The Democratic dream team
If there is a Democratic dream team for 2008, it would have to be a Presidential ticket headed by former Vice President Al Gore with Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois as his running mate.
Gore seems swept along by a combination of his own hard work and good fortune, namely the Academy Award that went to "An Inconvenient Truth," the film by Davis Guggenheim which portrays Gore's efforts to persuade the world of the real and imminent danger it faces from global warming. Obama, while professing to want the Presidency for himself, just as Gore did in 1988, could do far worse than to accept the second spot on the ticket with perhaps the only candidate in my lifetime who can be said to be a man of destiny. Together they would bring the public a combination of experience, intelligence, and, in the case of Obama, youth, passion, and a gift for public speaking.
If Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his global warming work next October, as many think he will, so much the better. A President Gore with a Nobel Peace Prize would go far toward restoring world respect for America squandered by George W. Bush. We will by 2008 have endured eight lost years in America. We need a Democratic president who can give us back what we lost, or at least as much as possible.
Unlike Sen. Hillary Clinton, Gore has always been right on the Iraq War. In the fall of 2002, months before the war started, he delivered a speech criticizing Bush's rush to war and willingness to sacrifice American civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. Obama, too, is clean on Iraq and has been a constant critic of the war.
And of course, there is the issue of the 2000 election. Many Americans believe the election was stolen from Gore in Florida. Even those who don't will look at Gore and wonder how much better America would have been if George W. Bush had not been in office the past eight years. Gore seems far less wooden and less sanctimonious than he did in 2000. The pain of "losing" that election, I think, tempered his passions with irony and self-deprecating humor. Instead of wallowing in anger and self-pity, for which few would have criticized him him if he had, Gore became a true President-in-Exile. He used the bully pulpit of his victimhood to draw world attention to issues he cared about, notably but not exclusively global warming.
We are already seeing a certain hysteria in the rightwing at the Oscar for Gore's film and the prospect of Gore as a candidate in 2008. Witness the classic and prepared-in-advance smear that erupted the day after the Oscars, when it was breathlessly revealed that Gore used twice as much electricity at his Tennessee home than the average American. The smear failed to note, however, that Gore buys renewable energy at a premium and also purchases carbon offsets. In other words, he lives what he preaches. But the weasel brigade counted on the public not understanding that part of the story, even if they heard it a day later. More to come, I'm sure.