Al Gore in Words and Images: A Profile

This week's profile is a video I created using footage I spent a weekend collecting from around Massachusetts and the words of Al Gore from a number of speeches, interviews, and policy forums.

This is not a biographical documentary, and it's not an opinionated documentary either. This is Al Gore "as is."

Words can be powerful and moving, especially Gore's and especially with accompanying music and images, but is Al Gore merely a master of rhetoric?

Has Al Gore failed in his efforts to effect change?

What lies beyond the inspiring words?

How much progress have we made?

One Man's Investment in America: A Profile

One morning in June of 2005, Dr. Mark Klein decided he should run for President.

While covering the election in New Hampshire last winter, I walked into a White Hen Pantry and noticed a man passing out fliers for his Presidential campaign. Initially, I was temped to dismiss him as another publicity hound in New Hampshire running a vanity bid for the White House. Instead, what he said to me caught my attention. Mark Klein was “sick and tired of writing letters and complaining.” Klein believed deeply in citizens actively pursuing solutions to problems this country faces and in his ability to “guide our troubled society through very rocky shoals.” Running for President was simply performing his civic duty.

Klein, a sixty-seven year old retired psychiatrist, decided to take the money he was saving to reward himself with a gift like a luxury car and begin a campaign. Klein would seek America’s highest office having never previously run for any political position. Once he completed FEC Forms 1 and 2, Klein was on his way.

Over two and a half years later Klein returned home from snowy New Hampshire to his home in Oakland, California; he had received nineteen votes in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. Dr. Klein finished second-to-last among the twenty-one Republican candidates in New Hampshire, but the significance of his campaign is bigger than the small number of votes he received.

As a psychiatrist, Klein feels he has diagnosed some of the problems of America. “I always tell patients ‘if you continue to go in this direction you’re going to have a bad end.’ What happens is they don’t listen to me until they have to go into rehab. America has meshiga,” Klein explained to me over the phone earlier this week. “If I were President that wouldn’t work for me.”

In an election year where the predominant campaign theme is “change,” Klein’s campaign was rooted in a different philosophy: returning America to the strengths it once possessed. “I was in the last generation of people raised in an America that I thought was governed by grownups. Now the country is run by a bunch of juveniles.” A campaign flyer Klein distributed in New Hampshire featured a portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower hovering behind his own. Though Eisenhower is often remembered for his command of American troops through France and Germany during World War II, Klein was not invoking his memory to make any foreign policy or military statements.


“Eisenhower was very cautious about foreign adventures, but he was also careful about fiscal responsibility” says Klein. It was around domestic issues like the economy that Klein’s political platform was centered. After telling a story about growing up the son of a butcher, working in his father’s store, and making (on good days) $1 an hour, he solemnly declared that the buying power of wages is woefully low now. In Klein’s eyes, the prospects of creating a middle class family like the one he grew up in are in jeopardy.

Klein ran for President as a Republican, and his position on a hot button issue like illegal immigration, for example, is very much in line with the GOP’s positions. “Millions of illegal immigrants drive down wages and take once good-paying blue collar jobs,” wrote Klein on his MySpace campaign page. On other issues, however, Klein found it difficult to connect with the popular policy positions of either the Republican or Democratic parties.

As a vocal supporter of the Fathers Rights Movement—a self-described civil rights campaign that fights to end what it sees as discrimination against fathers in family custody courts—Klein’s core of supporters came from the Movement. Though the Movement has a sizeable following around the country (and there are over 25 million non-custodial parents in the United States), they are often deemed too radical and extraneous to get the attention of those in the political establishment. Klein has four children and has spent much of his life helping to raise them. In Klein's view, the negative impact that current policies have on the fate of today’s children was enough to get Klein out of bed and into the Presidential race.


“The children come first!” proclaims one of Klein’s pieces of campaign literature. In order to ensure the economic livelihood of the next generation of Americans, Klein believes our government ought to pay down the national debt, regulate interest rates, and crack down on companies outsourcing jobs overseas.

I asked Klein if his adamant opposition to free trade was out of touch with the inevitable growth of globalization. Klein turned the tables on me immediately. “Are all our children supposed to work at McDonalds or Best Buy?” he asked. Klein admits he lives in an upscale bubble, but in campaigning he “ran into all these kids who were college graduates working at Starbucks—they don’t have anything. Is our future to give everything away? If that is the future, it’s nuts.”

Though Klein’s position on globalization is hardly mainstream, he argued his point clearly and with the experience of a man who’s heard the concerns of voters around the country. After all, campaigning heavily in three states, building a volunteer network, and working crowds at local conventions and straw polls was what Klein did through most of 2006 and 2007.

Though he is far from an established politician or veteran of political campaigns, Klein did have a following in the Northeast corner of Georgia. This base of support gave Klein hope that he might be able to make a small showing in Georgia. Fanning out from his corner of support, he thought he could then pick up enough momentum to get his name and candidacy into the MSM and onto voters’ radar.

Unfortunately, New Hampshire would be the last chance for Klein to make a stand. Of the states he initially campaigned in, New Hampshire was the only one in which Klein could get on the ballot (by paying a $1,000 registration fee). Although he placed highly in the Des Moines straw poll and other polls at conventions around the country, Klein feels the Republican party systematically squeezed him out of the race by denying him spots on state ballots and at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa.

Klein was aware that his campaign was drawing near an end when I met him just days before that state’s Primary. When I asked him if he did more than distribute fliers in New Hampshire, Klein explained “well that’s all I did, nobody invited me to anything [he was barred from debates and other forums]. I decided to spend every day walking around and talking to everybody. I figured if I had a shot it was by word of mouth. Anybody with a heartbeat got a brochure.”

After what he considered a “very poor result” in New Hampshire, Klein decided to return home and get back to pursuing his hobbies and spending time with his kids and grandchildren. As he wound down his campaign, however, Klein says he has no regrets about running: “The money I spent on this was my gift to the United States. To repay America for all it has done for me and my family. It’s basically a charitable gift.”

Since ending his campaign Klein has split from the Republican Party and says he is now supporting Senator Barack Obama.

"Super Volunteers" Reshape America: A Profile

Yesterday’s two Democratic Primaries brought more than three million voters to the polls to choose between Senators Obama and Clinton, but behind those votes were thousands of volunteers from both sides. Over the past week, I spoke with three of the volunteers about their experiences.

Traditional canvassing efforts have been around for many years, and by the 2000 Election the Internet already played a significant role. There is something noticeably different about the ways in which activists have been channeling their energy in the 2008 Election. Their responses to the candidates’ calls to action are more than constructive and effective; they’re self-generated and inspired.

The Obama Volunteer Corps fanned out through the historic Olivewood Cemetery in Houston on a cleanup mission for two Saturdays in April as part of the community-oriented work the group performs on a regular basis. The group of more than 70 volunteers, under the direction of twenty-eight-year-old Brad Pritchett, is one of three similar organizations across the country where Obama supporters work together on largely non-political service projects. “The Corps’ main purpose is to take Senator Obama’s message of change and prove that words can inspire people to do remarkable things in their own communities,” says Pritchett. After the cleanup at Olivewood ended last month, one member of the Corps began working with the City of Houston to establish a long-term solution that would protect the cemetery.

In Santa Cruz, California a volunteer has been working feverishly for Senator Hillary Clinton on the other side of the Democratic campaign. Vickie Nam, a doctoral student at UC-Santa Cruz didn’t stop her volunteering at canvassing and phone-banking; instead she created an online business (Visit it HERE) where she sells Hillary Clinton t-shirts of her own design. A portion of the money from the site’s sales goes to the Clinton campaign and a portion goes to Wellesley College, Clinton's and Nam’s alma mater. Nam, who does not typify many young voters in her choice of candidate, penned a letter to California Congressman Sam Farr (an undecided superdelegate) arguing her case for Clinton. She wrote that young people supporting Senator Clinton are “resisting the master narrative and are perhaps demonstrating true grass-roots organization.”

After a group of Obama supporters on a local college campus were featured on a television broadcast, Ms. Nam collaborated with a producer at another area station to create and air a segment featuring young Hillary supporters. “I have always had a passion for creating outlets for adolescents and emerging adults to speak out and be heard,” she says. A second-generation Korean-American, Nam sees strength in Senator Clinton that resonates with her and has inspired her to be such an active volunteer: “I am inspired and often moved to tears by the strength that Hillary has revealed during this stormy election, but she keeps on because she loves and dreams about America.”

While Ms. Nam has been helping out Senator Clinton directly, Brad Pritchett maintains that the Obama Volunteer Corps is less about politics and more about lending others a hand. His group welcomes any volunteers to join their service efforts. However, Pritchett’s political beliefs clearly motivate his actions. He sees the civic efforts of the Obama campaign as reflecting the “desire of people wanting to embrace a political message which returns much of the power to the people, as opposed to giving it all to politicians.” For that reason Pritchett isn't surprised that Clinton volunteers have not created groups similar to his. Having a philosophy deeply rooted in the platform and vision of a candidate while simultaneously transcending the traditional boundaries of political activism the Obama Volunteer Corps has reached an unexpectedly balanced approach to activism in the midst of a heated campaign.

The creation of the Obama Volunteer Corps is not the only non-traditional effort started by supporters of the Senator. In the central Ohio town of Newark, singer/songwriter and composer Celeste Friedman recently wrote a song and created a YouTube video accompaniment called “Oh Barack!” In 2004 Friedman penned and performed a song for the Kerry campaign entitled “Carry Me Home,” but this time around she isn’t begging her Democratic candidate to fight harder, instead she has been inspired by the uplifting messages of the Obama campaign.

Friedman’s Obama tune came to her easily, she says, especially because she does not consider herself an overly political songwriter. “The one thing that was standing out the most as I was writing the song was light. It was all I could think about in the darkness of the world as it exists right now.” After becoming a supporter of Obama this January, Friedman now says she is more firmly behind Senator Obama than ever and feels she is truly counting on him now that she has put her own stamp on his campaign.

In the process of creating a video slideshow to play along with her song, Friedman collected pictures of Barack Obama with the help of over forty independent photographers on Flickr.com. Friedman says the responses she received from Obama supporters around the web who enjoyed her song pushed her to create the video, and she has stayed in contact with a number of the project’s contributors. Though she communicated her political beliefs through a musical skill most do not have, Friedman says, “I didn’t take advantage of that like the people [activist songwriters] in the 1960’s did. I think I’m no different than anyone else in this country.” In her eyes, ‘Oh Barack’ is “a little cheesy, but it was what was coming out of me.”

As pundits around the country declare the Democratic nomination sealed up and predict the course of events in the coming months, thousands of “super volunteers,” both Republicans and Democrats, won’t stop until every vote has been cast and counted. Celeste Friedman has an upcoming gig for which she will (somehow) have to write a song about John McCain to perform in front of a group of parents and children. The Obama Volunteer Corps will continue working on Houston-area service projects even after the November election. Meanwhile, Vickie Nam recently delivered a shipment of 400 Hillary Clinton signs to be transported to Oregon, the next stop on a long and busy campaign trail.