush. So serious people need to ask: should Gore leverage his award and run and if so, how?
Barrack Obama, meanwhile, has failed to achieve escape velocity and is now betting on Hillary making a mistake — a long shot at best. Obama needs to recognize that he is eight years from the Presidency and the best outcome for him now is to run in second position on a strong ticket. Obama needs Al Gore.
Obama should offer to join a Gore ticket. Gore may be a wooden speaker, prone to exageration, and a subject to the seductions of Hollywood, but there is still a lot to like about him as a politician and a President. His qualities start with his judgment, which has been sharper than anyone else in US politics:
* It will surprise many of his supporters to learn that Gore is a lifelong hawk on national security. He supported Reagan’s contras and the bombing of Libya in 1986. He voted for the neutron bomb, the B-2 bomber, the Trident II missile, the MX missile, and the Midgetman.
* Gore has been the leading Democratic hardliner on Iraq since 1988. In 1991 he noted that Saddam “has more troops than Hitler did in the early years of World War II.” In the New York Times he wrote, “We can no more look forward to a constructive long-term relationship with Saddam Hussein than we could hope to housebreak a cobra” and that the Iraqi dictator is not “an acceptable part of the landscape.” As Vice President -elect, Gore announced that there could never be normal relations with Iraq so long as Saddam remained in power. He reiterated the call for a coup, if not by the Iraqi military then by the CIA.
* He sounded the alarm on global warming long before any other public figure — 26 years ago, and he is more right than wrong, even if he consistently exaggerates the magnitude and urgency of the problem.
* He understood early that the Internet would be a transforming technology (even if he exaggerated about that, too).
* He was right about the need to reform welfare and cut the federal deficit when this was a very unpopular position among Democrats.
* A Vietnam veteran without John Kerry’s hubris, he backed the first Gulf War when many Democrats remained disgracefully silent.
* He was a profile in moral and political courage in urging Clinton to confront Solobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo (a fine piece of war-making that ended ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and would have been a much better basis for a Peace Prize than his global warming campaign).
* Since 2001, he has consistently warned of the dangers of constitutional abuse, warrantless domestic spying, and sanctioned torture — warnings that today appear spot-on.
* He smelled a rat in the Bush Administration’s evidence for the war in Iraq an publicly doubted their operational competence or good faith — a position that earned him the scorn of the media at the time and looks astonishingly prescient today.
* He has gone after Bush as captive of oil companies, HMOs and pharma companies and he did it with the judgment of someone who has spent his life in both the legislative and executive branches.
Although a majority of Americans in 2002 thought that Bush would do a better job than Gore of fighting a war on terror, few would make that argument today.
Obama_22The Al Gore I encountered during my service with the Clinton Administration was tough, smart, and intellectually curious. He twice asked me to round up experts on business topics he cared about (outsourcing and quality management, if I recall correctly), prepare background materials, and convene a group of CEOs and business scholars in his office to make sure he understood the subject. He arrived impressively prepared, was thoughtful and succinct in asking questions, and generally impressed everyone as a quick study. The late Harvard historian and presidential scholar Richard Neustadt tutored Gore two hours each week when Gore was a Harvard senior and declared him the strongest student he ever taught.
In short, Al Gore may be more qualified for the Presidency than any candidate in US history. But, having dallied, how would he enter the race now?
Barrack Obama must propose the ticket — and he should propose it soon. Obama gets the best running start for the White House that he can possibly have. He names two or three policy areas that he is passionate about and negotiates a lot of room for himself in those areas. He gets a wide berth on speaking for the administration, (and in a dream deal would offer to tutor Gore for two hours each week to improve his speaking skills).
Would it work? The polling data on the individuals are not compelling, although I have not seen this ticket polled. Gore/Obama would inherit an organization and money and would have no trouble extending both. They could bring excitement to a campaign that hasn’t had any since the day Obama announced (although I will be the first to admit that the terms “Gore” and “excitement” rarely occur in the same sentence). It is safe to say that if Gore/Obama cannot stop Hillary Clinton, she will not be stopped.
Will Obama initiate such a deal? He should. The first job of any leader is to clearly understand reality. If Obama cannot do that, he will have earned his obscurity. He needs to acknowledge that his campaign has been strong but will not on its own overtake Clinton — and he needs to decide this within a week or two. There is a perfectly good case for teaming with Gore and it is the best plan I can imagine for giving Dems a 16 year run and the country a political future not tied to the Clintons.
The biggest problem with the idea? In the first Presidential primary race in US history where the top two contenders are black and female, having a wooden white guy who blew a lay-up the last time he ran waddle in and take over is a bit of a let-down. I’m not sure that even an ill-deserved Nobel Peace Prize can overcome that.
Martin Manley
Oakland, California
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