Article: Is Al Gore a Man of VIsion: An Exchange

On the thread of a piece of mine published here earlier today, someone wrote:
If he really had vision, shouldn't he have seen, at that time, the great danger...
And here, with some modification, is how I responded: Two ways it's not a contradiction First, I do not think that Gore's failure to see just how terrible it was means he is a man of no vision. I regard myself as a man of vision --at least I work to be-- and I did not really grasp that the Bushites represented evil's takeover of America in 2000, and indeed it was only in September of 2004, that I really had any VISION about the nature of this regime. I hadn't slept through it, but I wasn't fully awake either. You say it was obvious. If it was obvious to you, more power to you. A lot of people of some understanding did not recognize how dark this gang was. (Scowcroft says this isn't the Dick Cheney he knew for 30 years.) Second, I believe Gore to have been transformed by the experience he went through in that election, including having to concede. (Even if he HAD seen, by the way, I cannot imagine ANY way that even a great leader could have blocked the Bushite coming to power at that point, or done anything other than to discredit himself and hasten the ascent of evil by making a futile fight out of it). I do not believe that Gore had greatness in him in 2000: he was still the son that year, and had not yet grown into being the father. That had been his weakness. Now I see him coming from a place of authority, not of trying to please. And with that transformation of his character there came a deepening of vision. That, at least, is what I've sensed in the man in recent years, as he has re-emerged from obscurity to a guy who is about to win an Oscar and could win the Nobel Prize, not to mention having guys like me (and I'm hardly the only one, by a long shot) saying that they want him to be president. What does it say about a man that he could come back from that obscurity to be in the position where he is right now. This guy has got something together to achieve that. As the older woman says in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, "I'll have what she's having."