Vox.com maven Ezra Klein tells America to forget Hillary Clinton — the Democrats should run Al Gore for president again.
And why not? Klein asks. Gore is richer than Mitt Romney and can fund his own campaign.
Klein also feels that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have a big enough agenda to be the candidate the Democrats need, but “the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear.”
“Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound,” he writes.
Gore, Klein says, dominates the big issue: global warming. “Income inequality is a serious problem,” Klein insists. “But climate change is an existential threat.”
Gore has made hundreds of millions in the last few years, Klein reports. The former veep has “carved a path through finance and telecommunications, becoming fabulously wealthy — richer, even, than Mitt Romney — as an investor and mogul.”
After the $100 million sale of his stake in a a cable TV network in 2004, sold to Al Jazeera News the network owned by the oil-rich Qatari government, and a big windfall realized by selling some $30 million of his Apple stock, Gore is now an extremely rich man.
With this much cash, Klein says, Gore should be able to fund his own campaign for president, and should have no problem fundraising despite Hillary’s success.
Still, if some are worried that Hillary is old news and not someone who might excite a new generation, what is Al Gore if not another retread form the 1990s? This, Klein thinks is not a worry. After all, “Gore cares enough about what comes next that he literally titled his last book The Future. But if he is really so obsessed with the future, then running in 2016 is his best chance to change it.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter: @warnerthuston. Email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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