Good Riddance to Al Gore

If Al Gore dreamed that a Nobel Peace Prize awarded by European socialists would be his ticket to the White House, he has had a rude awakening.

Gallup Polls taken after last week’s prize announcement found that only 14 percent of Democrats prefer the failed 2000 Democratic standard-bearer as their choice for president.

Fifty-four percent of Americans do not want Gore to enter the 2008 presidential race.

Gore’s only dim ray of hope is an Oct. 17 poll that reported he would beat former New York City Mayor and Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani 52 to 46, three points more than Sen. Hillary Clinton would. But this was a CNN/Opinion Research push-poll to boost liberals.

Gore has been given a fortune — reportedly as much as $100 million — by special interests he served as Bill Clinton’s vice president. Because Gore could bankroll his own campaign, he could enter the presidential race as late as November if front-runner Clinton stumbles.

What makes this fascinating are the odd parallels between Gore and another vice president who lost, was politically resurrected, and became president, but then fell.

This odd doppelganger whose career in so many ways mirrors Gore’s past and potential future is Republican President Richard Nixon.

Nixon began his career with $5,000 in poker money won while serving in the Pacific during World War II as a Navy lieutenant commander. He won a seat in Congress in 1946. He quickly became a hero of anti-Communists by using identifying a high official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Alger Hiss, as a Communist agent. Hiss denied this. Soviet archives decades later confirmed that Hiss was their agent directed by East German military intelligence.

In a 1950 Senate race, Nixon defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, by describing her as “pink right down to her underwear.” His anti-Communism won Nixon the undying hatred of the American left and Douglas’ nickname, “Tricky Dick.” In 1952, Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, and his running mate Nixon became vice president.

Al Gore was a princeling, the privileged son of powerful Democratic Tennessee U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr., groomed from infancy to become president.

Gore family money came from Armand Hammer, boss of Occidental Petroleum, whose father founded the Communist Party USA. Hammer admitted that he carried suitcases with millions in cash from Moscow to bankroll the CPUSA. The Soviets helped Occidental acquire oil deals with its allies including Libya.

Young Gore earned mostly Cs and Ds at Harvard, flunked out of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, and with bottom-scraping grades dropped out of Vanderbilt’s Law School.

But with red-and-black family wealth, oily Al was elected senator via his familiar name, doubtless mistaken by voters for his father. In 1992 he was the bottom-half of a Clinton-Gore ticket elected with a 43 percent popular vote plurality — and re-elected four years later with less than a majority of popular votes.

Gore’s hallmarks became radical environmentalism and corruption. But because Gore was a Democrat, the liberal mainstream media did little to pursue Buddhist Templegate or other potentially criminal Gore activities.

Gore arranged drilling rights for Occidental Petroleum in the U.S. Navy’s strategic petroleum reserve for a paltry $100 per acre. This same oilfield was once known as Teapot Dome, focus of a major scandal seven decades earlier when Republican Warren Harding’s administration made a similar sweetheart deal with a campaign contributor. Liberal journalists refused to lift the lid on Gore’s teapot dome.

The liberal media, by contrast, unceasingly smeared Nixon. This occasioned one of the most famous speeches in American history, Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, in which he said his daughter would keep the dog Checkers given as a gift by a benefactor.

Nixon nearly became president in November 1957 after President Eisenhower suffered a stroke. Nixon would almost certainly have won as the incumbent president in 1960. Imagine our history with no President Kennedy, no Vietnam War into which JFK committed the first 17,000 armed troops, and no spawn of the anti-war movement like Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Gore might have become president in the late 1990s after Bill Clinton became America’s first impeached elected president. Democrats refused to force their smarmy president from office. Had Slick Willy been ethical enough to resign, Gore easily would have won in 2000 as the incumbent president.

In 1960 Nixon narrowly lost the presidency to Democrat John F. Kennedy in an election stolen by the voting graveyards of Democrat-run Chicago.

Nixon chose not to put America through a political crisis by legally challenging the outcome. Nixon thereafter positioned himself as the only major Republican acceptable to both Goldwater conservatives and Northeastern liberals in the GOP and was elected president eight years later. Nixon the anti-Communist opened relations with Communist China.

In 2000 Gore lost the presidency because Tennessee voters who knew him best rejected him. Gore attempted to steal the election using seven Democrat-appointed state Supreme Court justices in Florida, where he narrowly had lost. He tied our country up for many weeks, tried to have military absentee ballots thrown out, and showed himself to be far smaller and more dishonest than Nixon by poisoning American politics.

Unlike Nixon, who became centrist after his 1960 loss, the defeated Gore became bedfellow of loony left MoveOn.org. His speeches occasionally erupted into screaming rants and delusional claims that he “used to be president of the United States.”

But the left has showered him with its glittering prizes.

Gore talks about being an environmentalist while packing his doomsday Hollywood global warming propaganda with wild exaggerations, deliberate falsehoods, and politically-subverted science.

But America’s most “environmental” president, at least since Republican Teddy Roosevelt began setting aside national parks and shooting African wildlife for sport, was Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Clean Air Act, amendments expanding Clean Water laws, and the Endangered Species Act. He out-Gored Gore by far in actual environmental accomplishments.

Goodbye, Mr. Gore. And good riddance. You are no Richard Nixon.