al gore, please be my president

Okay, I have to preface this: I voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 Presidential Election. I even donated a small amount of time and money to his campaign. Now I’ll stand by my vote in the sense that I think Ralph Nader is a very important voice in our political spectrum, but what I failed to realize back then was how vastly different Al Gore was from GW Bush. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Al to win, I thought he was a shoe-in. My dream scenario was that Nader would get 5 or more percentage points but Gore would win the over-all election and leave Bush in the dust. My dream scenario did come true here in the great state of Oregon, but nationally things obviously went a different way. Had I been one of the 97,000+ people who voted for Nader in Florida, only to find out later that Bush won by less than 300 votes, I would be pretty bummed out.
But since that dreadful fall of 2000, the vast differences between Al and George have become clear as day, and after seeing the movie An Inconvenient Truth I honestly have to admit that I’d be hard pressed to vote for any political candidate over Gore, regardless of the scenario (sorry Ralph). Gore has been pretty adamant lately that he has no plans to re-enter politics, but I truly hope he changes his mind. Watching his presentation brought tears to my eyes- it is clear that he has a deep understanding and profound concern for environmental issues, but what was even more powerful was how he framed the debate as really being about greed versus moral values.
It has been a long time since I have seen a political figure speak wisely and frankly about problems that face our society, but perhaps it is because Gore is no longer a political figure that he is able to do so. You might have to go all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s 1980 speech at the DNC when he described an American future under the Reagan administration as a “surrender of our energy future to the merchants of oil” to find a politician taking on tough issues with a sense of realism. Political campaigns tend to dumb things down to the lowest denominator. I liked John Kerry just fine, but I remember at a debate or two he’d look in the camera with a clinched fist and promise that he’d hunt down Osama Bin Laden and kill him. Or back in ’88 when Michael Dukakis drove a tank in a TV commercial to suggest he wasn’t weak on defense. It was that same sort of campaign dumbness that drove many progressives to vote for Nader over Gore. But now I think we are seeing a real version of Al that had been previously obscured by campaign organizers and 20 second sound bites. This is a guy who gets it; who understands that we face some serious problems, and that turning our back on them would be a devastating economic and moral failure.
So Al, I doubt you read my blog, but just incase you do, thank you for doing what you do, and PLEASE RUN FOR PRESIDENT! (and for everyone else, I implore you to get your butts to the movie theater and see An Inconvenient Truth)