Here's a frustrating thing for me about "An Inconvenient Truth":

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

(which I highly recommend to all by the way)

I thought the personal anecdotes about Gore's family life growing up in TN and the death of his sister from lung cancer were very poignant and well done, they were mostly relevant in reinforcing his narrative, but did a very good job of representing Al Gore the man. He really comes across as a very appealing, warm and likeable person. (And he certainly comes across as a very intelligent person in the rest of the presentation.)

My frustration? How come THIS aspect of Al Gore wasn't presented at all successfully in the 2000 campaign? I know a lot of the reason has to do with the media pressing the "wooden Al Gore who invented the internet" thing, but even aside from that, I wasn't aware that anything like this kind of narrative was put forward.

These kind of stories, narrated by Al himself, could have been individual commercials, or spliced together into some kind of special or TV program or short film.

[Big Kahuna]

1. He dropped out of the machine.

and became Al Gore again.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

5. I agree that the machine sucks and does poor things to our candidates.

Kerry didn't fare too well with it either. Still a damn shame we're stuck with shrubco instead of him.

[H2O Man]

11. Yep.

That's really what it is.

[cascadiance]

22. His best speech in 2000 was his concession speech!

That was when he went back to being "Al Gore", instead of trying to "not be Bill Clinton", which is obvious that his advisors were telling him to do throughout his whole campaign. Thank god he's ditched the DLC influences since then!

That whole sequence where his campaign jumped all over Ms. Sanchez's efforts to organize a fund raiser in the Playboy Mansion opportunistically instead of just leaving it alone if he didn't want to be apart of it epitomized what was wrong with his campaign in 2000. He seems a lot more comfortable with his projected image of himself now than he was then, which he had to "define" in such ways that I think hurt him more then than helped him.

I was that close to voting for Nader then too, though voted for him at the last minute, even though I'd even supported his earlier campaign for president efforts in previous elections.

If he or Feingold runs this time, I'll be all over supporting one of them.

[jobycom]

2. Gore did some of that during the convention, but

the Repubs were on top of it. They had started spreading stories that Gore had supported the tobacco industry at times, so he looked callous talking about his sister dying of lung cancer. They accused him of exploiting the near-death accident of his son whenever he talked about that. Gore decided not to drag his family into it.

One thing about Gore's 2000 campaign that seems misunderstood to me. People accuse him of running away from Clinton because of the bogus scandals, and of not being personable enough, and all of that. But Gore wasn't just doing that to avoid scandals. He had witnessed what the press did to Clinton, and he was trying to show that a winning campaign could be run on the issues, leaving out personal attacks and slanders. He ran a clean campaign, and won. You know the rest. He maybe could have won by a bigger margin if he had been more personal, but who knows? BushCo is a master of slimy slander campaigns, dating back to Father Bush's campaigns. I don't know if Gore could have won a campaign where he attacked Bush. BushCo had more experience at it.

And there's the big picture that people don't consider. By running an above-board campaign on the issues, Gore undercut a lot of what Bush wanted to do. We saw glimpses of it, like Bush sending the debate tapes to Gore to try to frame him, but Bush had to stick to the issues a little more than normal. Gore even got Bush to promise to not run negative ads, and when Bush went back on that promise, he fell in the polls. So I don't buy the argument that Gore could have done better if he had just embraced Clinton and attacked Bush's shortcomings. It would have been a very different race, and it would have played to Bush's strenghts rather than his weakness (intelligence).

I still say, given that the media campaigned and openly lied for BushCo 24/7 that Gore ran a brilliant campaign.

[Kokonoe]

3. But Bill Clinton got a BJ. Quit changing the subject! n/t

edited to add Mr. Gore weighes too much.(sarcasm)

[Greeby]

4. There was, of course, the short film made by Spike Jonze

Showing Gore the family man. Of course, the MSM couldn't allow that to be shown, that would be going off-script :eyes:

Anyone got the link? I don't know where it is

[NYCGirl]

15. Here's the link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-29385328971143264&q=al+gore

[justgamma]

6. For just a minute, I saw the real

Al Gore. It was on one of those on the campaign buses. He was joking with someone and for just a minute you got to see his wild sense of humor.
I kept praying that they would show more of the "real Al", but, alas, it was only that one time. They needed to let him loosen up a little.

[Skittles]

7. the corporate media was hell-bent on getting bush elected

they presented bullshit (bad) about Gore and bullshit (good) about bush

[theoldman]

8. I do not fault Gore as much as I fault his handlers.

They tried to make him to be something he is not. I think that Gore has a great personality and would have made a great president. There is no way that Bush could compete with him face to face. Remember the way that Gore put down Ross Perot? Perot is no fool.

[Kahuna]

9. It was present. The media brain-washed America every day as they

repeated the bush campaign's whisper=campaign, mantra, "nobody likes Al Gore. Why is Al Gore so unlikeable?"

[UTUSN]

10. Wingnuts have perfected turning our BEST POINT against ourselves

Thus they took GORE's accomplished self, which should have DEMOLISHED the addled chemical abuser, and made a joke of it. And they took KERRY's military credential, which should have DEMOLISHED the deserter, and fragged it. We try to play by rules, try to be noble, enlightened, and high minded, and they are brazenly unscrupulous street fighters.

[OwnedByFerrets]

18. Great Post and

one I agree with 100%. And, even if we try to level the playing field and go by their "rules", we are so bad at it because we have decency.

[peacetalksforall]

12. I thought then and now that he received a lot of bad advice from

his DLC advisors. I thought then and now that they practice a campaign philosophy that is stiltified and ineffective. The same group that appears on corporate networks today is suppsed to be speaking for me since and they don't. They come to each show as Democrats and I feel let down time after time. I don't like what they say. I don't like how limply and predictably they say it. I can almost tell you in advance what they are going to say. But boy are they ever accepted on corporate tv.

They need to acknowledge who they are up against - vultures. And fight.

Same thing happened to Kerry.

I am not an expert and I don't know how I got to this place of thinking of them the way I do, but it happened. If any one wants to extol their virtures to win me, please go at it.

Ms. Blah, Mr. Blah, and a lot of other Blahs don't do it for me. He followed them too cloaely. They are not experts, obviously. But they do know how to keep on getting invitations to speak on tv.

Perhaps their expertise focused on raising money and getting out the vote, not on advising the candidate.

[jwirr]

13. The media presented us with the Gore/Kerry that they wanted

us to see. Have you watched the photos they use of Democrats? They are usually the worst photos that were ever taken. They did this with both men in the elections. They took pictures and situations out of context that made the candidate look bad. Not once did the media let us see the real Gore and it almost totally ignored anything good about Kerry. Voting machines are not our only problem.

[gratuitous]

16. That's it on the nail head

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has exhaustively catalogued the media's shortcomings in covering the 2000 campaign, how anything real or imagined that could be used against Gore was used, while anything derogatory about Bush disappeared in less than a news cycle. I don't recall who he cited (Cokie Roberts or Maureen Dowd?), but one journalist sort of let the mask slip when she said that the reporters covering the campaign loved getting Gore and taking him down a peg or two. It was sport to them.

[mother earth]

14. I just saw An Inconvenient Truth---Al Gore is amazing. It should

be pretty clear to all of us that we never truly appreciated him when he served as VP. There is absolutely much to be desired from those who handled his campaign in 2004, I agree with your sentiments. I feel like we are only beginning to realize the worth of this man. We needed him in 2000, but we can't be without him in 2008, and I can't think of anyone else who would better serve our needs at this truly crucial time. We can't afford to have anyone else. There's just no getting around it.

[LibDemAlways]

17. The hatchet job performed on Gore by the

entire corporate whore media at the behest of the Bush Crime Family was so savage and merciless that it's a testament to the caliber of the man that he actually won the election.

The media relentlessly portrayed him as a stiff, wooden, uninspiring guy prone to exaggeration, if not outright lies. His ability to respond to debate questions in a thoughtful, intelligent manner against a doffus who can't complete a coherent sentence was completely ignored and/or dismissed. Instead the meme was that the chimp did "better than expected." Gore's "sigh" became the forerunner of the Dean scream - something trivial that could be latched onto and magnified for no purpose ofther than to portray the candidate in the most negative way possible.

Gore's campaign people did a lousy job of countering the negative spin, but I'm not sure there was any way they could have overcome it.

[KoKo]

19. He did do that in the 2000 Convention...It was a "turn off" at the time,

though. I thought the movie handled it very well in that it explained it in context whereas at the Convention...lots of folks kind of groaned because it was so personal about him...and it didn't connect in a way the movie did with why these events were important to him.

At a Convention everyone's spirits are high and his talking about his sister and son sort of seemed a "downer." (I love Gore...and am a DU'er who is hoping he will run...so don't take my comments the wrong way).

I think that the country was so tired of Clinton's personal life dragged through the mud that at the Convention when Gore did film clips ...it sort of was OTT..at least it made me cringe at the personalness of it. :shrug:

And...the RW was all over it the next day...as they usually are...but then they are always all over anything a Dem says or does,anyway.

[leftofthedial]

20. I swear, I believe the Democratic Party machine

is a GOP-run operation

[cascadiance]

23. More like GOP and Dems are corporate run operations!

That is the real master now... The sooner we get rid of the DLC shackles fromt he Democratic Party, hopefully we can be a party that brings back a strong message again that the PEOPLE want!

[AnnieBW]

21. That's What We Said

I asked my husband the same question as we left the theater tonight. BTW, it was mostly an older audience. I think we were two of the youngest people there.