I Love Al Gore

I don’t know if I’ve ever really mentioned that, but I do. I love him with all my heart. When Bill Clinton got the democratic nomination in ’91, I said at dinner one night, “I hope he picks Al Gore as his running mate.” I was 17 at the time, and I think my dad was seriously concerned for my social future that I was focusing my energies on knowing the politics of Tennessee Senators. But I knew about Al Gore, and I wanted Clinton to pick him more than I can describe, because I wanted Al Gore to be my president someday. I still do.

Our founders understood that there is in all human beings a natural instinct for power. The Revolution they led was precisely to defeat the all-encompassing power of a tyrant thousands of miles away.

They knew then what Lord Acton summarized so eloquently a hundred years later: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." They knew that when the role of deliberative democracy is diminished, passions are less contained, less channeled within the carefully balanced and separated powers of our Constitution, less checked by the safeguards inherent in our founders' design, and the vacuum left is immediately filled by new forms of power more arbitrary in their exercise and derived less from the consent of the governed than from the unbridled passions of ideology, ultra-nationalist sentiments, racist, tribal and sectarian fervor -- and most of all, by those who claim a unique authority granted directly to them by the Almighty.

Go read the rest of this speech. Lament the leadership we have lost.