You Talk Too Much

Last night I caught part of "An Hour With Al Gore" on the Charlie Rose show (video of the entire interview is available). This was the latest incarnation of Gore: confident, hip, laid-back, cool. He was wearing a trendy brown outfit and sporting fashionable cowboy boots. If it wasn't for his jowly--badly in need of several tucks--face, you might have thought him a Hollywood actor promoting his latest movie instead of a former vice president promoting his latest book, "The Assault On Reason."

From what Gore said during the interview, I understand the book to be his call for a return to reason to politics. Apparently the root cause of the current troubles facing the country is that the public is largely uninformed about the key issues of the day. Rather than reporting facts, the media is more interested in entertainment and fluff, giving people would they want, rather than the facts that would help them understand the "truth." And if anyone is brave enough to question the prevailing wisdom being dished out, they are immediately shouted down and "punished," which serves to intimidate others who might have spoken out.

That all of this was coming from a man who hobnobs with the likes of Laurie David, Sheryl Crow, and Leonardo DiCaprio (I'm the king of the fluff!) and has unilaterally declared the debate over global warming "over," struck me as as a touch ironic. I also found it interesting that during the entire portion of the interview that I caught, the topic of global warming never came up, giving credence to the notion that he is still considering jumping into the 2008 race.

While his image has changed since 2000, at the end of the day, he's still the same Al Gore, seemingly incapable of answering a simple question without veering down several different alleys of thought, loosely related to the original question. By the time he stops talking, you forget what the point of the question even was. He also shares with John Kerry the annoying habit of interrupting his own answers in mid-thought with "Let me give you an example..."

Rose hypothetically asked Gore "Say it's 2008 and you're just been elected president," (the crowd dutifully applauded) "What are top five things that you do to turn the country around and return reason to public life?"

It was an excellent question and I looked forward to getting further insight as to where Gore's real priorities lie. Twenty minutes (or maybe it just felt like twenty minutes) and three follow up questions later and Gore had yet to name even ONE action that he would take if he running the country, to say nothing of five as Rose had requested. I wanted to scream "Stop blathering and answer the question!" and had flashbacks to the 2000 campaign when Gore oft displayed the same tendency to talk and talk and talk without ever really saying anything.