Thoughts on Gore's Campaign

When Gore was running for president, he was advised that he should not make a big deal out of his passion for the environment, but should try to focus on other things to get elected, and then once he was in office, he could let his passion for the environment drive real policy changes. And the source of this advice -- the polls.

His campaign advisers were looking at the polls, and people were telling him that people didn't really care about the environment, that it wasn't an issue that they would vote for him on, and that is why he shouldn't focus on that.

This is an issue I touched on in my post about McCain - how it is the duty of politicians not just to pander to us a voters, and make sure what we care about is being taken care of - but there is also an extended role that they should have of telling us what we should care about. When I watched Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, it made me care about the environment. That along with a book by Jared Diamond I read around the same time called Collapse.

And to me, it is much more important to have a political leader who cares about the environment (or campaign finance, as I mentioned with McCain) than that I personally care about it. My small steps to help the environment are nothing compared to the legislative impact that a president can have.

This is an issue that I feel more at a loss of what to do about, though. This has more to do with how campaigns are run, being so based on polls and such. But I think it does relate to the issue of the difference between electing a political leader who shares your views on issues, and electing a political leader who you think will do a good job creating legislation needed for the nation.

Unless anybody has ideas of what we can do? I suppose we could start a letter-writing campaign to the poll companies to give them ideas for better questions, or something like that. So have at it with the ideas!