2008 Presidential Election Coverage

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Al Gore

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948 in Washington, D.C.) is an American politician, teacher, businessman, and 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) and the United States Senate (1985–93) representing Tennessee. 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 half a million more votes than the Republican candidate George W. Bush, Gore ultimately 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, handing the electoral college victory, and 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., 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 controversial Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, discussing global warming and 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 and Sciences. He will be inducted in a ceremony in October 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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, which he discusses in the film An Inconvenient Truth.

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. 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 and for another month at the Army Engineer Command in Long Binh. As his unit was standing down, he applied for and 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 and ran the restaurants and 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 and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses.

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 and was elected to his first Congressional post. He was re-elected three times, in 1978, 1980, and 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 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.

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 and Communication Act of 1991. The bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation directly affecting the expansion of 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. 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 and the passage of NAFTA, and Perot arguing against it. Public opinion polls taken after the debate showed that a majority of Americans thought Gore won the debate and 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 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. 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.[citation needed]

During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, Gore himself attributed positive economic results to his and 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, and 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 and NASDAQ crash of March 2000 in an interview with National Public Radio's Bob Edwards.

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 and putting little emphasis on the New Hampshire Primary in order to concentrate his efforts on the South. He won Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee in the Super Tuesday primaries but dropped out of the presidential race in April after a poor showing in the New York primary.

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