The New New Gore- from The American Prospect
The New New Gore
Tuesday, 21 March 2006
(The American Prospect) - The most important speech of Al Gore’s
post–non-presidency was neither well-covered nor particularly dramatic. He
delivered it against a plain blue curtain, and when he finished, the
applause rippled but never roared. None in attendance, however, would have
dared call it boring.
The address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the
Associated Press headquarters in New York last October and attended by an
audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators.
In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward,
president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all
leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had
deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential
campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice
president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total,
unforgivable bore.
They must have been wondering what changed. Over the next 48 minutes, Gore
laced into the state of the media, lamenting the “systematic decay of the
public forum,” and echoing Walter Lippmann’s belief that the propaganda
emanating from the press corps was rendering America’s “dogma of democracy”
void. Journalism, Gore said, had grown “dysfunctional,” and now “fails to
inform the people.”
The speech wasn’t just an isolated blast aimed at wresting some headlines
or settling some scores. Gore has long been quietly obsessed with excising
the media from the politician-public relationship. That’s been the unifying
aim of all his seemingly disconnected ventures since returning to the
public eye: a determination to evade, and eventually end, the media’s
stranglehold on political communication. Yet few seem to have noticed this
campaign, with most observers too caught up in Gore’s old storylines to
recognize his new efforts.
So when he taught a class at Columbia’s School of Journalism, the
conventional wisdom held that Al Gore was becoming the boring professor he
was always meant to be. When he began distributing his speeches through
MoveOn.org, the pundits intoned that he was merely proving himself the
wild-eyed liberal they’d always suspected he was. When he started the Gen-Y
oriented Current TV, the commentators snickered at his pathetic attempts to
become cool. And when he endorsed Howard Dean for president, political
watchers quickly associated Dean’s downfall with Gore’s reverse-Midas
touch, laughing as Al lost another one.
Taken together, these moves, and Gore’s coming film on the global warming
crisis — “An Inconvenient Truth,” to be released in May — point to a new
narrative: Gore as warrior against the gatekeepers of the press. As it has
turned out, Al Gore as presented by Al Gore is infinitely more electric and
attractive than the anodyne stiff the media popularized and the voters
remembered.
Since his loss, Gore has undergone a resurrection of sorts, shrugging off
the consultants and the caution that hampered him during the campaign and
– aided by new distribution technologies — evolving into perhaps the most
articulate, animated, and forceful critic of the Bush administration. And
now, with Democrats taking a fresh look at a man they thought they knew and
speculation mounting around his ambitions in 2008, it seems that the man
much mocked for inventing the Internet is in fact using the direct
communication it enables to reinvent himself.
The standard holding pattern for leading politicians who awaken one morning
to find themselves suddenly out of a job is to take the helm at a major
company or maybe join a couple of corporate boards. They often choose major
multinationals like Halliburton or shadowy investment consortiums like The
Carlyle Group. Gore’s chosen berths were a bit different. The “inventor of
the Internet” decided to join the powwows of its popularizers, becoming a
senior adviser to Google and a member of Apple’s board of directors,
arguably the two most innovative companies on the tech landscape. It seemed
an almost overly symbolic rejection of his monochromatic reputation: the
candidate of earth tones joining two companies with famously multihued logos.
But it wasn’t. In fact, little could’ve been more natural for Gore, one of
Congress’ earliest and most committed computer nerds. Though his
misreported comments on the Internet’s lineage were unfortunate for his
campaign, Gore, in fact, was a prime mover in its early days — if not its
father, then definitely the rich uncle who sent it to college, using his
seat on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to ensure the
fledgling technology had the financial wherewithal to make something of
itself. Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, the two men most often given credit for
birthing the Web (due to their development of the crucial TCP/IP
protocols), were so appalled by the media’s distortion of Gore’s comments
that they jointly penned a defense, writing that “no other elected official
… has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time” than Gore.
Gore’s interest in communicative technology and media dates back at least
to the late 1960s, when he was attending Harvard and, under the direction
of presidential historian Richard Neustadt, wrote his thesis on
television’s relationship to the presidency. It continued when he enlisted
in Vietnam as an army journalist and deepened when, on returning, he signed
up with his hometown paper, The Tennessean, where he remained for four and
a half years, breaking a corruption scandal that resulted in the arrest of
two city council members. He has often mused that if he had not assumed
dynastic responsibilities and followed his father’s footsteps into
politics, he would’ve enjoyed being a journalist.
It’s fitting, then, that after some hanging chads lynched his political
ambitions, he returned to his roots, accepting a post at Columbia’s
journalism school to teach about the intersection between journalism, his
first career, and the Internet, his longstanding obsession. The class,
which began in Spring 2001, was entitled “Covering National Affairs in an
Information Age.” Gore’s first lecture engaged objectivity itself,
challenging the journalistic trope that fairness resides in controversy and
an article has to represent all sides — no matter how marginal — equally.
Instead, Gore argued that the journalistic impulse to exalt even the most
fringe views to parity in order to furnish opposing perspectives is harmful
to basic accuracy. This didn’t sit well with more than a few of the wannabe
reporters in the class, many of whom were aghast at the suggestion that the
media should attempt to actually mediate between truth and spin. As Josh
Bearman, a student in that class and now an editor at the LA Weekly,
recalls it, “He stood up there challenging the entire dogma of the
journalism school. First semester, you learned that objectivity was
emperor, then Gore came in and told you it had no clothes.”
And along with that backlash, the old anti-intellectualism Gore experienced
in 2000 made a reappearance. As Bearman tells it, “He knew more than
everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he
was smarter than they were, and they didn’t like that. We witnessed exactly
what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior.” Gore did not
return to teach the class in 2002.
It’s possible, though, that the class taught something to Gore, because not
long after that he began actively seeking to evade the media. On August 7,
2003, Gore headed to New York University to offer one of his first major
speeches since his concession address; it was a notably prescient
condemnation of the Bush administration’s later bellicosity and overreach.
But more visionary than the content was the distribution method: the speech
was Gore’s first — but not his last — offered under the auspices of the
online-activism powerhouse MoveOn.org, an alliance that granted Gore a
direct conduit to millions of engaged liberal activists nationwide.
“I know the word fell out of favor after the dot-com collapse,” mused Wes
Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org, “but he’s doing disintermediation. He
contacted us in the summer of 2003, said he wanted to give a speech, and
was wondering if we’d like to sponsor it. What we lend to it is some of
that disintermediation.”
Disintermediation is a big word for a type of subtraction, the sort that
excludes the middleman (the “mediator”). As a dot-com term, it described
producers selling directly to customers rather than working through
established retail channels. In Gore’s case, it describes a public figure
distributing his words directly to the public rather than working through
established media outlets.
The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore’s
friend since 1961, told me, is that “Gore wants to make change, not be part
of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media.” Speaking into
the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those
gag gift bullhorns — what came out had little relation to what went in.
“Gore’s own view,” says Hundt, “is that he sighed noisily in the debate and
used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are
momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to
catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net.”
So Gore sought a way to bypass the filter. Every time he gives a speech
under MoveOn’s auspices, a guaranteed 3 million MoveOn members get the
address blasted directly in their inboxes, where it can be read in full.
From there, the speech gets e-mailed around, promoted on the blogs, passed
from friend to neighbor — what tech types call “viral marketing.” At no
point in this process does a news editor or television producer decide
which sound bites will be emphasized for ratings. MoveOn allows him to
speak on his own terms and individuals to distribute his speeches on
theirs. It’s Gore Unplugged, and everyone’s got a ticket.
If the Internet is reinventing Gore, though, Gore is using its lessons to
reinvent television. His October 2005 speech to the We Media conference was
a tour de force, ranging from Johannes Gutenberg to Thomas Paine, Walter
Lippmann to John Kenneth Galbraith, the historian Henry Steele Commager to
the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Gore was a know-it-all, and he
didn’t care if they knew it too. He blasted the media for accepting “fewer
reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less
independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and
more dependence on government sources and canned public relations
hand-outs,” for chasing sensationalism and conflict, for becoming
“dumbed-down and tarted-up.” He lamented that “the inherent value or
validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is
now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the
perceptions of voters.” But most of all, he decried television’s
unidirectionality. “[A]long with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to
work within the medium of television to recreate a multi-way conversation
that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas.”
That’s the vision for Current Television. Hyatt, the wealthy son-in-law of
former Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum, is probably best known for founding
Hyatt Legal Services, whose commercials he’d close with “I’m Joel Hyatt and
you have my word on it!” Hyatt was the Democratic Party’s finance chair
during Gore’s campaign, and their partnership only deepened after the
election. The two attempted to buy The New Republic in 2001; when that
failed, they began to dream about something far bigger than a political
weekly, eventually amassing enough money to take over the Newsworld
International Network (an international news channel reaching 20 million
homes and mainly playing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation content) and
replace it with their participant-driven, short-form creation.
When Gore announced the project, the assumption was that he would take aim
at Fox News and the accelerating rightward bent of the cable media. But
when Current was finally explained, those fears — and hopes — were laid
to rest: Gore wasn’t launching a challenge, he was just promoting a channel
of home movies hosted by hipsters. Or so went the CW, with even The Nation
magazine running a cover story on the channel with a photo of Gore
ludicrously bedecked in hip-hop garb.
But Current, in fact, represents a far more fundamental assault on the news
networks than anyone expected. If the problem with television is that the
audience can’t talk back to the flickering box, then the answer, clearly,
is to have them talk through it. Thus, Current devotes a large chunk of its
programming hours to viewer-contributed content. The Web site offers
instructions on how to create videos (“pods”), which amateur auteurs then
upload to www.Current.tv. The Current community then watches and rates the
pods online, elevating the better ones, eventually, into rotation on the
channel. The content is surprisingly strong — including everything from
clever, animated political shorts to reports from the Katrina-devastated
Gulf and even a poignant, artfully done pod following a birth — but the
response has been tepid. No matter. If the revolution is indeed to be
televised, it’ll be because Current helps do for television what blogs have
done to punditry: democratize it, decredentialize it, open it to the masses.
The one guy who’s not contributing much content to Current is Gore himself.
But he’s been making his own pod. On May 26, Paramount Pictures will
release “An Inconvenient Truth,” a made-for-theatres version of Gore’s
digitized global-warming movie presentation. (Hundt says Gore views global
warming as “the biggest challenge this species ever faced, the ultimate
nightmare of technology, the ultimate nadir of pure capitalism
unfettered.”) Deadening as it sounds — Gore giving a slideshow on climate
change — the film received a standing ovation at Sundance and excellent
reviews that seemed to leapfrog consideration of the work and trigger a
larger reassessment of the man. The Village Voice’s Amy Taubin called him
Sundance’s Celeb of the Week, and marveled at all the attendees saying,
“He’s so amusing. Why wasn’t he more like that when he was running?” Kim
Voyner at Cinematical.com was similarly appreciative, writing, “Gore is
surprisingly entertaining, peppering the salad of scientific facts he
serves up with sparks of humor, wit, and insight that frankly, I didn’t
know he had in him.” Pretty good for a project tiptoeing so close to
self-parody.
It used to be that an out-of-power political figure who lacked media
relevance but wanted to perpetuate his message had to devote his life to
stumping across the country and belting out endless speeches in thousands
of locales, still reaching only a fraction of the interested public. So,
taking a page from Apple founder Steve Job’s book, Gore is working smarter,
not harder. The nature of his film has rendered it possible for Americans
everywhere to absorb his ideas unfiltered. And the audience won’t stop with
filmgoers. Gore’s presentation will be repackaged and offered — free — to
science classrooms across the country. If this generation insists on
ignoring global warming, maybe the next one, incited by the world’s most
widely viewed and slickly produced slideshow on atmospheric science, won’t.
Out of office, Gore’s passion for issues hasn’t changed. Indeed, it has
intensified, the excitement of a wonk whose obsessions have suddenly
exploded into relevancy. Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic
Leadership Council (the DLC, which Gore was once closely identified with)
and former-domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House, laughed that
“it’s not the politics of climate change that made him want to do a
documentary on it. For 25 years he’s tried to get people interested. … This
is a guy who, in the late 1980’s, went to the South Pole and brought back
home movies of penguins playing on the ice surrounded by senators in parkas
and wrote about it for The New Republic.”
Gore’s policy involvement has stretched beyond his crusade against global
warming; his speeches shredding the rationale for the invasion of Iraq were
true ripsnorters, and his recent address on the National Security Agency’s
domestic spying program, symbolically delivered on the birthday of the
oft-surveilled Martin Luther King Jr., evinced a clarity, fearlessness, and
wider vision all too absent from the nightly news. Other addresses have
reached similar rhetorical heights, confronting a score of weighty issues
with a thoughtful, even soaring, eloquence that has restored Gore’s
reputation by glittering in contrast to the leaden rhetoric of contemporary
Democratic leaders.
But it has been a strange trajectory, like watching a corporate yes-man
regress back into an idealistic teenager — Al Gore goes Bulworth. And
never was it so stunning as when he endorsed Howard Dean’s candidacy in
December 2003, throwing his institutional weight behind the Democratic
field’s anti-establishment, pugilistic, liberal champion. In doing so, he
snubbed Joe Lieberman, his running mate from four years earlier. But what
all the commentators who fretted about Gore’s etiquette missed was that the
Dean endorsement wasn’t a repudiation of Lieberman, but a repudiation of Gore.
That’s because Dean, in 2000, was the anti-Gore: a fiery outsider running
against the equivocating Democrats — like Al Gore — of yesteryear. (Fun
fact: Dean almost mounted a primary challenge against Gore in 2000). He was
also running the way Gore wished he had run. The Dean campaign’s architect,
Joe Trippi, told me, “What I’ve learned from people who are close to Gore
was that, had he gone in 2004, he had this vision of running a
disintermediated, Internet-driven, decentralized campaign. His vision was
the Dean campaign! So one of the things that attracted him to the Dean
campaign was that he looked and saw that, ‘Holy toledo, these guys are
running the campaign I wanted to run.’”
In endorsing Dean, Gore did more than signal support for the chaotic,
democratized nature of the campaign. For a wonk like Gore, the endorsement
of Dean — the DLC’s bête noire during the 2004 primaries — was an embrace
of the new “it” Democrat. If the DLC’s “New Democrats,” led by Clinton and
Gore, were the buzzworthy wing of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, the 2004 election ushered in their successors, led by Dean.
Call them the New New Democrats, MoveOn Democrats, or whatever you want.
They were the liberal response to Clinton’s triangulation and Bush’s
ascension. Gleefully pugilistic, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War, deeply
distrustful of a “corporate media” they believe screwed Gore specifically
and Democrats generally, and proudly unapologetic about the progressive
agenda, they found their first champion in Dean and, in Gore, their most
surprising convert.
Gore, after all, had been one of only a handful of House Democrats to
support the first Gulf War. In 2000, he slammed Bill Bradley’s expansive
health-care plan from the right, spoke in dusty generalities, and reduced
liberalism to a “lockbox.” He was considered so mealy-mouthed and
corporatized that Ralph Nader’s lefty insurgency gained genuine momentum
with a message based mainly around the assertion that Gore and Bush were
indistinguishable.
So it was a shock when, in 2002, he dispensed with the equivocating and
endorsed a full-blown single-payer solution to health care, going further
than even Bradley had dared. When he unleashed a blistering assault on the
proposed invasion of Iraq, decried the corporatization of American media,
and endorsed Dean, it became clear that this was not the Gore of yore.
None of this has passed unnoticed. On the blogs, in the magazines, on the
op-ed pages, and across the punditocracy, “Gore 2008” is simultaneously a
rallying cry and a guessing game. Handicapping his rise has been one of the
few unifying activities in contemporary political life, with everyone from
Arianna Huffington to Tony Blankley to Dick Morris talking up his chances,
and Gore asymptotically approaching, but never actually offering, a
Shermanesque rejection of the enterprise.
To be clear, there is no sign that Gore is preparing for a campaign. His
spokesperson, Josh Cherwin, assured me that “there is no ’08 story.”
MoveOn’s Wes Boyd notes that Gore has not parlayed his association with
MoveOn into a fund-raising list. He has built no personal Web site, and
Markos Moulitsas Zunigas, founder of DailyKos, the largest progressive
political blog, noted in an e-mail that Gore has made no effort to engage
with the netroots save for his association with MoveOn. “I’m personally
focused on elections,” he wrote, “and in that regard, he’s yesterday’s news
and will remain so unless he decides to reenter electoral politics.”
In past years, the moment at which Gore had to make that decision would
have been rapidly approaching. When Gore decided to sit out the 2004
election, The New Republic reported that many of his associates blamed the
grueling, crushing fund raising the campaign would have demanded. Not so
now. Planned or not, Gore’s alliance with MoveOn and Dean’s army of online
volunteers has ensured him unique access and affection among one of the
richest, most easily activated cash sources in the Democratic Party. Trippi
estimates that a well-timed entrance, under certain conditions, could raise
Gore $50 million almost instantly, and hundreds of millions more if he won
the nomination. “Remember,” he told me, “McCain in 2000 has 40,000 people
sign up on the web and raises a couple million bucks. A few years later
Howard Dean raises $59 million. The next [netroot darling] is going to be
as exponential as Dean was to McCain.”
And it could be Gore, if he wants it. Here’s the scenario: Hillary Clinton
continues rolling forward, amassing establishment support and locking down
the large donors. Anti-Hillary voters prove unable to coalesce around a
single champion, so Clinton is able to suck up all the oxygen but, as with
most faits accomplis, attracts little genuine enthusiasm. At the same time,
her hawkishness and ostentatious moderation sparks widespread
disillusionment among the online activist community. Inevitably, the
liberal wing of the party begins calling for a Bigfoot of its own to enter
the primary, and the obvious prospect is Gore. DraftGore.com, which already
exists, amplifies the drumbeat, collecting pledges and holding events. The
press corps, sensing a Godzilla vs. King Kong battle, begins covering the
events. As Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic and a longtime
friend of Gore, says, “if he were to find that there was some groundswell
for him, I think it would be hard to resist.”
But not impossible. Long-standing associates of Gore’s say his appetite for
a second campaign seems to depend, at least partially, on whether he judges
it an issue-based endeavor that allows him to continue speaking out on
matters of substance or just another round of dodging media-narratives and
churlish characterizations. If Gore’s experiments in disintermediation pan
out, the 2008 campaign may prove a very different undertaking from 2000’s.
The fund raising will be easier. So will the communication. Rather than
speaking through the press, Gore would be able to blast out speeches on
e-mail, post videos on the Internet, release statements on a blog, use
online organizing tools to empower the grassroots. The question is whether
those distribution channels will have matured to the point that they could
serve as primary communication methods for a successful presidential
campaign. Because, as Reed Hundt warns, “if you’re using the new medium to
get across a new message, but you believe that really the new medium is
just a way to get back into the old medium, you’re doomed.”
It’s hard to believe that Gore doesn’t wish to correct the record on
himself, rewrite his legacy. In a sense, that’s what he’s been doing since
2000. Andrei Cherny, a former close aide of Gore’s interviewed for this
piece, protested that “Gore was never a prototypical New Democrat. He never
thought of himself that way. … There were a lot moments of overlap, but
he always had a much more populist streak than the DLC did. Partly his
father’s son, that old southern populist tradition.”
Since his loss, that old populist tradition has burst through the membranes
of caution and ambition that once constrained it, and Gore has exploded
back into the Democratic consciousness. In the late 1980s, his reputation
as a New Democrat propelled him to the party’s vanguard; in 1992, it netted
him the vice presidency. Today, his leadership as a New New Democrat,
enabled by his disintermediated communication strategies, has begun
restoring his reputation among liberals and allowed him to step forth from
the wreckage of 2000 as a progressive statesman. The question, of course,
is whether he could retain that standing in the chaos of a presidential
campaign. The Internet may well have reinvented Gore, but for Gore, the
issue may be whether it’s done the same to politics.
By Ezra Klein