Al Gore is an American politician, teacher, businessman, and environmentalist.Most know him as the 45th Vice President of the United States, under Bill Clinton. Al Gore served in the United States House of Representatives (1977–85) and the United States Senate (1985–93) representing Tennessee. Since his earliest days in the U. S. Congress 30 years ago, Al Gore has been the leading advocate for confronting the threat of global warming. His pioneering efforts were outlined in his best-selling book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992). He led the Clinton-Gore Administration's efforts to protect the environment in a way that also strengthens the economy.He was the Democratic nominee for President in the 2000 election — one of the most controversial and highly contested presidential elections in U.S. history. Despite the fact that he won the popular vote, with over 500,000 more votes than the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, Gore controversially lost the electoral college. A month of ballot recounts and court challenges in the state of Florida led the U. S. Supreme Court to end the highly disputed contest with its final ruling of Bush v. Gore.
Today, Al Gore is president of the American television channel Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a director on the board of Apple Inc., and an unofficial advisor to Google's senior management. He lectures widely on the topic of global warming, which he calls "the climate crisis." In 2006, he starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, discussing global warming and the environment.Gore is nominated as Nobel Peace Prize candidate for 2007. Al Gore's most recent book, The Assault on Reason, waspublished on May 22, 2007. While he has stated that he has no intention of running for President again, it is frequently speculated that he is a potential candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Grassroots organizations are mounting an effort called "Draft Gore", to show Gore, the man who received the most popular votes in any presidential election, that Americans still want him to lead.
Al Gore was born in Washington, D.C., to Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., a U. S. Representative (1939–44, 1945–1953) and Senator (1953–1971) from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. Al Gore Jr. thus divided his childhood between Washington, D.C., and Carthage, Tennessee: as a boy, during the school year, the family lived in a hotel in Washington and during summer vacations, Gore worked on the family farm in Carthage where hay and tobacco were grown and cattle were also raised.
Gore attended Washington's private St. Albans School through high school. In 1965, he enrolled at Harvard College, the only school to which he applied. His roommate (in Dunster House) was actor Tommy Lee Jones. After finding himself bored with his classes in his declared English major, Gore switched majors and worked hard in his government courses and graduated cum laude from Harvard in June 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government. After returning from the military he took religious studies courses at Vanderbilt University and then entered its Law School. He left Vanderbilt after completing the required one-year Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for students returning to secular work to run for Congress in 1976.
In 1970, Gore married Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson (known as Tipper), whom he had first met at his high school senior prom in Washington, D.C. They have four children: Karenna Gore (born August 6, 1973), married to Drew Schiff; Kristin Gore (born June 5, 1977); Sarah (born January 7, 1979); and Al Gore III (born October 19, 1982). The Gores also have two grandchildren: Wyatt (born July 4, 1999) and Anna Schiff. The Gore family resides in Nashville, Tennessee, and own a small farm near Carthage. The family attends New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Carthage. In late 2005 the Gores bought a condominium at San Francisco's St. Regis.
In 1984, Gore's elder sister, Nancy Gore Hunger, died of lung cancer, and Gore accounts for the deep impact of his sisters death.
Gore served as a field reporter in Vietnam for five months. Al
Gore opposed the Vietnam War and could have avoided serving overseas
by accepting a spot in the National Guard which a friend of his
family had reserved for him or by other means of avoiding the draft.
Gore has stated that his sense of civic duty compelled him to serve
in some capacity, so on August 7, 1969, he enlisted in the United
States Army.
"didn't change my conclusions about the war being a terrible
mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself,
really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful
lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what
they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed
by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked
in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for."
-Al Gore, 1988
After returning from Vietnam, Gore spent five years as a reporter for The Tennessean, a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee.
Political career (1976–2000)
While in Congress, Gore was a member of the following committees: Armed Services (Defense Industry and Technology Projection Forces and Regional Defense; Strategic Forces and Nuclear Deterrence); Commerce, Science and Transportation (Communications; Consumer; Science, Technology and Space- chairman 1992; Surface Transportation; National Ocean Policy Study); Joint Committee on Printing; Joint Economic Committee; and Rules and Administration.
Gore became the first person to appear on C-SPAN, making a speech in the House chambers. In the late 1980s, Gore introduced the Gore Bill, which was later passed as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. The bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation directly affecting the expansion of the internet. Upon commenting that 'his' actions paved the way for the infrastructure of the internet, he was infamously spun into saying "he"(Al Gore) invented the internet.
Bill Clinton chose Gore to be his running mate on July 9, 1992. After winning the 1992 election, Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993. Clinton and Gore were re-elected to a second term in the 1996 election.
During the Clinton/Gore administration, the American economy expanded for eight years. One factor was the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, for which Gore cast the tie-breaking vote. The Administration worked closely with the Republican-led House to slow federal spending and eventually balance the federal budget. One of Gore's major accomplishments as Vice President was the National Performance Review,which pointed out waste, fraud, and other abuse in the federal government and stressed the need for cutting the size of the bureaucracy and the number of regulations.
In 1993, Gore debated Ross Perot on CNN's Larry King Live on the issue of free trade, with Gore arguing for free trade and the passage of NAFTA, and Perot arguing against it.
1997, Al Gore ran the 1997 Marine Corps Marathon in 4:58:25 or a pace of 11:25/mile. His Secret Service agents were also runners and changed every few miles.
Since 1998, Gore heavily promoted a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since The Blue Marble photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.
2000 campaign for the presidency, Gore himself attributed positive economic results to his and Clinton's policies — more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the paying off of $360 billion of the national debt, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, higher incomes at all levels, the conversion of largest budget deficit in American history into the $100 billion (largest) surplus, the lowest government spending in three decades, the lowest federal income tax burden in 35 years.
National campaigns
In 1988, Gore ran for President but failed to obtain the Democratic
nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis.
Son's accident and effect on 1992 presidential campaign
On April 3, 1989, Gore's six-year-old son Albert was nearly killed in an automobile accident while leaving the Baltimore Orioles' opening day game. Because of the resulting lengthy healing process, his father chose to stay near him during the recovery instead of laying the foundation for a presidential primary campaign. Gore started writing Earth in the Balance, his book on environmental conservation, during his son's recovery.
2000 presidential election
After two terms as Vice President, Gore ran for President. In the
Democratic primaries, Gore faced an early challenge from Bill Bradley.
Gore's nomination was never really in doubt and Bradley withdrew
from the race in early March 2000 after failing to win any state
primary.
In August 2000, Gore surprised many when he selected Senator Joe Lieberman to be his vice-presidential running mate. Lieberman, who is a more conservative Democrat than Gore, had publicly admonished President Clinton for speaking ambiguously to the American people about the Lewinsky scandal. Some pundits saw Gore's choice of Lieberman as another way of trying to distance himself from Bill Clinton White House. During the entire campaign, Gore was neck-and-neck in the polls with Republican Governor of Texas George W. Bush. On Election Day, the results were so close that the outcome of the race took over a month to resolve, highlighted by the premature declaration of a winner on election night, and an extremely close result in the state of Florida. On election night, news networks first called Florida for Gore, later retracted the projection, and then called Florida for Bush, before finally retracting that projection as well. The governor of Florida, who's adminstration was in charge of the vote count was Jeb Bush, George Bush's brother.
The race was ultimately decided by a margin of only 537 votes in Florida. Florida's 25 electoral votes were awarded to Bush only after numerous court challenges. Gore publicly conceded the election after the Supreme Court of the United States in Bush v. Gore ruled 5-4 that the Florida recount was unconstitutional and that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline, effectively ending the recounts. Gore strongly disagreed with the Court's decision, but decided "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession." Following the election, a subsequent recount conducted by various U.S. news media organizations indicated that Gore would have won given a full recount of the state if overvotes (i.e. optical ballots where the oval next to a candidate was blacked in and the candidate's name was mistakenly written in the space on the ballot headed "Write in Candidate's Name", which were rejected by optical scoring machines but unmistakably assignable by a human scorer) were counted, regardless of whether the undervotes (mainly the infamous punch ballots where "chads" were not completely punched out) were subjected to rigorous (only fully punched out) or loose (any dimple or mark) standards, or a standard in between were counted.
As a matter of law, the issue was settled when the Congress of the United States accepted Florida's electoral delegation, only after a challenge to the Florida electors was presented in the congressional chambers on January 6, 2001 by members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Member after member went up decrying the lack of a senator who would be willing to co-sponsor the challenge without any effect.They thus failed to bring the challenge to a debate.
Joe Lieberman later criticized Al Gore for adopting a populist theme during their 2000 campaign. Lieberman said he objected to Gore's "people vs. the powerful" message, believing it was not the best strategy for Democrats to use to retain the White House.
The popular political weblog The Daily Howler contends that Al Gore lost the election due to a relentless media "war," in which his positions were misconstrued and his personal idiosyncrasies exaggerated or even invented altogether by members of the mainstream press corps. Singled out for particularly misleading accounts of Gore and his candidacy are Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, Katherine "Kit" Seelye of the New York Times and television talk-show host Chris Matthews.
As the first major speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Gore held himself out as a living reminder that every vote counts. "Let's make sure not only that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, but also that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court...Do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates?"
Decision not to run
Initially, Al Gore was touted as a logical opponent of George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election. "Re-elect Gore!" was a common slogan among many Democrats who felt he had been unfairly cheated out of the presidency, on the grounds of his winning the popular vote and the Florida voting controversies. On December 16, 2002, however, Gore announced that he would not run in 2004, saying that it was time for "fresh faces" and "new ideas" to emerge from the Democrats. When he appeared on a 60 Minutes interview, Gore said that he felt if he had run, the focus of the election would be the rematch rather than the issues.
Despite Gore taking himself out of the race, a handful of his supporters formed a national campaign to "draft" him into running. However, that effort largely came to an end when Gore publicly endorsed Governor of Vermont Howard Dean..
2008 presidential election plans:
Gore and his family have commented upon whether or not Gore would
participate as a candidate in the 2008 presidential election.
"I am not planning to run for president again ... I haven't
completely ruled it out." Al Gore - 2006
His son, Albert Gore III, said it best when asked about his father,
"I think the way he always says it is, 'I don't see any circumstances
under which I would run for president."
Despite stating that he is not planning to run, Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign chairwoman in the 2000 campaign, made a series of cryptic comments during a speech on January 31, 2007,at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania stating "Wait till Oscar night, I tell people: 'I'm dating. I haven't fallen in love yet.The meaning of these remarks became more clear when on award night, while in attendance and acting as a presenter for an award, Gore began a speech that seemed to be leading up to an announcement that he would run for president. However, background music drowned him out and he was escorted offstage.
Others have expressed an interest in seeing Gore run in 2008. As of 2007, Gore's popularity has increased among progressives and supporters of the Democratic Party since his loss to George W. Bush following the close 2000 election. Gore received 68% of support among potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidates on a May 2006 Daily Kos poll and 35% on July 13, 2006 AlterNet poll.A Gallup poll of August 2006 showed that nearly half of Americans currently view Gore favorably (48 percent to 45 percent).A CNN telephone poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation of registered or independent leaning Democrats in November 2006 has Gore with 14% support in a theoretical multi-candidate Democratic primary. A poll of Democratic Iowa voters in light of the 2008 Iowa Caucus put Gore at 7%.
Visiting professor
Following his election loss, Gore accepted visiting professorships at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Middle Tennessee State University, UCLA, and Fisk University.
Norway nominates Al Gore for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to draw the world's attention to the dangers of global warming. Norwegian lawmakers are among the thousands of people and groups with rights to nominate Nobel candidates.
The secretive Nobel committee never comments on specific nominations, but members often note that anyone can be nominated. In 2006 there were 191 nominations for the prize.
In late 2001, Al Gore became Vice Chairman of Los Angeles financial firm Metropolitan West Financial LLC. In late 2004, Gore launched an investment firm Generation Investment Management, which he chairs, to seek out companies taking a responsible view on big global issues like climate change. On May 4, 2004, INdTV Holdings, a company co-founded by Gore and Joel Hyatt, purchased cable news channel NewsWorld International from Vivendi Universal. The new network will not have political leanings, Gore said, but will serve as an "independent voice" for a target audience of people between 18 and 34 "who want to learn about the world in a voice they recognize and a view they recognize as their own.The network was relaunched under the name Current TV on August 1, 2005.
Electoral history
2000 United States Presidential Election
(popular vote)
Al Gore (D) 48.4%
George W. Bush (R) 47.9%
Ralph Nader (Green) 2.7%
Pat Buchanan (Reform) 0.4%
Harry Browne (Lib.) 0.4%
Howard Phillips (Constitution) 0.1%
John Hagelin (Natual Law) 0.1%
(Gore would lose the electoral vote)
1996 United States Presidential Election
(Vice President's seat)
Al Gore (D) (inc.) 49.2%
Jack Kemp (R) 40.7%
Pat Choate 8.4%
Jo Jorgensen (Lib.) 0.5%
Herbert Titus (Taxpayers) 0.2%
Michael Tompkins (Natural Law) 0.1%
1992 United States Presidential Election
(Vice President's seat)
Al Gore (D) 43%
Dan Quayle (R) (inc.) 37.4%
James Stockdale (I) 18.9%
Nancy Lord (Lib.) 0.3%
Cy Minett (Populist) 0.1%
1984 Tennessee United States Senatorial
Election
Al Gore (D) 60.7%
Victor Ashe (R) 33.8%
Ed McAteer (I) 5.3%
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