Al Gore’s Regrets
To warm up the crowd for Barack Obama last night, Al Gore did something he has resisted for eight years, replay the 2000 election and express bitter regret over what might have been.
“Take it from me,” he told Democrats, “if it had ended differently, we would not be bogged down in Iraq; we would have pursued bin Laden until we captured him.
“We would not be facing a self-inflicted economic crisis; we would be fighting for middle income families.
“We would not be showing contempt for the Constitution; we’d be protecting the rights of every American regardless of race, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation.
“And we would not be denying the climate crisis; we’d be solving it.”
If Gore had shown more of that combativeness eight years ago, we might be looking back at his two terms in the Oval Office and facing a different set of choices this year.
Instead, we have an admirable but tragic figure with the consolations of an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize and a rueful sense of humor.
“Today,” Al Gore told Democrats, “we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now, because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again.
“Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.”
Cross-posted from my blog.
2 Responses to “Al Gore’s Regrets”
I watched the convention finale last night on a boat crossing Lake Michigan, with several other people. We thought Gore was great with his “recycling” remark, and we also were saying to each other than had Gore been more like this and less robotic and off-putting in 2000, he would have wiped the floor with Bush all of 2000 and naturally in November 2000's results.
There is nothing in Gore's nature to make one believe that he would have pursued Osama or cared at all about Afghanistan. The Clinton Administration has many chances to get tough with Al Queda and took a pass every time. Besides, Al Gore wanted international law to apply to all military operations. A Gore presidency would have been facing a huge number of resignations in the military.
Also, the ecnonomy was headed south in the last few months of the Clinton Adminstration.
The best thing that could have been said about a Gore Administration is that the government would have been divided and thus there would have been less pork barreling spending and no new entitlement programs would have been started.