The Answer to Bloomberg? 
Ad-Free Gore!
By Hank Edson
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is breaking from the Republican Party to make an independent run at the presidency using his own fortune. Bloomberg is the latest act in a political season burgeoning with discontented energy after six plus years of the worst presidency in the history of our nation. First there were all those potential firsts: the first woman president (Hillary), the first black president (Barack), the first Latino (Bill), the first Mormon (Mitt). Then there were those two non-candidates polling high in both the Democratic and Republican Parties: Al Gore and Fred Thompson. And now, there is Bloomberg, the conservative independent. All this energy is good for a system corrupt with corporate campaign finance, there is no doubt, but none of this energy will provide the American people the type of political leadership that can repair the damage that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have wrought.
All the “firsts”—those candidates dressing up the debate podiums with their carefully centrist, tentatively strident calls for change—are completely wedded to the system of campaign finance that insures their own corruption. This money does not come for free. These candidates want to win and they do not find within themselves any other way to succeed that does not involve accepting the corrupting consequences of corporate cash.
Al Gore says he’s not getting in the race; Fred Thompson is carefully moving ahead. Bloomberg is looking for a way not to have to be so careful. The problem with Thompson and Bloomberg is that they have devoted themselves to the Republican Party that brought us Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Gingrich, Delay and Bush Jr. Thompson and Bloomberg are part of a political establishment that has over the last four decades dedicated itself to putting corporate America in charge of our government by pandering to the Religious Right and by crafting a nationalistic foreign policy that institutionalizes an out of control industrial-arms complex. Republicans, even self-made, independent ones, are not acceptable candidates in any shape or form following the disaster that the Republican Party raised to the Presidency in 2000 and 2004. Therefore, the smart money, not the corporate money, has to be invested in Al Gore.
Without Gore, Bloomberg’s candidacy presents a real problem for Hillary, Barack, John Edwards and the rest of the Democratic Party. Bloomberg will be corporate-cash-free. This difference is in many ways more significant than any difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties so long as they both remain wedded to corporate cash. Even as, candidate after candidate side-steps further and further to the left, not on principle, but in response to public anger over the state of our nation, the Democrats are not providing the kind of clear vision we are all looking for our candidates to provide. They can’t; their corporate sponsors would not find such vision acceptable. But for all his independence, Bloomberg will not bring a progressive vision based on democratic principles to the office of the presidency either. Instead, he will bring a perspective developed during an entire lifetime within the Republican Party.
What’s to be done? After the Republican Party’s careful building of the Bush presidency are we really going to allow an independent/Republican become President of our nation?
If Bloomberg is the Republican Party’s response to corporate campaign finance corruption; the Democratic Party must find its own equally corporate-cash-free candidate. That candidate is Al Gore. Here’s how it works.
In his recent book, The Assault on Reason, Gore meditates at length on the deleterious effects of television on the application of reason in the political process. He laments that a huge majority of every major candidate’s campaign budget goes directly to tv ads. He also adamantly states that The Assault on Reason is not a candidate’s book. These three aspects of Gore’s book point to a single clear conclusion.
Gore should announce that he will be making an ad-free run for the presidency. Let’s look at why this strategy is not as crazy as the mainstream pundits would have us believe. First, Gore already is running in second or third place for the Democratic nomination without spending any money or entering the campaign. As when one league in baseball is incredibly weak and the real contest is in the playoffs, not the World Series, here Gore’s biggest challenge is getting the Democratic nomination. On the left, the appeal of running an ad-free campaign would likely lift him to first place without doing anything else.
Second, Gore, better than any other person on the planet right now, is in a position to generate campaign coverage without using TV ads. He is already in the midst of a book tour. A smart team could easily secure Gore enough free media coverage through the 2008 election to make the ad-free strategy work. Gore could resurrect the pamphleteering tradition he fondly recalls as a pure expression of our nation’s democratic genius. Though internet circulation, through book tours, through town hall meetings, through interviews, articles and speeches from the back of train cabooses, Gore, if he wanted to, is actually in a position to run a campaign based on reason.
Gore’s book offers many good ideas for resurrecting democracy in a nation in which the last to presidential elections were stolen: prime time debates in congress, net neutrality, government funded campaigns, wikis, blogs, and CurrentTV. None of these ideas is as bold as an ad-free campaign for the presidency. Gore can take his fight to the street both for the sake of reason and for the sake of the planet. If he wants to really do something about global warming, why not make a presidential campaign about it? No other person on the planet is in a position to make this work, but Al Gore can make it work, if he dares to be truly bold, to truly make a presidential campaign about opening up the public discourse, to make it about really giving our attention to big and imaginative ideas that really try to create the revolution that we so desperately need following the criminal presidency of George W. Bush.
We, the people, of the United States of America desperately need a progressive politician to offer an alternative stand against corrupt corporate campaign finance than that offered by Michael Bloomberg. The answer to Bloomberg? Ad-Free Gore!
Copyright © Hank Edson 2007