Al Gore recent speech

West Palm Beach, Florida
March 12, 2006

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. It’s great to be back. It’s great to be back with you and it’s great to feel the enthusiasm that you have.

(To a call from the audience that he should have been President) I was -- President of the Senate.

I want to thank your wonderful state party chair Karen Thurman who is a great public servant and a great party chair and a great friend to me. I just want to begin by acknowledging the expertise and dedication that Karen and Luis Navarro, your Executive Director, have brought to this state party. It is really a great sight to behold.

To all of the candidates and public officials who have spoken and who are joining me on stage, I want to pay my respects, to say to Senator Rod Smith and my friend Congressman Jim Davis, whichever one of you guys gets the nomination, we’re going to make you the next Governor of the State of Florida.

State Senator Skip Campbell is going to be a great Attorney General for the state of Florida and let’s make sure that happens. To the state representatives here, State Senator Ron Klein will be the next member of Congress from the 22nd Congressional District, and Tim Mahoney from the 16th Congressional District. I want to say a special word of thanks to Mayor Lois Frankel. I’ll tell you, if you’re in a knock-down, drag-out, you want Lois Frankel on your side. She is great and has done great work for so long. Palm Beach County Chair Wahid Mahmood, thank you for your friendship and leadership, and to the next Agriculture Commissioner, Eric Copeland, good luck to you, my friend.

I am Al Gore, I am a recovering politician, and I’m on about step nine now. But I have to tell you, feeling your enthusiasm and seeing the outstanding candidates that you are putting forward is very exciting for me and I want to encourage them.

I want to begin by saying that over the last two days I have had a wonderful experience traveling here in Florida with a truly outstanding public servant, your senator, Bill Nelson. And so, even though he’s not here today -- I’ve been with him -- he’s at another event that was already scheduled -- I’ve been with him at quite a few events over the last two days. I want to urge you not to take anything for granted. Sometimes as Democrats we can feel the prospects of victory and success. Sometimes there is a temptation to say, oh well, we’ll relax a little bit. You know that’s a deadly error and you’re not going to make that mistake, but I want to give you a couple of reasons to redouble your efforts.

The United States of America was born in 1789 of a revolutionary idea that we the people are the best stewards of our destiny and that self-government could prosper on this earth. And our founders designed the most brilliantly written political document in all of human history in our Constitution.

The people, of course, made it much better -- they wouldn’t ratify it until they sent them back into convention and said, add the Bill of Rights. We want freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and all of the other guarantees in the Bill of Rights.

Our founders were probably the most literate generation in all of history and they were keen students of human nature. And they understood quite well that what they were doing was a sharp break from all of the history that preceded America. They had studied what happened in ancient Athens. They knew the story of the Roman republic and how it fell when a returning general seized power. They knew that democracy was possible, but they know that it was fragile. And they knew that the greatest threat to the survival of democracy lay deep within human nature.

And thus they designed a framework that was intended to avoid the accumulation of too much power in the hands of any one person or any one small group of people, who, they understood, would inevitably, because of human nature, have their own interests that could get out of proportion in their minds compared to the public interests and the high principles on which they always wanted this great country to be based.

And so they established three branches of government and made them independent one from the others. And set checks and balances in place so that whenever one branch or one small group got too big for it’s britches or too much power for what was healthy, the other branches would keep them in place. And in writing that document it was not an accident that they wrote Article I about the Congress, the House, and the United States Senate. They believed that it was the most likely safeguard to prevent abuses from the President and the Executive Branch because that was what they most feared given the experiences they had with King George of England. And so the willingness and ability of members of Congress to live up to their oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution is intimately related to the most important safeguard of what America is all about.

In the state of Texas there are no statewide Democratic officials. In the state of Florida there is one. And he is an independent voice. And he calls them as he sees them. And one of the most important questions that is at stake in the Senate race is whether or not Florida wants a rubber stamp, another rubber stamp, to go along with whatever the Executive Branch wants, or whether you recognize and understand that especially in this moment in our history it is particularly important to have a senator who is independent, who will hold them accountable and say, this is right, that’s wrong, and hold their feet to the fire.

Let me give you an example. I’m an environmentalist. I’m proud that Senator Bill Nelson has fought to protect the coastline of Florida against off-shore drilling. The Secretary of the Interior, with whom Senator Nelson has so frequently crossed swords, you may have noticed or you may not have, resigned on Friday night. You know, reading tea leaves is something you learn a little bit about if you’re up there long enough. Tipper and I live in Nashville, Tennessee, but I still read a few tea leaves. And when a cabinet official exits after the news deadlines on a Friday evening, it’s hard to know what it means. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a triumphal exit. It means they don’t want it to be noticed too much because that’s what Friday nights are for in the political world. You know how it goes. But I want you to give full credit to Bill Nelson for backing her down and protecting the coastline in Florida.

Now I want to say something here that in my opinion goes beyond any of the specific issues. There are so many of them, but they all have a few things in common. How many times have we listened to the current administration and their supporters in the Congress and in the state offices here in Florida that are Republican and after a few years, suddenly everyone wakes up and says, what they’ve been telling us has been completely wrong. I’m not calling it a lie. I’m not, I’m not. I’m just saying that, you know, we got the impression, we got what turned out to be a false impression that Saddam Hussein had a lot to do with attacking our country on September 11th. We got the impression that he was about to build an atomic bomb with uranium from Africa and give it to his buddy Osama Bin Laden. We got the impression that our troops would be welcomed with flowers and that they would speedily go about the task of putting a democracy in place and that we wouldn’t need many troops because it would be a cakewalk. All those impressions turned out to be false. Now I don’t know how that happened, but we’re paying a price and unfortunately it’s a heavy price.

In my religious tradition there is a saying in the Bible that I read -- “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” There were warnings from the general in charge of the Army, General Eric Shinseki -- we don’t have enough troops to do this, it’s dangerous to do it with so few and with the plan that’s not thought out. And they cashiered him and silenced him. And the others got the message. His warning was ignored.

There was a warning of 9-11 -- Osama Bin Laden was determined to attack within the United States of America. In eight years in the White House President Clinton and I a few times got a direct and really immediate statement like that in one of those daily briefings and every time, as you would want and expect, we had a fire drill, brought everybody in. What else do we know about this? What have we done to prepare for this? What else could we do? Are we certain of the sources? Get us more information on that. We want to know everything about this and we want to make sure our country is prepared. In August of 2001, such a clear warning was given, and nothing, nothing, happened. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Four Augusts later, as Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the city of New Orleans, having crossed South Florida and then gaining strength from the warmer waters of the gulf, there were warnings that the levees were in danger. No questions were asked. No evacuation plan was put in place. The buses were left to be flooded along with the rest of the city. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

A special committee of 11 Republicans, all Republicans, did a study of how that could have happened. Let me tell you what they said, and this is an exact quote. “In the White House,” they said, “there was a blinding lack of situational awareness.” Where there is a blinding lack of situational awareness, the people perish.

What is going on there now? There are still refrigerators in front yards, and there are still bodies under rubble not yet recovered. The levees have not yet been repaired. There were warnings.

When the important legislation to help senior citizens pay for their prescription drugs was being presented to the Congress, inside the bureaucracy the experts with the knowledge who had calculated the numbers were saying, this won’t work. The numbers are all wrong. And Democrats in the Congress said, we want those numbers, we want the testimony. We want to know what the truth is. And the truth was locked from the Congress. The testimony was not allowed. The awareness was not there. And then, of course, the legislation turned out to be catastrophically flawed.

There were warnings that the economic plan would create giant deficits and put our economic future at risk. The Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, came in at the beginning of that plan for his first meeting in the Oval Office and then wrote in his memoirs that the meeting lasted an hour and that there was not one single question. If you were a member of the cabinet or shared the responsibility for charting the economic destiny of our country, would you be curious about the plan you were about to enact? Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Finally, there are warnings now, and have been for many years, that the rising temperatures of our world, caused by global warming pollution, are raising the temperature of the oceans as well. Warnings that the hotter ocean water makes hurricanes stronger, increasing their destructive power. Are those warnings being ignored?

I think it’s a lot more complicated. What I’m getting at is that all of these things have a common thread running through them. When our country began with those checks and balances, our founders wanted us to make the principles of democracy live and breathe in our hearts and in our daily lives by talking with one another about the facts as best we could establish them, the best evidence we could find, reason together and use the rule of reason to make the best decisions that we could. Put partisanship aside as much as possible. Of course there’s always going to be partisanship. But let’s join together as Americans and try to do what is right for our country. And how do we determine what’s right? By looking at the facts and by being honest with one another. And being truthful with one another. If it offends some big company or some special interest, so be it. Let’s do what’s right for the people.

How many of you here have had the feeling in the last few years, that something has gone badly wrong with America? How many of you here have had the feeling that there’s something a little strange about the way decisions have been made? How many of you have had the feeling that the way it’s been done is just kind of contrary to what the United States of America is all about?

General George Washington at Valley Forge, in the darkest hours of our revolution, during a time when a war correspondent by the name of Thomas Paine wrote, “these are the times that try men’s souls,” led an army, rag-tag as it was, trying to survive that cold winter and emerge in the spring with some chance of victory to bring forth a new nation based on liberty and the principles of justice that mark America’s role in the world. And during that cold winter, some British soldiers were captured, and while they were held, two of Washington’s lieutenants came and said, “you know, our soldiers, when they were captured by the British or their allies the Hessians, have been tortured terribly. Some of the fellows want to return the favor and torture these captives.”

And George Washington said no -- no matter that in all prior history that has been commonplace, we are different. What made us different, he said, was that we respect the dignity of individuals, because the dignity of the individual is what our system is based on. That’s where the right of free speech and free worship goes, and if the whole American system was going to work we had to be true to ourselves and to the basic principles of Americans. So he said no. Every president from George Washington all the way through until now honored that principle. In every war there have been excesses and exceptions that come out of the extremes of combat and war but never previously has it been official U.S. policy to depart from that respect that we should not torture people.

My friends, I truly believe, not everybody here may agree with this, but I genuinely believe that American democracy faces a time of challenge and trial right now more serious than any we have ever faced. The current White House, backed by the Republican Congress, now asserts that the government can eavesdrop on anybody’s conversation here that they want to, that they can go into your homes, they call it “sneak-and-peak,” without a warrant. They assert that this White House, on the say-so of one person, the President, can lock up any American citizen for the rest of his or her life, if the Executive Branch determines that’s what they want to do, without allowing them to see a lawyer or even informing their family. This sounds so strange, doesn’t it? It’s so contrary to the constitution and to our way of life and to our principles.

But let me close by telling you that the good news is that America is waking up to their game. America is catching on to what they are all about. Even many Republicans are saying enough is enough.

There is another common thread and it runs among all of these candidates and the others that you are offering up here in Florida, and it is that all of them are supportive of what America really is all about and would oppose what this White House and this Congress is trying to do.

We are a partisan gathering. We have an opportunity in the political system to fight for independent voices that will make our checks and balances work and help to restore the good health of America’s democracy. But my friends, much more is required. Beyond partisanship, even as we fight through this election season, we have to reach out to our Republican and independent friends and form a bond, insofar that it is possible to do so, and make the powerful point that we the people of these United States of America, are going to stand up for what America is all about and take our country back.

God bless you, and let’s start right here in Palm Beach county. Thank you.

Florida Dems