In the year 2000, I held my nose and voted for Al Gore after giving serious consideration to voting for Nader under the Safe State Strategy. On election day, I decided that the national popular vote total might have some significance and I voted for the Democratic nominee, just as I had done every presidential election since 1972.
I had supported Bradley in the primaries and I had a lot of contempt for the Clinton-Gore rendition of Democratic politics. There was NAFTA, the Telecommunications Act and welfare "reform" at the top of the minus side of the ledger -- and one of the biggest items on the plus side was the speculative bubble in the stock market that did not seem to be much of an accomplishment for a Democrat. I did not like Clinton's bombing of an aspirin factory -- and although I admit that I was wrong at the time, I thought the cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan were nothing but Wag the Dog manipulations. The war against Serbia did not strike me as anything to be proud of at the time, either.
In short, I detested the concept of triangulation and I still consider the Clinton years as pretty much a continuation of the Republican hegemony since 1966.
Al Gore's campaign did nothing to inspire me. I was not familiar with Joe Lieberman at the time, but his love fest of a debate with Dick Cheney showed what this cretin was all about. Putting him on the ticket probably remains the biggest mistake Al has ever made in public life. I saw the Main Stream Media give him The Treatment, and I was mystified at how haplessly he responded to the pummeling he got from the Broders and Dowds and Brokaws of the world. And, finally, his performance in the first two debates were disgraceful.
By election day, however, my basic Democratic world view reasserted itself and when I heard the call for Florida going for Gore early in the evening, I was jubilant. We all know what happened next. . . .
Or do we?
Al Gore learned the lesson of how the Main Stream Media operates. And this weekend we saw his lesson applied.
I want Gore to run -- and it seems obvious to me that he is going to run.
Gore understands that you cannot beat the Main Stream Media on their own turf. They control the content of their product and their power to frame questions and to ignore as much of reality as they chose cannot be overcome when you are trying to communicate in their corporate owned medium.
I come closest to committing the sin of despair when I read the countless posts on DU and other progressive boards that pine for the media to "do its job." For crying out loud, the main stream media IS doing its job -- and its job is to serve the interests of the corporations that own it. General Electric, Disney, CBS, The News Corporation, Dow Jones, Time-Warner, Gannett: these corporations form a power block in and of themselves.
Instead of whining about this situation or forlornly hoping that those corporations will somehow change on their own, the task at hand is to find a way around them to communicate directly with tens of millions of people. Al Gore accomplished that this weekend.
Live Earth is the high point of a campaign that Gore has been running for years now. I first heard about it when I read the text of a speech he gave on October 5, 2005 on the topic of how television poses a grave danger to our democracy.
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/5/14301/6133I understand that many of the ideas he expressed that day are repeated in his latest book. Here are some passages from that speech:
Remarks by Al Gore as prepared
Associated Press / The Media Center
October 5, 2005
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.
/snip/
Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.
But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."
/snip/
Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.
Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.
Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.
Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.
The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.
/snip/
Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.
/snip/
The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs.
/snip/
One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters.
As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads. That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.
Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politics.
/snip/
The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.
The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.
Reading that speech in its entirely transformed me from a Gore Hater to a Gore Supporter. He puts his finger on exactly how the majority has been thwarted over the last couple of decades -- and, without specifically mentioning the fracas in Florida, he also explains how the image of Sore Loserman permeated our political culture during that night mare.
What is far more impressive, however, is to see him put these insights into action. That is what separates him from the crowd of politicians and public figures with some degree of insight. He is making it happen, giving us all hope again.
The first element of Gore's campaign to break out of the idiot box was
An Inconvenient Truth. Like the work of Michael Moore, it stands alone as a coherent message immune to the manipulations of framing that the television networks use to dismiss unapproved information. DVD technology provides Gore with an organizing and fundraising tool that no other candidate can match -- and no Maureen Dowd column can undermine.
The mega-event of Live Earth makes Al Gore into a superstar. The Presidency is his if he wants it.
I think he wants it. I hope he wants it.
We need it.
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