If Speaker Nancy Pelosi hadn’t wanted to be outshined by Al Gore, she shouldn’t have invited him to share the stage for her morning Netroots Nation keynote speech. The former vice-president, who referred to himself as “the dog in this dog-and-pony show” became the center of attention at what had been billed as Ask the Speaker. When the Q&A portion began, he was peppered with questions from the floor at a rate of roughly three-to-one for what Pelosi was getting. But both made the same core point: that an administration, as Pelosi put it, “tearing up the constitution and saying we rule, this is a monarchy,” is inherently antithetical to American politics.
As a major figure in the development of the legislative base for the Internet, Gore was definitely amongst friends: most importantly, friends that had read beyond the 2000 GOP taking points memos on what he never actually said. But that was kind of the point of his speech, that the US needed to restore “The rule of reason.” Lambasting the “engines of distraction” at play in debate, he compared using fossil fuels to solve a fossil-fuel-created climate crisis as like invading Iraq because of attacks from Afghanistan.
Pelosi, on the other hand, wasn’t pure partisan (still not quite sure how that became a bad thing.) Facing down criticisms over the three I’s (FISA immunity, Iraq, and impeachment) she put a big chunk of blame for the failures to get traction on these issues on Senate, and the baffling Democrat voting block that the administration somehow has been able to count upon (it was, after all, the Senate FISA bill that was taken to vote, not the Congressional version.)
She also took some time to bash the idea that there was any intellectual consistency to the GOP (“If you don’t like abortion, you should love contraception,” said the mother of five and practicing Catholic). As for infrastructure investment, which again she saw as inherently American (what else can the Louisiana Purchase be called except property bought on a grand scale), she just had one simple request: “Just spend as much on infrastructure here as you have in Iraq.”
But what about the pending inherent contempt proceedings pending against Karl Rove? Any chance this sometime UT guest lecturer will end up in that little jail cell in Congress? “That’s certainly where he belongs,” she told the crowd, before clarifying that, “as (House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman) Mr. Conyers said, leave it to him.”
This article appears in July 18 • 2008.
