The title of the new film about Al Gore's environmental crusade against global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, could also define Gore's presence on the public stage, as an inconvenient reminder of what was, arguably, a historic failure of American democracy. David Remnick, the New Yorker editor and writer, put the Gore problem aptly in a recent article: “If you are inclined to think that the unjustly awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst presidencies of this or any other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore.”
Gore knows what people think, and to disarm it, he introduces his lectures on the environment by saying, “Hi, I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States.” In person, he's disarming and pretty much everything that George W. Bush is not. Tall and thick-set, the 58-year-old Gore has gracious Southern manners and tends to talk in long, professorial sentences. He is informal and articulate. He stands up and shakes hands before and after a hotel-room interview, with more thanks and compliments. He has a sense of humour. After a recent screening of his film in Toronto, when a woman asked about some of the religious right's support of anti-environmental measures, he politely disagreed, citing more than 80 evangelists who have petitioned the U.S. president on environmental concerns. But he noted that there were small groups who welcomed the destruction of the planet when the elect would ascend to heaven and the rest of us would burn in hell, “which I suppose, from their perspective, is an added benefit.”
Gore won more popular votes than any Democratic president in history, more than half a million more than Bush, and more than any leader with the exception of Ronald Reagan in 1984, and he would have won Florida if the Supreme Court had not voted to stop the recount. In the wake of seeing his lifelong dream collapse, Gore found himself increasingly drawn back to the cause that had held his attention for more than 30 years, the threat of climate change.
Though his cause may be urgent, no one could reasonably call it opportunistic. Twenty-eight years ago, Gore established the first congressional committee on the environment. In 1992, George Bush Sr. ridiculed him as “Ozone Al” when Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, was on The New York Times bestseller list. Both George W. Bush's administration and now Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government have rejected the international agreement on fossil fuels and the environment, the Kyoto Protocol, which Gore, as U.S. vice-president, helped broker.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060530.wxgore31/BNStory/Entertainment/home
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