QUESTION: What is the one thing you would most like to see happen by this time next year?
March 31 2008: Reversing custom, Al Gore celebrated his 60th birthday by giving presents to other people, in fact to everyone in the world. He announced he would run again to be president of the United States.
In November, he achieved the White House in a landslide after a genuinely free and open election, unstained by the media smears and mean spirit of a belatedly repentant television and the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, that disfigured the race in 2000 every bit as much as the political hatchet work of the supreme court. His presidency immediately offered a dynamic American initiative on global warming to which Al Gore alerted a dozing world early in the 1970s.
But that was just for starters. The Gore presidency promised to restore the concept of international cooperation on which liberal western civilisation was revived and sustained in the ruins of the second world war. It would take time for the long national nightmare to become a memory - on Iraq, on fighting terror without sacrificing values, on Congressional sodomy, on a widening rich-poor divide - but under the leadership of its 44th president America found its true self again.
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