about the specifics of that query lit me up. For the first time, I could see casting my ballot for a man who would pose such a question. It was just so boldly arcane. The kind of mind that would wonder about temperature variations on a Caribbean peninsula a thousand years ago might have the stomach to look into any number of Americans’ peculiar concerns. Paradoxically, this fervor for scientific facts—the thing that alienates him from voters because they see him as cold—requires no small amount of passion. You don’t write a four-hundred-page book about ecology unless you have the heart.
Of course, Gore being Gore, he doesn’t write just about what he knows. Gore being Gore, he is compelled to confess the dweebish details of how he learned what he knows. Earth in the Balance features countless hints that his life is an ongoing study hall: “Since that time, I have watched the Mauna Loa reports every year” or “Beginning in January 1981, I spent many hours each week for more than thirteen months intensively studying the nuclear arms race.” January 1981 he says—I bet it was his New Year’s resolution. Every other member of Congress was vowing to cut back on the hookers, but then-Senator Gore probably French-kissed Tipper at midnight and made a mental pledge to really get a handle on those ICBMs.
This is the Gore of the first presidential debate with Bush, the sighing, eye-rolling, eager beaver, buttinsky Gore, interrupting Bush to ask the moderator, Jim Lehrer, “Can I have the last word on this?” Ross G. Brown commented in the Los Angeles Times , “Gore studied hard and was thoroughly prepared for the televised civics and government quizzes each debate provided. A teacher might have given him an A. But much of the rest of the class just wanted to punch Mr. Smarty-Pants in the nose.”
“I didn’t think of Gore this way,” my friend Doug told me on the phone one day, “but he was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you’re not smart. You’re a smarty-pants. It’s annoying. People get annoyed with knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework. Everyone knows what that’s like. ‘Time to hand in your assignments.’ And that dread of ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t do my assignment.’ It calls that back. It’s this feeling of ‘There’s something I should know. I don’t know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don’t. So I’m going to have to make fun of him now.’”
Before and after the election, I found myself having versions of this conversation again and again. “One of the frustrations about Al Gore,” explained my friend John not long after the election, “is that he’s uniquely qualified to be president by having the actual equivalent of street knowledge. He knows how the system works. I remember seeing an interview with him on TV, it might have been a Nova episode on global warming in the mid-eighties. It was basically the first time I had ever heard of global warming. And Gore was the young senator from Tennessee. He very articulately explained what politics is. Politics is people worrying about next year and right now. The problem you have when the more you know about global warming as a politician is the more you realize you can’t do anything with it. Experts bombard you with cold, hard facts about what’s going to happen fifteen years from now. You look at your children. You know they’re going to be living in that world. You can see the train coming down the track. Gore said one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t run on that because the public is not interested in wisdom and the public is not wise. The public is actually reactive. So unless you can create it as a scenario that’s going to work for them right now, it’s just something you have to do behind the scenes. You have to figure out how to sell your idea to people within the system. And I just thought that’s the most thoughtful assessment of the
Of course, Gore being Gore, he doesn’t write just about what he knows. Gore being Gore, he is compelled to confess the dweebish details of how he learned what he knows. Earth in the Balance features countless hints that his life is an ongoing study hall: “Since that time, I have watched the Mauna Loa reports every year” or “Beginning in January 1981, I spent many hours each week for more than thirteen months intensively studying the nuclear arms race.” January 1981 he says—I bet it was his New Year’s resolution. Every other member of Congress was vowing to cut back on the hookers, but then-Senator Gore probably French-kissed Tipper at midnight and made a mental pledge to really get a handle on those ICBMs.
This is the Gore of the first presidential debate with Bush, the sighing, eye-rolling, eager beaver, buttinsky Gore, interrupting Bush to ask the moderator, Jim Lehrer, “Can I have the last word on this?” Ross G. Brown commented in the Los Angeles Times , “Gore studied hard and was thoroughly prepared for the televised civics and government quizzes each debate provided. A teacher might have given him an A. But much of the rest of the class just wanted to punch Mr. Smarty-Pants in the nose.”
“I didn’t think of Gore this way,” my friend Doug told me on the phone one day, “but he was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you’re not smart. You’re a smarty-pants. It’s annoying. People get annoyed with knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework. Everyone knows what that’s like. ‘Time to hand in your assignments.’ And that dread of ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t do my assignment.’ It calls that back. It’s this feeling of ‘There’s something I should know. I don’t know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don’t. So I’m going to have to make fun of him now.’”
Before and after the election, I found myself having versions of this conversation again and again. “One of the frustrations about Al Gore,” explained my friend John not long after the election, “is that he’s uniquely qualified to be president by having the actual equivalent of street knowledge. He knows how the system works. I remember seeing an interview with him on TV, it might have been a Nova episode on global warming in the mid-eighties. It was basically the first time I had ever heard of global warming. And Gore was the young senator from Tennessee. He very articulately explained what politics is. Politics is people worrying about next year and right now. The problem you have when the more you know about global warming as a politician is the more you realize you can’t do anything with it. Experts bombard you with cold, hard facts about what’s going to happen fifteen years from now. You look at your children. You know they’re going to be living in that world. You can see the train coming down the track. Gore said one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t run on that because the public is not interested in wisdom and the public is not wise. The public is actually reactive. So unless you can create it as a scenario that’s going to work for them right now, it’s just something you have to do behind the scenes. You have to figure out how to sell your idea to people within the system. And I just thought that’s the most thoughtful assessment of the
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