Al Gore: Address to the 1996 Democratic National Convention

About the Author

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C. His father, Albert, Sr., was elected to the House of Representatives in 1939, and in 1952 he began a Senate career that would last until 1970. The younger Al was raised in the elite circles of Washington, where his family groomed him for politics from an early age. He graduated from Harvard and shortly thereafter enlisted in the army, serving in Vietnam for five months of his two-year military service. Before he left for Vietnam, Gore married Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) Aitcheson. He was discharged from the army three months early in order to pursue religious studies at Vanderbilt University, and he also began a five-year career as a journalist for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1974 Gore enrolled in law school at Vanderbilt.

Raised as a senator's son, Gore eventually followed in his father's footsteps. In 1976 he left law school to run for the House of Representatives, winning the seat that represented the Gore family home in Carthage, Tennessee. In 1984 Gore successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He built a reputation for being an articulate interrogator as a member of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, where he gained national attention for investigating the potential dangers of chemicals used in manufacturing flame-retardant children's pajamas and the public health threat posed by the Love Canal toxic waste site. He cosponsored the first Superfund Bill to finance cleanup of hazardous waste sites and helped pass the National Organ Transplant Act, which created a system to match organ donors with recipients. He also actively campaigned for arms reduction during the arms control debates of the Reagan administration.

Following a disastrous bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1988, Gore redirected his political activities toward legislation affecting technology and the environment. In 1988 he traveled to the South Pole with atmospheric scientists and visited the Amazon a year later; both of these trips increased his concern about the impact of human activities on the environment. In response, Gore introduced a number of proposals in the Senate, including bills to develop alternative energy sources and to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons. In addition to his environmental bills, he also wrote the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided funding to expand a fledgling Internet.

Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate in 1992 based on his expertise in the environment, technology, and arms control along with his moderate position as a “New Democrat.” The term New Democrat was used to describe leaders who sought to align the party's image not with the big government programs of its New Deal past but with a more global, modern constituency that embraced change. Gore and others associated with the New Democrats were open to importing techniques and ideas from the business sector in order to streamline government services and improve productivity.

As vice president, Gore worked to improve government efficiency and reduce bureaucracy, and he supported welfare reform. He led a massive reevaluation of federal government operations, detailed in his report titled “From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less,” which called for a 12 percent reduction in the federal workforce over five years. Following his delivery of the successful keynote address at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Gore established himself as a viable candidate for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination. Facing George W. Bush in the 2000 election, Gore won the popular vote by approximately five hundred thousand votes but lost in a contested recount of Florida's twenty-five electoral votes, a fight that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gore conceded the election to Bush on December 13, 2000.

Once out of public office, Gore became a vocal critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies as well as its engagement in Iraq. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on publicizing global warming, as depicted in the film An Inconvenient Truth. He also continued to pursue his interests in technology; Gore served as an adviser to Google; joined the board of Apple Computer in 2005; and founded a television news network, Current, aimed at younger viewers.