Inconvenient Countdown: 8 Days

GO-Team '08

Got a message from FotF K.Torkelson, who saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth last night in NYC wit her husband. Here's here brief commentary:

The whole time all you can think of is what might have been . . .

Here’s what I learned:

- Al Gore needs to be our next president
- Joel and I are buying a Prius NOW

Speaking of presidential posturing for '08--before we get into coverage of the movie at hand--we have this news from the WaPo's Chris Cillizza:

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) has brought on two nationally known Democratic consultants as advisers in recent weeks, prompting renewed speculation that the freshman senator may be considering a 2008 White House run.

Anita Dunn, a partner with Squier Knapp Dunn, a media consulting company, and Minyon Moore, who is with the Dewey Square Group, are now serving as advisers to Obama.

[...]

Both Dunn and Moore have experience in presidential campaigns. Dunn served as a senior adviser to Bill Bradley in 2000 and is playing a similar role for Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh as he weighs a run for president in 2008. Moore was involved in Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential race, served in the Clinton White House and led minority outreach for John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004.

Political insiders will continue to wonder about Obama's plans given the incredibly active travel and fundraising schedule he's maintaining. Obama has already visited 21 states to raise money for Senate candidates and raised better than $1.5 million into Hopefund in the first four months of the year.

My GO-Team dreams continue...

Anyhoo, Salon has an interesting view of the film, which was directed by Davis Guggenheim (a Hollywood TV vet who's produced HBO's Deadwood and directed episodes of 24 and Alias), after seeing it in Cannes that balances the artistic and political questions of the film:

European critics have wondered whether Guggenheim's film did enough to explicate Gore the man, but this may reflect a misunderstanding of American politics in general and the former vice president in particular. Guggenheim spent many months with Gore and interviewed him repeatedly, while traveling around the world with Gore's wonky but highly effective lecture-demonstration on global warming. More than anything I've ever seen or read about Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth" brings this notoriously awkward politician into focus as a human being, both warm and guarded, intellectually curious but not especially introspective. Guggenheim gets Gore, for instance, to discuss the two central emotional events in his life: his sister's death from lung cancer, and the near-death of his son, who was run down by a car, at age 6, in 1989. In both instances, it's clear that Gore is being as emotionally open as he can, and that behind his stilted, almost clichéd language lies a universe of painful meaning. His sister's death turned him into a fervent campaigner against Big Tobacco, and his son's accident, he says, made him determined to focus his work on the damaged planet we are leaving for future generations. The fact that Gore simply isn't capable of speaking in the canned, confessional Oprah-isms of our culture -- the sort of thing that comes as second nature to Bill Clinton -- only made me like him better.

[...]

Based on the evidence found here I'm at least half-convinced that Gore won't run for president in 2008 or any other year. Guggenheim's efforts to graft a narrative arc onto this episodic and mostly static documentary are only partly successful, but what we see here is a man who seems to have walked away from the inevitable compromises and insider horse-trading of politics in order to deliver a clearer, purer message.

Part of me hopes I'm wrong about this, because the lesson Gore preaches on his barnstorming tour is an urgent and necessary one. Yes, his lectures are sometimes dense and wonky affairs, and it'll be easy for people on all sides of the political spectrum to deride this movie. (Hey, babe, wanna catch the flick about Al Gore's slide show?)

But he never minces words, defaults to religious platitudes (startlingly, he never mentions God at all) or offers any quarter to the forces of mendacity and denial who try to claim that there's any serious scientific controversy about global warming or what is causing it. Besides, as slide shows go, Gore's is a damn good one. He's got both amusing mock-educational cartoons in a "Simpsons" style and punch-to-the-gut photographic evidence: the vanished glaciers of Kilimanjaro and Patagonia, the ever-worsening patterns of tropical storms, the likely effects of melting polar ice on low-lying cities around the world.

I'd like to believe that a public figure can speak truth at this level -- including the discourse-rotting fact that politicians of both parties are so stuffed with corporate money that they've preferred to ignore this issue -- while remaining politically viable. But I'm not sure that's possible now, if it ever was. Gore speaks hopefully of a time when America, by far the most wasteful nation in the world and the biggest contributor to global warming, will face this potentially devastating crisis with a little forthright Yankee techno-ingenuity. But that day, he admits, has not come yet and may not come soon.

[...]

Beyond its policy consequences, Guggenheim's film captures Al Gore as a tragicomic but highly sympathetic figure. If he remains a little uncomfortable in his own skin, he has at last escaped the ghost of Bill Clinton and the ludicrous specter of his own "hanging-chad" defeat and become his own man. It has often been observed that Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, and that American lives these days have second and third acts. Whether Gore's current missionary work constitutes his last act as a public citizen, or just an intermission, remains to be seen.

More in the coming days, but for now it's back to work...