Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The return of the veep
Think of this as sometime-author Al Gore's victory tour.
For eight years Gore has been on the sidelines watching George W. Bush run the country, a role that was almost his. Gore, you'll recall, was the Democratic presidential nominee who won half a million more votes than Bush in the 2000 election, but fell just short in the ruling Electoral College. The final outcome was in doubt for weeks, until deadlocked Florida slipped onto the Bush side of the scale with help from some hanging ballot chads and a Supreme Court ruling along party lines. (That said, anyone who's convinced that forces of darkness never would have let Gore win should remember that he wouldn't have needed Florida if he'd won his home state, Tennessee.)
Gore had campaigned on a platform of sweeping environmental regulations, a limited military, broader health care, and continued hefty taxation on the wealthy, all stances that proved at odds with administration policies in the ensuing years. But this winter's inauguration of Barack Obama means new life for the concerns that Gore championed. So even though he's not in the White House, his values are.
Frankly, the intervening years have been good to him in other ways. Science generally has borne out his early concerns over global warming. His dogged quest for environmental awareness led to his best-selling book "An Inconvenient Truth," as well as an Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name, and, topping it all, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Besides being interested in the enviroment, Gore is a longtime techophile. While in the US Senate, he pushed hard for a more powerful Internet (no, he didn't really say he invented it), and these days he is both a senior adviser to the all-mighty Google and a confirmed Twitter user. (Recent sample: "The Antarctic is warming," plus a Web link.) He was right that technology was on the march. To find out what else is on his mind, you can hear him next Monday 3/30 at 8 p.m. at Boston's Wang Theatre, the latest stop on a short speaking tour. There are admission charges.
Posted by Jim Concannon at
02:52 PM
