Al Gore (my political and personal hero, btw) was on 60 Minutes tonight. While the rest of my family sat in the living room watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, I hung on Al Gore's every word in the kitchen while fixing dinner.
Behind those kind and intelligent eyes is a new spark, one that I rarely saw during the 2000 presidential campaign. His new passion for educating people about global warming has taken the place in his life that politics once held.
He had a good reason for going on 60 Minutes:
He is taking his fervor and some of his personal fortune and funneling them into a huge, new $300 million advertising campaign. He hired the agency that made the caveman and talking lizard ads for Geico to create global warming commercials.
The ads will start running this week on the broadcast networks and cable channels in a blitz as sweeping and expensive as a big corporation's rollout of a new product.
"Now, the rest of the future ads are going to stress this bipartisan coalition that's coming together on this with some surprising pairings," Stahl said.
"Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, two people who don't agree on very much at all," Gore remarked.
"They're going to do an ad together?" Stahl asked.
"Are doing an ad together," Gore pointed out.
And other unlikely couples, like Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton, are also doing an ad.
"Now, we're told that this ad campaign is going to cost a barrel of money. How are you paying for this?" Stahl asked.
"Well, Tipper and I - thank you again -have put all of the profits from the movie and the book that we would have otherwise gotten, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' to this," Gore said.
"All the profits?" Stahl asked.
"Correct. All that we would have received, absolutely," Gore said.
The only person I can think of that could get Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton to sit on the same sofa is Al Gore. And that's just the billionth reason that I think he is a great man. I'm glad he's not president. He is too good for it.
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