Yesterday I watched Al Gore's film,
An Inconvenient Truth. Expecting to see a documentary about global warming, I was (surprisingly) surprised to find that the film has an obvious dual-purpose: in addition to "educating" the public about global warming, the film was primarily about positioning Mr. Gore for his future.
Either the Vice President is trying to make himself into a public intellectual in the Friedman/Galbraith model, or he is going to run for president in 2008. I believe it is the latter, and Gore's film does two things to further this goal: presents himself as the anti-Bush, and corrects the mistakes of his last campaign.
The Anti-BushIn addition to cracking jokes about the current Administration, Gore littered his film with images which call to mind a man who is exactly what President Bush is not: intellectually curious and personally engaged.
Gore is constantly working alone on his Mac, he is making his own PowerPoint slides, he is answering his own phone. We learn that he became interested in global warming during a college course (did President Bush go to college?) and, as a young congressman, brought his former professor to Washington to testify on the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions. How earnest.
The Vice President is shown making trips all over the globe using technical, scientific terms in his presentations, quoting Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair, attempting to, in his words, solve global warming "city by city, person by person, family by family." (Given this philosophy, making a movie is odd, but let's not quibble with details.)
He presents himself as engaged, thoughtful, intelligent, committed. He is, in his film, all the things that President Bush is not. And, lest we forget that he is not President Bush, he shows us video footage of the 2000 election.
Problems from 2000Some major criticisms of the Vice President's presidential campaign (in 2000, not in '88 or '92 -- he likes to run) were that he was a member of the Washington establishment, that no one knew his personal story, and that he was stiff, a man with no passion. He deals with all these.
We learn that, although his father was a respected United States Senator, he owned and operated a farm on which the young Gore worked -- that is, apart from the eight months of the year Gore spent living in a Washington hotel with the children of other congressmen. Yes, he spent the remaining four in nature on the family farm where he found it difficult to "distinguish between work and play" and where he could "shoot his rifle." Not exactly what a member of the establishment would do. The Vice President also takes some advice from President Carter's carrying his own suitcase and President Ford's making his own breakfast: he shows himself removing his shoes, his belt, and going through an airport metal detector. He shows himself driving his own car. Maybe he is just like you and me? Maybe.
His tells his personal story. We learn of his young son's nearly fatal accident and of his sister's tragic death from lung cancer. The death of his son compelled him to dedicate his life to a higher purpose (solving global warming), and his sister's death showed him that there are elements of society which will kill others rather than admit the truth about the danger of their products.
And he has passion, declaring, with respect to global warming: "I believe this is a moral issue." He shows himself to have been disillusioned that, in our democracy, the persuasiveness of his science-based opinions did not compel the public and the Congress to act during the 1980s. (One wonders how he was still able to serve in our broken Congress.) In fact, he shows himself to have been passionate about the fact that the world will end tomorrow since the beginning of his political career in the '70s.
PoliticsThe Vice President is not above politics, shamelessly reminding America of our pledge to never let another September the 11th happen again while telling us that the continued burning of fossil fuels will find the World Trade Center site under the sea. And he will not allow global warming to cause another Hurricane Katrina. (In case we've forgotten Katrina, the Vice President graciously provided pictures.)
He also opines that, "In America, political will is a renewable resource." In this he is correct, and in this he is genuine. Despite the awkward way in which he presents himself as the anti-Bush, despite the clumsy way he addresses the criticisms of his 2000 campaign, despite him repeating old mistakes (he presents himself as having discovered global warming before nearly anyone else; perhaps this was around the same time that he invented the Internet?) -- despite all these things, an an inconvenient truth for the Republican party is that the Vice President won the popular vote in 2000 when Republicans were much more popular than they are now. An inconvenient truth for the Republicans is that this feeble attempt may be all Al Gore needs to be our 44th president.
