Gore, Albert, Jr. (1948-)

FORTY-FIFTH VICE PRESIDENT of the United States from 1993 to 2001 in the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton, Al Gores political career climaxed with his nomination to run as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in the 2000 election. In one of the most divisive elections in American history, Gore won the popular vote by a margin of more than 500,000 votes, but lost the Electoral College (271–266) to his Republican opponent George W. Bush.

After his failure to win the presidency, Gore, who has always been concerned with green and environmentalist issues, has devoted most of his time to ecological causes. He has focused particularly on global warming with his Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and with the organization of the Live Earth benefit concerts in July 2007. Because of his role in bringing the problem of global warming to public attention, Gore has been nicknamed, not always flatteringly, the “Noah of Modern Times,” and “The Environment Evangelist.” His commitment against global warming made him a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for peace in 2007.

Gore was born on March 31,1948, in Washington, D.C. His father was a Democratic congressman and senator from Tennessee. Gore attended St. Albans School and, in 1965, he enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in English, but later switching to government. He graduated with honors from Harvard in June 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government. Gore was then recruited into the Army and was [Page 462]sent to Vietnam as a military reporter. Upon his return to the United States in 1971, he started to work for the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean, and enrolled at Vanderbilt University to study philosophy and law.

Albert Gore, Jr., has sometimes been called “The Noah of Modern Times,” and “The Environment Evangelist.”

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives starting in 1976 for three consecutive terms before winning a seat in the Senate in 1984. In 1991, he was among the 10 Democratic senators who voted in favor of American military involvement in the Persian Gulf War. The following year, Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, chose Gore to be his running mate, and Gore became vice president following Clintons victory against George Bush in 1992.

In 1993, Gore was instrumental in engineering the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the 1990s, Gore launched the GLOBE project, an educational scheme that made extensive use of the internet to make students aware of environmental problems. He also campaigned, although unsuccessfully, to have the Kyoto Treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. He symbolically signed it in November 1998.

In June 1999, Gore announced his intention to run for the presidency. As a moderate Democrat, he focused his campaign on themes such as the economy, healthcare, and education. As his running mate, Gore selected Senator Joseph Lieberman, the first Jewish American to be on the presidential ticket. The election proved one of the closest in American history. During the election night, Florida became the key state as the candidate who would get the state s 25 electoral votes, would also have a narrow majority in the electoral college. Gore initially conceded defeat as the state was assigned to Bush by television networks, but, later in the same evening, he withdrew his concession, enthused that returns from Florida pointed to an increasingly slim margin for Bush.

...