[Mb-civic] A Campaign Gore Can't Lose - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Campaign Gore Can't Lose
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By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 18, 2006; A19

Boring Al Gore has made a movie. It is on the most boring of all 
subjects -- global warming. It is more than 80 minutes long, and the 
first two or three go by slowly enough that you can notice that Gore has 
gained weight and that his speech still seems oddly out of sync. But a 
moment later, I promise, you will be captivated, and then riveted and 
then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.

You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see 
Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with 
greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from 
space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now 
and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai 
and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of 
New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to 
naught. It will be underwater.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore 
has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming. Davis 
Guggenheim, the director, opened it up a bit. For instance, he added 
some shots of Gore mulling the fate of the Earth as he is driven here or 
there in some city, sometimes talking about personal matters such as the 
death of his beloved older sister from lung cancer and the close call 
his son had after being hit by a car. These are all traumas that Gore 
had mentioned in his presidential campaign and that seemed cloying at 
the time. Here they seem appropriate.

The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in 
extremis . It's not just that polar bears are drowning because they 
cannot reach receding ice flows or that "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" will 
exist someday only as a Hemingway short story -- we can all live with 
that. It's rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past but prologue. In 
the future, people will not yearn for the winters of yesteryear but for 
the summers. Katrina produced several hundred thousand evacuees. The 
flooding of Calcutta would produce many millions. We are in for an awful 
time.

You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who 
beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the 
lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a 
harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of 
imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences 
are beyond him.

But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an 
intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of 
applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty 
calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as 
the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so 
reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming and 
his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol -- ideology trumping science. It may 
be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this 
movie than Bush ever did by beating him in 2000.

Gore insists his presidential aspirations are behind him. "I think there 
are other ways to serve," he told me. No doubt. But on paper, he is the 
near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. Among other things, he won 
the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he 
supported the Persian Gulf War -- right both times. He is smart, 
experienced and, despite the false caricatures, a man versed in the new 
technologies -- especially the Internet. He is much more a person of the 
21st century than most of the other potential candidates. Trouble is, a 
campaign is not a film. Gore could be a great president. First, though, 
he has to be a good candidate.

In the meantime, he is a man on a mission. Wherever he goes -- and he 
travels incessantly -- he finds time and an audience to deliver his 
(free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the 
peril we face, nor do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man 
at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, 
smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried and failed to 
gain the presidency, he has raised his sights to save the world. We 
simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701259.html
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