Goracle of the Mountaintop

Fareed Zakaria interviewed Al Gore today on CNN in a heavily promoted segment. Gore is on my mind these days as I finish up my reflections from an October encounter with him in Nashville.

The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner has had his name floated for one of the new “czar” positions that Obama may create. These mega-posts are based on the unrealistic assumption that the answers are easy and readily obtained, if only one person could get the feuding bureaucracies to talk to each other. This, of course, is a fallacy. To be sure there are intense divisions within every level of government and this “protect the bureau” tunnel vision is enormously unhealthy for the nation. But adding a new level of bureaucracy is hardly ever the answer. Did our “Drug Czar” solve the narcotics problem? Is the shotgun wedding of agencies known as Homeland Security making us safer?

I have rambled off topic---Al Gore is quite unlikely to accept any position in the Obama administration. As Zakaria’s interview demonstrated, Gore clearly enjoys his position as the wise man of the mountain to whom seekers ascend. On issue after issue (the role of the V.P., the future of Iraq and Afghanistan, the auto bailout, and transition strategy) the question was simply “What would you do?”

I saw this aspect of his personality on display in Nashville as well. Surrounded by admirers who hope he will use his sizable megaphone to trumpet their own ideas, he is rarely told that he is wrong. This is not unique to Gore: as any person’s power grows, access to frank and constructive criticism usually decreases.

In many ways, Gore still is not over the 2000 election. Fareed Zakaria’s introduction tried to draw links between the “historic” elections of 2008 and 2000, and it included the completely erroneous statement that Gore was briefly declared the President-Elect. Gore certainly must have known this was not correct, but he said nothing. He still seems happy with the narrative (one no doubt still filling his personal echo chamber) that he should have been the President and was wrongly denied the office.

A quick reminder of what happened eight years ago. Florida was erroneously “called” for Gore by CNN and other news outlets, but no network ever asserted at any point on election night that Gore had been elected as our next President. (There simply were not enough electoral votes available to be called when Florida was first put in the Gore column.)

CNN and others did announce that “the polls have closed in Florida” just before making an immediate Gore call at 7:00 Eastern. This was an hour before the polls actually closed in the heavily conservative Panhandle region (Central time zone).

I recall seeing statistical studies that estimated this premature announcement created an anomaly in voting patterns that may have cost Bush 10,000 votes or more. Not surprisingly, the networks (beyond saying “we’ll try harder next time”) never fully embraced the storyline that media screw-ups may have created the Florida fiasco.

And at the risk of getting this post too lost in the details myself, I will quickly remind you of how things unfolded:

(1) the networks eventually pulled back their Gore call, and several hours later called Florida for Bush and that produced enough electoral votes to call the presidency for him as well (I was in the cheering crowd in Austin when that happened---flags were passed out and dignitaries began to assemble on stage);

(2) as the actual numbers tightened, the networks then recanted (Bush never came out on stage in Austin . . . and we in the crowd muddled home);

(3) at the end of the official count, Bush had won Florida by less than 2,000 votes and the tight margin sparked a host of legal actions aimed at recounting votes in specific counties;

(4) the Florida Supreme Court, in an extraordinarily activist decision, eventually granted relief (a state-wide recount) that had no basis in statute and which no party had requested;

(5) the U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly took the case and in a 7-2 decision found, using somewhat dubious judicial theories not normally associated with the conservative justices, that an equal protection violation had occurred against Bush. Then in a 5-4 ruling on the remedy, declared that no more recounting should occur;

(6) several media outlets eventually utilized open government laws to gain access to the ballots and these shadow recounts found that the “hanging chad” standard Gore’s lawyers had sought would have produced a bigger win for Bush and the Republican's preferred standard would have actually tightened the race. None (to my memory) ever found a litigated scenario where Gore would have had more votes than Bush. In short, "Bush Won" as this PBS report notes.

Despite being intimately familiar with all these details, Gore just smiles and nods when Zakaria says he was once declared the President-Elect. Gore then opens with a quote attributed to Winston Churchill saying that “some call a defeat a blessing in disguise---damn good disguise.” [I found it this way on the net: “If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.” Read in what you will to Gore‘s modifications.] In Nashville, when introducing a session on presentation skills, he said, “If I had gone through what you’re going through, I’d be finishing up my second term as President. . . . I’m not kidding.” Despite his laudable post-2000 success, Gore still has not fully “let it go.”

That was a longer trip down memory lane than I first envisioned, but details are important. To his credit, Gore makes this point and provides Obama with some good advice: the new President should “make more longer, thoughtful, expository speeches” on the issues. Despite the “sound bite” culture of the media, Gore noted that there are more opportunities (like downloads) for the full message to get out there.

It might be hard for the man of vague “change we can believe in” to get into the specifics, but I agree with Gore that it would be extremely helpful for the nation. I also think Obama is a smart man who has a firm grasp of policy realities. His firm grasp of political realities (ie the short attention span of the average voter) may mean he eschews this advice (lest he be saddled with Gore’s tag as a professorial rambler), but I would welcome anything that truly raises the level of dialogue.

[Sidenote: This video testing the knowledge of Obama voters is definitely worth a view.]

While he sometimes exaggerates his facts, at least Al Gore shows an interest in real data. He is right that the scientific studies on global warming are quite scary. Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad voice to have in the Obama White House after all.

.