Al Gore

Vice president of the United States (1993-2001)

• Born: March 31, 1948
• Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

Gore, both as politician and activist, underscored the need for public concern, discussion, and debate on issues of technology, consumption, and the environment. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. In 2000, he received a majority of the popular vote for president of the United States but was not permitted to take office after the US Supreme Court decided against a further recounting of damaged ballots in Florida.

Early Life

Al Gore was born and raised in Washington, DC, where his father was serving as a representative from Tennessee’s Fourth Congressional District. When the younger Gore was only four years old, his father was elected to the Senate. While Gore spent many summers on the family farm near Carthage, Tennessee, he lived and attended private schools in Washington.

Gore graduated from Harvard University with a degree in government in 1969 and entered the US Army, intending to serve in Vietnam despite his opposition to the war. While he had comparatively safer duty as a reporter for a military newspaper, simply being in Vietnam was dangerous. Gore was one of the very few sons of Washington politicians to serve in the war zone. After Vietnam, he attended Vanderbilt University and took graduate courses in religion. Not satisfied with this area of study, he switched to the Vanderbilt law school. He also worked as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean while pursing his graduate education.

Life’s Work

At age twenty-eight, Gore quit law school to run for the congressional seat his father had once held. As a border-state Democrat, Gore represented his district’s moderately conservative views but sought to establish progressive credentials by developing expertise in arms control and the protection of the environment. He served four terms in the House until Tennessee’s senior senator, Republican Howard Baker, retired in 1984. Gore then won his seat in the Senate. He broadened his policy credentials by developing expertise in modern technology, especially the Internet (before the advent of the World Wide Web).

Four years later, in 1988, Gore ran for president. Although he won a number of southern Democratic primaries, he was not able to win the New York primary and realized he could not win the party’s nomination with so many candidates vying that year. His showing was good enough to support a future run for the presidency, although his son’s serious car accident kept him from running in 1992. In 1992, Gore published his Earth in the Balance , which became the first bestseller published by an incumbent senator since John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage in the 1950s.

Bill Clinton, who would become US president in 1993, made an unusual decision by picking Gore, a southern moderate from an adjacent state, as his running mate in 1992. Still, Gore’s service in Vietnam mitigated some of the concern over Clinton’s lack of service in the same conflict. Upon his election as vice president, he expanded his previous policy expertise into the arena of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and produced a major report on the subject in 1995. In line with a growing trend to make the vice presidency a more important office, Gore became the most actively involved vice president in the history of that office.

In 2000, Gore was heavily favored for the Democratic presidential nomination, easily overcoming a challenge from former US senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. He defeated Bradley in every primary. In the general election, Gore ran a strong campaign and showed his policy expertise in each of the three debates with his Republican opponent, George W. Bush. While the experts rated Gore’s performance as superior, Bush went into the debates with low expectations but performed well enough to make slight gains in the polls. Bush made additional mistakes, including failing to disclose early in the campaign that he had been arrested in 1976 for drunk driving. This disclosure on the last weekend before the election damaged Bush’s candidacy greatly, leading to his loss of the popular vote by more than a half million.

Unfortunately for Gore, the election was not decided by popular vote but by the electoral college, where a majority of the electoral votes organized by states selects a president. Normally, the popular and electoral votes produce the same result, but in 2000, Florida’s popular vote was very close. Gore led early in the evening, but Bush pulled ahead after midnight. Later, Bush’s lead fell to just a few hundred votes, staying there until certification, now in the hands of Florida state officials. Some critics of this election have argued that because the most important of these officials were Republican, they had acted to “protect” Bush’s lead.

Gore has the unfortunate distinction of being one of only four former candidates for president, all Democrats, who won the popular vote for office but lost the election in the electoral college. Two candidates Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland ran for office at a later time and won their respective presidential elections. Another candidate, Samuel Tilden, abandoned electoral politics and became a social critic and activist for progressive causes. Gore’s career has resembled that of Tilden.

The fairness of the election was challenged. A recount of all the ballots likely would have produced a narrow victory for Gore, based on a subsequent unofficial recount conducted by a consortium of national news organizations. Soon after the vote, pollsters found that thousands more Floridians had intended to vote for Gore, and not for Bush. Many voters had cast their ballots incorrectly, thereby unknowingly voiding their own ballots or voting for the wrong candidate. A full recount and a complete judicial review of the various challenges in the courts would have helped to determine the outcome of the elections and given credibility to the electoral system.

However, in an unprecedented move, the US Supreme Court intervened in the election controversy and stopped further counting of the votes. After a narrow 5–4 decision, the Court claimed the authority of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and argued that the Florida Supreme Court incorrectly allowed the recounting of some but not all ballots. This decision has been widely criticized by both conservative and liberal legal scholars. In effect, it was the court system, and not the voters (via the electoral college), that selected Bush for the presidency. After the Court decision, Gore gave a gracious concession speech and served the remainder of his term as vice president.

Significance

Gore remained in the public realm after his work in electoral politics as a college lecturer, writer, and environmental activist. His book on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It (2006), was a best seller and stirred public debate about the rapid changes to Earth’s climate patterns. The book was made into an Academy Award–winning documentary film. For his work to raise awareness about global warming and climate change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He shared the award with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gore won the Dan David Prize for Social Responsibility in 2008. In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded Gore with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2006, Gore was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, as well as its 2017 sequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Also in 2007, Gore published The Assault on Reason, which argued against the trend in US politics that ignores facts and analyses in policymaking. He further argues in the book that, at the expense of democracy, television threatens public discourse because it is focused on entertainment and, through powerful gatekeepers that include the corporate-owned news media, it presents a one-sided perspective and interpretation of the world. The Internet, he argued, is an interactive medium that could change that threat by keeping public discourse and debate alive. In 2013, Gore announced that Current TV, a cable news network that he cofounded in 2005, was being sold to the Al-Jazeera news network. Gore remains involved in environmental activism and politics, splitting his time between homes in San Francisco and Nashville.

Bibliography

Alvarez, R. Michael, and Bernard Grofman. Election Administration in the United States: The State of Reform after Bush v. Gore. New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.

Cohen, David. "'We Can Reclaim Control of Our Destiny,' Al Gore Says of Climate Change." Politico, 24 Dec. 2023, www.politico.com/news/2023/12/24/al-gore-climate-change-00133166. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Dionne, E. J., Jr., and William Kristol, eds. Bush versus Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001. Print.

Downie, Leonard, Jr., ed. Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Print.

Fishman, Steve. "Al Gore's Golden Years." New York 46.15 (2013): 32–86. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.

Gore, Albert A. The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Gore, Albert. Common Sense Government: Works Better and Costs Less. New York: Random House, 1995. Print.

Gore, Albert. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. 1993. New ed. Boston: Houghton, 2000. Print.

Gore, Albert. The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. New York: Random, 2013. Print.

Gore, Albert. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It. New York: Rodale, 2006. Print.

Gore, Albert. Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2009. Print.

Hosansky, David, ed. The Environment A to Z. Washington, DC: CQ P, 2001. Print.

Issacharoof, Samuel, Pamela S. Karlan, and Richard H. Pildes. When Elections Go Bad: The Law of Democracy and the Presidential Election of 2000. New York: Foundation P, 2001. Print.

Rakove, Jack N, ed. The Unfinished Election of 2000: Leading Scholars Examine America’s Strangest Election. New York: Basic, 2001. Print.

Remnick, David. "Al Gore Doesn't Say I Told You So." The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2023, www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/al-gore-doesnt-say-i-told-you-so. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Sabato, Larry J., ed. Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller. New York: Longman, 2002. Print.

Wells, Charley. Inside Bush v. Gore. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2013. Print.