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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
If Al Gore searches his soul, he can come back in four years and lead.
Nov 30, 2000 | "The environmental crisis (leads me to) conclude that I have not gone nearly far enough. The time has long since come to take more political risks ... We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization ... We can believe in (the) future and work to preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in the balance."
Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance"
Dear Vice President Gore,
Although you are still committed to winning this election, the time may come sooner than you wish to concede. If so, concession could be a blessing in disguise, if you follow it with a campaign to take the White House in 2004 with a popular mandate for the environmentalism you once espoused, but abandoned in this election.
This would be preferable to barely winning the presidency, with a campaign in which you failed the standard you set for yourself. Neither your political ads, debates nor speeches took the political risks necessary to build support for serious action on the environment. In fact, you barely mentioned it, compared to the time you spent hawking your positions on prescription drugs for the elderly, Social Security and taxes. Far from making saving the environment "the central organizing principle for civilization," it was not even a central principle of your presidential campaign. It must be, if you want to win the White House in 2004.
This will not only be good policy but, in your case, good politics. You squandered this election because you could not connect psychologically with most Americans, in large part because you were not speaking from your heart about the issues you really care about. But if you use your political exile during the next four years wisely, you can not only win in 2004 but do so with a sweeping mandate to rescue the planet. History is filled with examples of leaders who achieved greatness because of deep personal transformations that could only have occurred out of office.
You brilliantly wrote in your book, "We must restore a balance within ourselves between who we are and what we are doing." It is long past time to take your own advice, and use the next four years to align your politics with the inner passion for environmentalism that leapt off the printed page when you wrote, "I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future." If you can mesh that passion with your fundraising prowess and the credibility you'll derive from having won the 2000 popular vote, you can be a powerful force for planetary good in 2004.
This is also crucial for you personally. The political class uses the word "psychobabble" to rule out any serious discussion of psychological issues as applied to political campaigns, which they analyze simply in terms of issues, process and polls. But if this campaign proved anything, it is that this hackneyed political thinking is little more than "polibabble," and that the real issues on which at least swing voters voted were far more psychological than political. As CNN political commentator Bill Schneider puts it (although he largely ignores his own dictum in his analysis), "the vote for president is the most personal vote voters cast."
Your trouble this election makes that clear. The "issues" broke your way. If swing voters voted on them, you would have won by a landslide. Almost all the votes you lost in this group were not due to policy but to how people felt about you personally. You lost on psychological issues like "trustworthiness" and "believability," not because of your stands on political issues like Social Security or prescription drugs. Swing voters knew you were smarter, but they connected more with Gov. George W. Bush, whose many inadequacies have produced an attractive vulnerability, puppy-like desire to be liked and personal candor.
Only if you campaign from your heart about what you really care about, speak with genuine passion and come from the inside out -- not outside in -- will you stand a chance of not merely winning, but mobilizing the nation for the goals you care most about.
I hoped you would win this time. Although your lack of courage on the environment was deeply disappointing, you would clearly be a far better president than Bush, a man who diminishes everything he touches, who could not read let alone understand your book and whose first act was to appoint Andrew Card as his chief of staff -- a leader of the fight against the Kyoto climate change treaty as chief lobbyist for the automotive industry.
But if you are to win next time, it will require more attention to psychology than politics. Your political problem, as seen from a psychological point of view, appears to stem from your deeply divided nature. As the Nicholas Lemann article in the New Yorker indicates, you are most comfortable in the realm of abstract ideas. You have a deeply spiritual core but are more attracted by New Age than traditional religious ideas, have been more exposed -- through your wife -- to the world of therapy than most politicians, have a deeply sensual side that you rarely show publicly and have far more liberal views on sensitive issues like gun control in private than you show in public. You fit rather comfortably, in short, into the baby-boomer, New Age-oriented, 45-million strong, politically liberal, cohort of "cultural creatives" identified by sociologist Paul Ray.
If there is one thing this group has in common besides relative affluence it is a distance from conventional values, mores, lifestyles and politics. Yet it is almost impossible to get elected in America today and admit to engaging in therapy, hanging with Jean Houston (look where it got Hillary Clinton) or Naomi Wolf (look what happened to you) or lounge around in hot tubs discussing Sartre and smoking dope on a lazy Saturday afternoon.
