The broken clock at Vox.com is right about something.
Al Gore should run for president:
To many Democrats, the fight the party needs is clear: Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. But the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear. Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound: tightening financial regulation, redistributing a little more, tying up some loose ends in the social safety net. Given the near-certainty of a Republican House, there is little reason to believe there would be much difference between a Warren presidency and a Clinton one.The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and who no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore.Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.Climate change is a real and growing threat to the world’s future…. No one really knows what that kind of temperature change — a swing that approaches the difference between most of human history and the Ice Age — would mean for humankind. The World Bank says that there is “no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”Income inequality is a serious problem. But climate change is an existential threat.
Don’t think Vox is alone. Last July Salon.com was pushing Gore as the single-issue candidate we need
This brings me to the critical detail of a hypothetical Gore candidacy: It would have to be a single-issue campaign. In part this is a fail-safe measure; while a strong case can be made that Gore would make an excellent president (a premise with which a plurality of American voters agreed in 2000), the primary objective would not be to promote Gore the man, but to guarantee due attention is paid to the threat of climate change. While other campaigns on both sides would continue the practice of focusing on several issues in the name of advancing a name brand (i.e., the individual candidate), Gore would have the advantage of representing not his own cause, but the cause of creating an environmentally sustainable future.
By all means. Let’s make 2016 a referendum on Climate Change.
[Featured Image credit Steve Jurvetson used under Creative Commons 2.0]
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