Unseen Gore Campaign Video

This is a campaign video shot by Spike Jonez during the 2000 election, passed on by Shaker Constant Comment. (If it won't play for you in-page, go here.) It’s a candid slice-of-life piece following Gore mostly around his home and spending time with his family, and Gore makes no attempt to hide its design, its intent to break down his image as “stiff.” At one point, he says, very quietly and frankly, “I’m a little more reserved than most, than a lot of the people I know in politics, but trying to break through that, that’s probably the most frustrating thing.”

It’s a wonderful piece. It really reveals the Gore some of us always saw underneath anyway, but so many others didn’t—at ease, funny, earnest, passionate.

As I watched it, I thought about 2000, and I thought about how I was torn to pieces when Bush was announced as our new president, because I feared so thoroughly the damage he’d do to the country. I thought about everything that has happened in the intervening five years—images of 9/11, the ignored Aug. 6 PDB, pictures I have seen of injured soldiers, of bloody Iraqi babies, the lost and displaced lives of the Gulf Coast, the endemic poverty within our borders that has only worsened. I thought about everything that has gone so very wrong as I watched Al Gore talk about becoming a man who found his place in the imperfect world of politics, who wanted to lead us, and I began to cry. And for a few moments, I let myself mourn the history we could have, should have, had.