The "Thin to Win" Al Gore?

From being the butt of about a thousand jokes, Al Gore has made a tremendous comeback. He's had a helluva good few years -- produced and narrated "An Inconvenient Truth," an Oscar win for the movie, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and the Live Earth concerts. All of these things are impressive to be sure, but what I find even more intriguing is his new book, The Assault on Reason.

NPR says this about The Assault on Reason:

"Gore takes a harsh look at the media's fascination with flash over substance and a lack of courage among politicians of both parties." Click here to read or listen to the interview.

Gore's assertion is that, regardless of party, today's current politicians exhibit a lack of leadership by avoiding the hard questions of the day. Even worse, the populace has become so shallow and short-sighted to not care that the very people they've elected aren't doing their jobs. They're not governing.

Webster's dictionary defines governing as: to control and direct the making and administration of policy. To me, this infers a collection of data, forming a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis through discussion, and implementing a plan. Are politician's of any stripe actually doing this? Are any of them doing it fearlessly?

In Robert J. Samuelson's recent column, The Debate We're Not Having, he explores this theme as well, but this time in relation to the Social Security conundrum. The reality is: assuming that inflation remains in check and that the GNP stays within historical trends, taxes on wages must double in order to meet Social Security obligations. What would that do to the American economy as individual consumers lose as much as 20% of their discretionary spending power? Or, would it result in cutting others programs?

Other programs like roads and bridges, for instance? It will be awhile before we know if the I-35 bridge failure is one of design, maintenance, or god's will, but we do know that funds for highway maintenance and building are shrinking. In Missouri for instance, a so-called "perfect storm" of lack of funding, maintenance, and needed expansion due to urban sprawl may cause the Department of Transportation to go in to a maintenance-only mode by 2010. Yet, there remains a strong feeling from the general public against adding more taxes to gasoline (among the lowest in the nation) to avert this crisis.

And is all of this fueled by a NIMBY-minded populace? One of the popular rallying cries from early 90s political campaigns was to get tough on crime. Three strikes and your out! Serve full prison terms as prescribed by judges! Hmmm... So that means we'll need to house more prisoners which means more jails which means they'll have to be built somewhere, but OMG! not in my backyard! Oh, and we may have to raise taxes to do all of that too. So, for all the platitudes and saber rattling about being tough, we didn't really have a workable solution now did we?

These are all tough questions to which I do not profess to have the answers. What I do know is this: Someone has to begin a dialogue. And we need to put aside all of the politics of fear and name-calling. Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that we're all Americans and these solutions are good for all of us.

To me, the current pack of presidential candidates from both parties is lackluster. I'm not seeing from any of them a departure from where we've been. I don't yet see the leader that can take us to a better place.

Note: Dialogue is a Chicago song and perhaps the last of their politically inspired songs. I love the interplay between the two characters in the song. While the songs certainly has a slanted view, I wish we could all talk more about things that matter and less about American Idol.