Al Gore for President
Didn’t you just love Al Gore on the Oscars last night? I might be one of the only people around yet who hasn’t watched An Inconvenient Truth, but you just have to think he’d be a vastly superior president than any current candidate.
I like what Kathleen Reardon writes today in the Huffington Post:
Why would Al Gore become a Presidential candidate under such circumstances? Would he do it for glory? Unlikely. Would he do it for a place in history?
The reason that could pull him into the race is patriotism – love of country – the need to step forward to undo what has been done so horribly to so many in its name. And this would take inordinate courage for a man once burned so badly by a system that clearly can be, repeatedly, rigged.
Whether you’d vote for him or not, it’s hard to deny that he’d extricate the Democratic Party from silliness by insisting that candidates grapple with issues of enormous importance to the world. Al Gore has the focus, humor, credibility, and good intentions to make that happen. His candidacy could raise all boats by raising the level of debate.
[. . .] Once too practiced in his responses, his current public demeanor suggests he’d likely be far less so this time. From him we’d likely get the truth. That would be a breath of fresh air in these times of constant maneuvering. Even if he entered the race to advance environmental concerns, that would do just fine. We need him there. We need someone driven not by what sells but by what matters.
I have to think that as president he’d be great for Canada, too, and would help push us further in the right direction on the environment front.
That said, I still don’t expect we’ll see him run; I think that he rightly sees that he might well have a bigger impact on the world doing what he’s doing now. The world’s gain will be the USA’s overall loss, to be sure.