The Wilderness Campaign

I love a good New Yorker profile, and I enjoy David Remnick’s writing, and I find Al Gore strangely fascinating, so I’m really loving this long, terrific profile of Gore in this week’s magazine. I’ve long had this odd affinity/empathy for Gore. Some of my favorite excerpts from the profile:

“Basically, the answer is, I do not expect to ever be a candidate again,” Gore said. “I really don’t. The second part of the answer is, I haven’t ruled it out completely. And the third qualifier is, I don’t add the second part as a way of signalling coyness. It’s merely to complete an honest answer to the question and it in no way changes the principal part of the answer. Which is, I really do not expect that I will be a candidate.”

I love it.

And then there’s a discussion about the public sphere, in which Remnick says that Gore referred to

the brain-imaging center at New York University; “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” by Leonard Shlain; “Broca’s Brain,” by Carl Sagan; an Op-Ed piece in the Times about the decline of reading in America, by Andrew Solomon; the lack of research on the relation between the brain and television — “There is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television”; Gutenberg and the rise of print; the sovereign rule of reason in the Enlightenment; individualism — “a term first used by de Tocqueville to describe America in the eighteen-thirties”; Thomas Paine; Benjamin Franklin. “O.K., now fast-forward through the telegraph, the phonograph.” O.K., but we didn’t fast-forward: first, there was Samuel Morse, who failed to hear the news of his wife’s dying while he was painting a portrait — “You know, he has a painting in the White House, if I remember correctly” — and therefore went out and invented a faster means of communication. “Now fast-forward again to Marconi… now that’s an interesting story”; the sinking of the Titanic; David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term “broadcast”; moving right along to “the nineteen visual centers of the brain”; an article on “flow” in Scientific American; the “orienting reflex” in vertebrates; the poignancy and “ultimate failure” of political demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public sphere…

Finally:

“One thing about Gore personally is that he is an introvert,” another former aide said. “Politics was a horrible career choice for him. He should have been a college professor or a scientist or an engineer. He would have been happier.”

At heart, Gore’s just a big ol’ nerd. I guess that’s why I empathize with him so much.

(For more Gore, here’s another New Yorker profile of him from four years ago by Nicholas Lemann.)