Al Gore: Modern Politics' Movie Star

[babylonsister]

http://www.alternet.org/story/52359/

Al Gore: Modern Politics' Movie Star

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted May 26, 2007.

Like the children's classic, "A Fish Out of Water," Al Gore has outgrown his fishbowl. He has developed a following of millions simply by reminding people that they can use knowledge as a source of influence.


For the organizers of Al Gore's one and only gig in Northern California promoting his new book, it was a little like that children's classic, "A Fish Out of Water," in which a boy overfeeds his goldfish and it grows and grows, outswelling its bowl, then a vase, then a bathtub.

Authors tour the country constantly, hawking their books. You see the fliers in bookshop windows. At night, in a space cleared for the purpose, you see that spectacle: three or four rows of folding chairs arranged to face the podium where a hopeful figure poses, looking so alone, scanning the empty seats while pretending not to. Bookstore owners have told me that attendance at author events has dwindled lately. Some stores around the San Francisco Bay Area, long hailed as America's second-biggest reading hub, have stopped hosting readings altogether.

Even so, planners at Book Passage -- an independent store in tiny Marin County -- expected a decent turnout for Gore. Ambitiously, they decided to charge for tickets to Wednesday night's event and co-sponsor it with Dominican University, a small, nearby Catholic school, and stage it in its 850-seat auditorium. A few weeks in advance, the forthcoming lecture was announced rather quietly on Book Passage's website and on a Dominican site. Within two days, the auditorium was sold out. The waiting list was hundreds long. Stunned, the planners chose yet another venue, the sprawling 2,000-seat Marin Civic Center. Tickets went back on sale. Two days later, the Civic Center was sold out too -- at forty bucks a pop, for what was scheduled to be a 20-minute talk. Again, the waiting list extended over the horizon.

Movie-star proportions, clearly. But Al Gore is modern politics' movie star, not in the metaphorical sense.

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[NastyRiffraff]

1. I think this is indicative..

..of how he'd do if he'd run. The country is hungry for an intelligent, compassionate, ethical person, after what we've had for the past seven years.

Unlike Bush, Al doesn't have to be president to prove himself. He's accomplished a lot in his own right.

[babylonsister]

2. I so agree; he's a lot more palatable than many out there. I wish he'd

surprise us all.