Al Gore is NOT your savior!

Written by: Brandon Lovejoy on Oct 26, 2007 6:24 AM EDT

I must say I'm more than a little dismayed by the situation regarding the candidate straw poll. Do people really feel that simply because Gore can use his prominence as former VP to raise the alarm about global warming that he would be at all constructive, or not beholden to powerful interests while back in the whitehouse? Have people forgotten about his Occidental Oil ties? Or the fact that he presided over his own defeat in 2000?

Gore gets a little breathing room from elite influence, is reborn, and starts doing some good by raising awareness of global warming, and suddenly everyone who should know better gets amnesia and writes him into a really important poll? This is preposterous! The second he steps foot back into the whitehouse he'll be sitting on his hands like he did for 8 years before! Leave the man in peace to try and assuage his guilty conscience, don't write him in! He's actually doing something constructive as an almost ordinary citizen, don't take that away from him.

Here we have Dennis Kucinich in 2nd place, a real champion of peace, who has -never- taken bribes from the empire, and who is beholden to no one but the American people, and folks go out of their way to try and draft Al Gore,, who's NOT EVEN RUNNING. It's like giving someone a chalice of gold filled with everlasting life and then watching them set it down to pick up a disposable Mickey D's cup and start slurping sugar water. It's like herding cats. I'm sadly disappointed. For those of you that participated in this travesty of common sense, PUT KUCINICH INTO FIRST PLACE ON THIS POLL or rue the day there was a massive lapse in judgement by 25,000 people and counting, who should know better. AL GORE IS NOT YOUR SAVIOR!

Get behind the man with VISION! and COURAGE! two things Al Gore and his convenient publicity will never have. It's like a NeoCon wet dream, they must be laughing their asses off... I can hear them now.. "Yeah, draft Gore, we own him, that'll be perfect." You know what? I think i can even hear the sound of Karl Rove typing away at his computer in the background, yep, he just cast a vote for Gore, and another, and another..

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What follows is a little refresher on Gore, courtesy of a Democracy Now interview from July of this year between Amy Goodman and Ralph Nader for the 25,000 amnesiacs out there who 'wrote in' Gore.

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean, “eight more years of the Clintons”? How would you summarize the Clinton-Gore years?

RALPH NADER: The Clinton-Gore years were -- they further allowed and even encouraged, with this reinventing governments movement, the further consolidation of corporate power, agency by agency, department by department. Eight years went by, and there wasn’t a single chemical control standard issued by OSHA initiated by the Clinton administration. 58,000 American workers died from worker-related disease. You’d think they’d at least issue one. And there’s a big backlog of them. There’s been a lot of scientific work done. They didn’t do it. They didn’t issue one fuel efficiency standard. Where was Gore? Gore knew about this. He called the internal combustion engine, in his first book that came out in 1992, a major threat to the planet. But when he was vice president, he was either muzzled or went along with Clinton, who right from the beginning signaled to the auto companies: you’ve got a four-year pass; in fact, we’re going to spend a billion dollars subsidizing a joint program, which was a complete waste of money, to develop some sort of improved engine efficiency -- a partnership between the White House and the three auto companies. So the Clinton-Gore years were the final evidence that the Democratic Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of giant corporations, with a few luminous exceptions, like George Miller, Dennis Kucinich, some of the older Democrats, Ed Markey. But even Ed Markey has lost some of his vigor in the telecommunications area. [...]

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Al Gore. He’s seen as the major voice now on the environment. I don’t know if it’s exactly on taking on the corporations, but he was in power for eight years. So what is your assessment of a Gore candidate for president?

RALPH NADER: Gore has been environmentally reborn. He is experiencing a important redemption. He is doing something very important. He is now basically a full-time citizen alerting the world to the peril of global warming and getting some pretty muscular forces behind them, behind his efforts. Maybe he’ll be restrained in terms of what needs to be done, in terms of the democratization of technology and the expansion of solar energy. I stood in line waiting for, you know, the book signing, when he came here in Washington. There were 300 people at a bookstore, and I just stood in line and finally got up to his desk, and he was very cordial. Anybody who thinks that the Greens cost Gore the election should ask Gore. He not only won the election, he knows how it was stolen from him. He knows he made some very serious failures himself, including not winning his own state of Tennessee, which would have put him in the White House. But he was very cordial, and I said to him, “Al,” -- because I’ve known him since years ago -- I said, “Al, how does it feel to be liberated?” He said, “Very good.” And that’s really the description of his present state. It’s quite the testimony. When he had real power, he couldn’t deploy it.

AMY GOODMAN: If he were to become president, what makes you think he would remain reborn?

RALPH NADER: He wouldn’t. See, the only politicians who are liberated once they’re elected are those who come out of mass movements, so that they know who they’re accountable for. And we have an electoral system where everybody tosses their hat in the ring and then goes around trying to raise money and expects people to be spectators on their campaign voyages through their cities and states instead of participants. I mean, that’s what they do. They don’t campaign with the people, with the citizen groups, with these struggles at the local level against pig farms or blowing off mountaintops for the coal industry or South Central LA and the poverty, and so on. They parade in front of the people. And that’s no way to win elected office and expect to represent the people.

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