Gore is now running for president.

[Admiral Loinpresser]

Last year Ezra Klein introduced me to a word I had never heard: disintermediation. Simply put, Klein (and others) were saying that Gore was bypassing the American press in order to get his message out directly. In 2003 he began a series of speeches on the decline of America due to Bush’s disastrous foreign policy and contempt for our Constitution.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_new_new_gore_031906

He has continued that path with a movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, which has fundamentally changed the American debate on this most important issue. Along with publishing a companion book for the movie, he has also published a book (The Assault on Reason) on the decline of American discourse, due to the corporate control of television and other media. He goes on to talk about the power of the Internet to change American discourse so that it is two-way in nature (rather than one-way like television) with access for all citizens so as to re-vitalize our democracy.

I believe Al Gore is now running for president. He is using these principles of disintermediation and democratic discussion to run the kind of 21st century campaign worthy of his visionary record.. On Friday he held a news conference acknowledging his latest international honor, the Nobel Peace Prize. Toward the end, he stated

“I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency. It is truly a planetary emergency and we have to respond quickly.”

Gore has stated in recent months that he is waiting to see if the Democratic candidates will give this issue the attention it deserves and that he isn’t currently satisfied with what they have done.

Today, Gore launched his new version of Current (formerly current.tv, now current.com). Not only did he launch it, for the first time he added content. Today he took three major positions:

1. We should get out of Iraq as quickly as practicable;
2. Universal, single-payer health care for all Americans; and
3. The need for new protections for all Americans from governmental spying.

http://current.com/people/algore

In other words, he has taken common sense positions on major campaign issues that leave Hillary and Obama sucking his dust. Of course his concrete proposals on climate change are also light years ahead of any viable Democratic candidate. Soon, I believe he will follow up on his promise to reflect on how best to use his award to help save our civilization by formally announcing his candidacy. It won’t be a traditional campaign, but a visionary one.

Just as 1960 was the first campaign where television changed the race (television viewers thought Kennedy won the historic debate, while the smaller number of radio listeners thought Nixon won), the 2008 campaign will be the first where the Internet plays a major role in determining the outcome.

In 2000, the press framed Al Gore as a liar. That is why some people still believe that Gore said he invented the Internet, or discovered Love Canal, or the Love Story lie, etc., etc. This is why some people still believe that Gore didn’t emphasize the environment, because of the lies of the press. In 2008, Al Gore will be speaking for himself to a much greater extent, aided by fact-checking bloggers. That is a truth which could be much more than convenient, for us and our planet.