Al Gore, a one-time vice-president serving under Bill Clinton, best known as a staunch environmentalist and the self-described “inventor of the internet” – a claim Gore later repeated only in self-mockery.
The Vice President backtracked significantly on environmental issues as he pandered to middle-of-the-road voters in the run-up to the 2000 U.S. election. Ultimately Gore won the most votes overall, but lost to the Self-Proclaimed President, George Bush (see electoral college) in the aftermath of the strangest and most public vote-recount in history, in the State of Florida.
The issue was resolved by the unprecedented intervention of the greatest
three-ring circus on earth, the U.S. Supreme Court. The court then held their own election for president, finding for Bush in a party-line
split decision – essentially invalidating the votes of several million U.S. citizens.
Numerous investigations had contrary findings about who actually won in Florida, but no one argues the fact that Al Gore won
the popular vote. Gore later repeated this fact so many times that even many of his supporters were glad to see him go.
Afterwards, Gore faded to near-invisibility, which he attempted to overcome by declining to shave, and by making the odd televised appeal to Americans about things that no one remembers anymore.
In the long run, he may be best-remembered for his
slide-show (and later film) about the threat of global warming, “
An Inconvenient Truth”. But then, if his predictions are correct and everything is burned to a crisp, maybe not.