Okay, he's not really there, but would it surprise you? Nearly seven years to the day after the Bush/Rove machine stole the Florida election from Al Gore and Al Gore from America, the truth wins. The most prestigious global prize has been handed to the former vice president, not for his government service, but for his passion to teach the world, one person at a time, about the perils we face here on our fragile planet. Frankly, it makes Bush seem smaller than ever and it makes us wonder all the more what these past seven years would have been had Al been president.
Rather than speculate on what if, let's look at what is. Al Gore has always been ahead -- a seer -- on major issues that affect society. When I first met him nearly thirty years ago, he was well into his quest to learn and teach about the environment, already in Congress and headed to the Senate. In the mid-1980's, with the Cold War raging, the US and the USSR faced each other with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Neither side could find a solution to the key issue of verification of nuclear arms, which led to a stalemate in the effort to reduce the threat of thermonuclear destruction and kept the earth in the balance.
In his typical fashion, then-Senator Gore studied the issue for months, mastered the arcane details of ballistic missiles and then surfaced with an inventive proposal that would have replaced MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles) with single warhead missiles. Al's proposal quickly became the platform for negotiations between the Reagan and Gorbachev administrations, leading to substantially reduced nuclear arms on both sides.
While in Russia during the Gorbachev era, Al not only pursued the vital issue of arms control, but made a journey to the Aral Sea, one of the prime examples of mankind's willful destruction of our environment. The world's greatest inland sea had become a dead, over-salinated, pond due to Soviet central planning that took its waters to irrigate cotton fields in a desert. Even then, he moved easily between nuclear arms reduction and the environment, both issues of global survival, fully comfortable with detail and the "big picture."
While Al did not invent the Internet, he certainly made it ubiquitous. During his White House years, Al took every step possible to move the Internet from its original purpose as a doomsday communications link for the Department of Defense to a tool that revolutionized communication and arguably civilization. We can tease him about words or we can stand back a dozen years later and realize that his commitment to the ubiquity of the Internet superhighway made possible the Huffington Post, blogs, Google, My Space and instant messages.
From 2001 onward, Al not only built a revolution with his now famous slide show on climate change, but he built two new businesses. His first effort resulted in Current, a television network run by Joel Hyatt that was again ahead of the curve. Current was four years ahead of You Tube, a network built on user generated content from around the globe. It's seen in the US, UK and Europe, with more to come. It's fun, it's accessible, it bypasses traditional news sources and it's a hit in every way.
And then there's his Generation Investment Management that uses sustainability as the investment thesis by which to provide superior returns. It's not green or socially responsible investing; it's quintessential Gore in that it combines a new way of thinking about our planet with the capitalist ethos at our core. Which companies are the best run, truly focused on the long term in every facet of what they do? If we are to survive, we'll need financial markets and corporations to think and act differently as well.
And there was Google and Apple. And a few best-selling books. And a family that loves him and each other, that is, well, a real family.
What of politics? Five years ago, in September 2002 when the US Senate was falling all over itself to give President Bush a blank check to attack Iraq, here was Al Gore in San Francisco:
"Moreover," he told his audience, "if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam....
[I]f Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of al-Qaeda then these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.
If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, 'that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide'....
What is a potentially even more serious consequence of this push to begin a new war as quickly as possible is the damage it can do not just to America's prospects to winning the war against terrorism but to America's prospects for continuing the historic leadership we began providing to the world 57 years ago, right here in this city by the bay.
A year later, he endorsed the candidacy of Howard Dean for president because Dean alone challenged the establishment's surety in attacking Iraq and because Dean gained his power from people, not from traditional institutions. Gore was criticized when Dean's candidacy imploded; four years on, he looks more prescient than ever.
I do not here advocate that Al Gore run for president. Why should he? He's done more outside of the system than in. Hollywood, for example, loves him today. But remember the brown suits? Yeah, as soon as he'd agree to seek to serve the public as president, they'd turn on him for the trivial, for not listening to this or not wearing that. And then there are all of those wonderful consultants who knew best and were only too quick to turn on him, interested as they are in themselves, never an idea or a nation. Thosee are the same consultants who said he should not talk about the environment in 2000. (By the way, they can all be found in various campaigns today, dispensing the same sort of revolutionary advice, no doubt.)
The Nobel Committee recognizes that most of the time, leaders work best outside the system. It appears that they are right. That said, close your eyes and imagine Al Gore as president in 2009. The alternatives are not dreamy at all.