Maybe you've seen this ad:



It's part of the This Is Reality Campaign, which is, itself, part of the Alliance for Climate Protection.  If that sounds familiar, it may be because the ACP is Al Gore's big climate umbrella -- the organization that includes, for instance, the WE campaign, which is running some ads of its own right now as part of its Repower America challenge.

They're moving, politically motivating ads, the kind of ads that, during the campaign, might have made one want to research one's candidate's background on these issues.  The clean coal ad is, with its sarcastic tone, clearly an attack ad, meant to ridicule the idea of existing clean coal techology.  But with the campaign won... who do these ads target now?  I'll give you a hint: it's not our current president.



Barack Obama actively campaigned on the idea of clean coal technology, and every time I heard him say it, I wondered if Al Gore had bitten through his tongue yet, trying not to respond.  This week, I've seen the answer.

I started to write about how this is really the beginning of the intra-party attacks, but then I paused (as I so often do¹) to think about Abraham Lincoln.

Barack Obama says he's been reading about Abraham Lincoln recently.  So have I.  In creating his "team of rivals" (is anyone else reading that book?  We should talk), he chose as treasury secretary a guy named Salmon Chase.  Chase wanted more than anything to be president, so much so that he actively campaigned -- in a time when hardly anyone campaigned at all -- against the Lincoln administration while he was still in Lincoln's cabinet.  He did this by taking "radical" positions on issues like slavery, where Lincoln, holding the Union together with both hands, was considered more of a moderate, and then by advertising himself as being ahead of the curve.

Lincoln allowed it.  He admitted privately that, if he had to choose a wing of his party, he would be closer in policy and ideology to the radical side, but that as president he needed to hold the coalition together as best he could.  Thus he let Chase careen around Ohio, claiming responsibility for the Emancipation Proclamation while castigating Lincoln for not announcing it sooner.  The benefits of this were two-fold for Lincoln: It helped him to have Chase's position, so near his own, more widely advertised, and as he actually wanted candidates closer to Chase's position to be elected, he was happy to provide administration support for his campaigning.

Al Gore isn't Salmon Chase -- I believe him when he says he doesn't want to be president.  But I do think he feels as passionately about global warming as Chase ever did about occupying the White House -- and Barack Obama, if he's been reading his Lincoln, should capitalize on this as soon as possible.

Lincoln's way of getting things done was one that radicals in his party found extremely frustrating.  He'd come to a conclusion -- say, that Southern slaves should be emancipated -- and then, instead of charging directly ahead with instituting his conclusion as law, he'd take the time to educate the public, beforehand, through letters and speeches, through small public statements, through smaller laws.  He'd weather the attacks of the radical wing silently and stoically, letting men like Chase take the credit among them, while simultaneously weathering attacks from the opposite side for even associating with Chase.  He'd wait for the most opportune moment -- not always an obvious moment, like we so often see now (a president takes to an aircraft carrier to announce the end of major combat in Iraq, for instance), but a moment when the message could best be received, so that by the time he made his proclamation, he could make it seem like the most obvious next step for everyone.

This is part of the Gore strategy.  For too long, the "green" movement has suffered from the same problems that the radical Republicans (what a funny term!) of Lincoln's time did: they absolutely were on the side of moral and political right, but they were a small movement in a vast country still skeptical of the need for change.  Public opinion had to turn before real change could happen.  The battle may be started by a few brave souls on one side screaming bloody murder, but to win, it must eventually be joined by the majority of Americans.

This is what Lincoln understood, and it seems like a lesson that Barack Obama, who has talked about "teachable moments," knows, too.  The time is nearly right for the entire country to be engaged not in a discussion of climate change, but a movement toward ending it.  Gore has been barnstorming the country, creating a movement, educating the public, and, now, he's calling on (and calling out) the next president.  Obama needs to respond -- but deliberately, and thoughtfully, and when the moment is perfect.

We seem to be almost there.

Gore has compared his call for clean energy to the Apollo Project.  It's an apt comparison, but, in making the speech in July, he may have spoken just a moment too soon.  The country needed the lengthy summer of high oil prices, the continuous play of Gore's We ads, T. Boone Pickens standing on every street corner yelling his story, and now the failing economy and the push for green jobs to be adequately prepared for his proposal.  They also needed a moderate leader -- a Lincoln figure to Gore's more radical Chase -- to be the one to propose the change.

I hope Barack Obama is this leader.  I hope the positions he held in the campaign -- the panders toward coal mining communities when he spoke about clean coal -- were the same as the political compromises Lincoln struck before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the necessary compromises that eventually deliver the power to make great change.

Here, by the way, is the close of Al Gore's July speech on climate change.  The entire speech (and the audio) is available at NPR.  It's not that hard, when listening, to imagine these same words being included in an Inaugural address.

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.