The New New Gore

American Prospect: The New And Improved Al Gore

(The American Prospect) 

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.