A Biography of Al Gore

Born March 31, Washington, D.C., United States
Nationality American
Political party Democratic
Spouse Tipper Gore
Alma mater Harvard University
Religion Baptist (formerly Southern Baptist)

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is an American politician, teacher, businessman, & environmentalist. From 1993 to 2001, he was the 45th Vice President of the United States, serving with Bill Clinton.

Previously, Gore had served in the United States House of Representatives (1977–85) & the United States Senate (1985–93) representing Tennessee. He was the Democratic nominee for President in the 2000 election — one of the most controversial & highly contested presidential elections in U.S. history. Despite the fact that he won the popular vote, with over half a million more votes than the Republican candidate George W. Bush, Gore ultimately lost the electoral college. A month of ballot recounts & 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, handing the electoral college victory, & consequently the presidency, to Bush. In his later film, he jokingly introduced himself as "the former next President of the United States".

Today, Gore is president of the American television channel Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a director on the board of Apple Inc., & 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 controversial Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, discussing global warming & the environment. Gore has a contract to write a new book, The Assault on Reason, to be published 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.

In April 2007, Gore was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He will be inducted in a ceremony in October 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life & family
Al Gore was born in Washington, D.C., to Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., a U. S. Representative (1939–44, 1945–1953) & Senator (1953–1971) from Tennessee, & 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., & Carthage, Tennessee: as a boy, during the school year, the family lived in a hotel in Washington & during summer vacations, Gore worked on the family farm in Carthage where hay & tobacco were grown & 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 & worked hard in his government courses & 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 & 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); & Al Gore III (born October 19, 1982). The Gores also have two grandchildren: Wyatt (born July 4, 1999) & Anna Schiff. The Gore family resides in Nashville, Tennessee, & 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, which he discusses in the film An Inconvenient Truth.

Soldier & journalist

Gore served as a field reporter in Vietnam for five months.Gore opposed the Vietnam War & 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. After basic training at Fort Dix, Gore was assigned as a military journalist writing for The Army Flier, the base newspaper at Fort Rucker. With seven months remaining in his enlistment, he was shipped to Vietnam, arriving January 2, 1971. He served for four months with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa & for another month at the Army Engineer Command in Long Binh. As his unit was standing down, he applied for & received a non-essential personnel honorable discharge two months early in order to attend divinity school at Vanderbilt University.

Gore said in 1988 that his experience in Vietnam:

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 & ran the restaurants & worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for.
After returning from Vietnam, Gore spent five years as a reporter for The Tennessean, a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee. His investigations of possible corruption among members of Nashville's Metro Council resulted in the arrest & prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses.

Political career (1976–2000)

Congressional service
When Congressman Joe L. Evins announced his retirement after 30 years, Gore quit law school in March 1976 to run for the United States House of Representatives, in Tennessee's fourth district. Gore defeated Stanley Rogers in the Democratic primary, then ran unopposed in the general election & was elected to his first Congressional post. He was re-elected three times, in 1978, 1980, & 1982. In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the United States Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker. Gore served as a Senator from Tennessee until 1993, when he became Vice President.

While in Congress, Gore was a member of the following committees: Armed Services (Defense Industry & Technology Projection Forces & Regional Defense; Strategic Forces & Nuclear Deterrence); Commerce, Science & Transportation (Communications; Consumer; Science, Technology & Space- chairman 1992; Surface Transportation; National Ocean Policy Study); Joint Committee on Printing; Joint Economic Committee; & Rules & Administration.

On 19 March 1979, 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 & Communication Act of 1991. The bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation directly affecting the expansion of the internet.

Vice Presidency
Main articles: United States presidential election, 1992 & Clinton Administration
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 & 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 & eventually balance the federal budget. One of Gore's major accomplishments as Vice President was the National Performance Review, which pointed out waste, fraud, & other abuse in the federal government & stressed the need for cutting the size of the bureaucracy & the number of regulations. His book later helped guide President Clinton when he down-sized the federal government.

In 1993, Gore debated Ross Perot on CNN's Larry King Live on the issue of free trade, with Gore arguing for free trade & the passage of NAFTA, & Perot arguing against it. Public opinion polls taken after the debate showed that a majority of Americans thought Gore won the debate & now supported NAFTA.[ Some claim that this performance may have been responsible for the passing of NAFTA in the House of Representatives, where it passed 234–200.

In 1997, Gore became the highest elected official to have run a marathon while in office. He ran the 1997 Marine Corps Marathon in 4:58:25 or a pace of 11:25/mile. His Secret Service agents were also runners & 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. The "Triana" satellite would have been permanently mounted in the L1 Lagrangian Point, 1.5 million km away. The finished satellite was not launched due to opposition from the Republican congress.

During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, Gore himself attributed positive economic results to his & Clinton's policies — more than 22 million new jobs, the highest homeownership in American history (up to that time), 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 the hitherto largest budget deficit in American history into the largest surplus, the lowest government spending in three decades, the lowest federal income tax burden in 35 years, & more families owning stocks than had up to that point. However Gore later placed a large share of the blame for his election loss on the economic downturn & NASDAQ crash of March 2000 in an interview with National Public Radio's Bob Edwards.

1988 Presidential run
In 1988, Gore ran for President but failed to obtain the Democratic nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis. During the campaign, Gore's strategy involved skipping the Iowa caucus & putting little emphasis on the New Hampshire Primary in order to concentrate his efforts on the South. He won Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma & Tennessee in the Super Tuesday primaries but dropped out of the presidential race in April after a poor showing in the New York primary.

Son's accident & 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. It became the first book written by a sitting Senator to make The New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

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 & Bradley withdrew from the race in early March 2000 after failing to win any state primary or caucus.

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 the Clinton White House. Lieberman was the first Jewish nominee on a major party's national ticket. This rose him in polls a bit, then he fell back again.

During the entire campaign, Gore was neck-and-neck in the polls with Republican Governor of Texas George W. Bush, usually behind. Some wondered if he would lose the popular vote, but win the electoral college as some states that could win him the election were so close.. 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, & an extremely close result in the state of Florida. On election night, news networks first called Florida for Gore, later retracted the projection, & then called Florida for Bush, before finally retracting that projection as well.

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 & 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 & 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 Bush would have won using the partial recount method of four strongly Democratic areas advocated by Gore, but 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 & 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 (i.e. at least one corner detached, at least two corners detached), & /or disputed absentee ballots (including those which were unsigned, undated, dated too late, etc.) were counted.

The states that ultimately voted for Gore over Bush were New York (by 1.7 million votes), New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico (by mere 366 votes), California (by 1.3 million votes), Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, & Hawaii, giving Gore 267 electoral votes to Bush's 271. During the formal Electoral College vote in D.C., one of Gore's electors cast a blank ballot to protest what she called DC's " colonial status ", thus Gore's final number of electoral votes was 266. Gore became only the third nominee to win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote.

The Florida election has been closely scrutinized since the election. Some irregularities are thought to have favored Bush, while others may have given Gore an edge. Irregularities assumed to favor Bush included the Palm Beach "butterfly ballots," which were alleged to have produced a large number of mistaken votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan intended for Gore, & a purge of some 50,000 alleged felons from the Florida voting rolls that included some voters who were again eligible to vote under Florida law. An irregularity thought to favor Gore was that most major news networks prematurely projected Gore as the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes at 7:52 p.m. Eastern Time. This happened before the polls closed in ten Florida counties in the heavily Republican western panhandle which are in the Central Time Zone, & thus closed at 7 p.m. Central Time (8 p.m. Eastern). This may have depressed the pro-Bush vote as panhandle residents waiting to, or going to, cast their ballots did not do so because they thought their votes were meaningless in the aftermath of the calling of Florida for Gore, although the degree to which this influenced Bush's vote totals are unknown & debatable. During the numerous recounts (which made the phrase "hanging chads" infamous in the American lexicon), there were also allegations of both pro-Bush & pro-Gore tampering by low-level operatives in the controversial counties. It is unclear what effect, if any, this may have had. Both camps fought (with some success) to keep overseas absentee votes out in counties thought to be favorable to the other candidate, arguing, for example, that votes in envelopes lacking cancellation marks could have been cast after the election. The counterargument was that, regardless of the law, many of the votes were cast by military personnel, & some could have been delayed due to emergency duty shifts by those overseas who chose to submit their ballots at the last hour.

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.

Concern about the possible disenfranchisement of voters in the Florida vote led to widespread calls for electoral reform in the United States, & ultimately to the passage of the Help America Vote Act, which authorized the United States federal government to provide funds to the states to replace their mechanical voting equipment with electronic voting equipment. However, this has led to new controversies, because of the security weaknesses of the computer systems, the lack of paper-based methods of secure verification, & the necessity to rely on the trustworthiness of the manufacturers whose employees also count those votes.

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 Gore lost the election due to a relentless media "war," in which his positions were misconstrued & his personal idiosyncrasies exaggerated or even invented altogether by members of the mainstream press corps. Life-coaching motivational speaker Tony Robbins once challenged Gore at Technology, Entertainment & Design "TED" conference in 2006 that if Gore had carried himself during the 2000 campaign as he did in his presentation at TED (an early version of his An Inconvenient Truth talks) he would have won the election. Singled out for particularly misleading accounts of Gore & his candidacy are Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, Katherine "Kit" Seelye of the New York Times & television talk-show host Chris Matthews. Gore wrote a note targeted toward savvy web users on his 2000 campaign site (algore.com) that was hidden in the HTML source code, only visible by "viewing source".

2004 Democratic National Convention
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," said Gore. Gore directed remarks to supporters of third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who abandoned the Democratic Party four years ago, asking them, "Do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates?" On October 18, 2004, Al Gore delivered his final major policy speech of the 2004 political season. In an hour-long presentation, Gore concluded that, "I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political & economic ideology than with the Bible."

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 & 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" & "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. Gore's former running mate, Joe Lieberman quickly announced his own candidacy for the presidency, which he had vowed he would not do if Gore ran.

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 (over his former running mate Lieberman) weeks before the first primary of the election cycle. This caused a rift due to the contentious relationship between Lieberman & Dean during the primary. Furthermore, Gore did not call Lieberman to apprise him of the endorsement. There was still some effort to encourage write-in votes for Gore in the primaries by Patriots for Al Gore who were separate from the draft movement. Although Gore did receive a small number of votes in New Hampshire & New Mexico, that effort was halted when John Kerry pulled into the lead for the nomination. Gore's endorsement of Dean was helpful to the latter in legitimizing him in the eyes of the establishment faction of the Democratic Party, but it also led the media to dub Dean as the clear front-runner, with the result that his opponents devoted more of their emphasis to opposing him.

Democratic campaign
On February 9, 2004, on the eve of the Tennessee primary, Gore gave what some consider his harshest criticism of the president yet when he accused George W. Bush of betraying the country by using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for the invasion of Iraq. Gore also urged all Democrats to unite behind their eventual nominee proclaiming, "Any one of these candidates is far better than George W. Bush." In March 2004 Gore, along with former Presidents Bill Clinton & Jimmy Carter, united behind Kerry as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

On April 28, 2004, Gore announced that he would be donating $6 million to various Democratic Party groups. Drawing from his funds left over from his 2000 campaign, Gore pledged to donate $4 million to the Democratic National Committee. The party's Senate & House committees would each get $1 million, & the party from Gore's home state of Tennessee would receive $250,000. In addition, Gore announced that all of the surplus funds in his "Recount Fund" from the 2000 election controversy that resulted in the Supreme Court halting the counting of the ballots, a total of $240,000, will be donated to the Florida Democratic Party. Gore stressed the importance of voting & having every vote counted, foreshadowing the 2004 United States election voting controversies.

Part 2 of this article

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