Roger L. Simon: "You Know Me Al": With Obama Wounded and Hillary Unappealing, Will Gore Finally Surface?

I don't know the answer to that, but it certainly occurred to me last night while watching a nervous Obama being interviewed on CNN and Fox. It seems Barack made a very conventional and not "change" worthy mistake that could come back to haunt him, telling a half or untruth by denying he had ever heard his "Uncle" Jeremiah hurling his more extreme Jeremiads. This is almost impossible to believe and even David Gergen - America's own refugee from the Medici Court - raised an eyebrow. Will Obama be finished by this (and the ongoing Rezko affair)? Hard to tell. But the innocent days of "Hope" and "Change" are now as distant as a Doris Day movie. When I saw the word "Change" behind him on the video screen last night, I almost laughed. Even if he wins the nomination, he will have a hard time selling himself as the second coming of anything.

And Hillary, as everyone knows, has shown scant appeal and is close to the most over-exposed candidate in history. (McCain may be lucky to be somewhat out of view for a few months.)

So what is a poor Democratic Party to do... besides sing for a rock and roll band? With two tarnished candidates lumbering toward the convention, this may call for more drastic medicine. There's a great old book about baseball by Ring Lardner (published 1916) called You Know Me Al. Maybe everyone should start reading it. It begins this way: "FRIEND AL: Well, Al old pal I suppose you seen in the paper where I been sold to the White Sox..." (It's available on the Kindle.)

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John Derbyshire, the columnist at National Review Online, has been predicting - for the past year - not only that Gore will be the Democrat nominee, but that he will be the next president.

Let's see... Gore has ZERO delegates, super or otherwise. He's an "old white male."

So put him in, and the blacks riot, then sit on their hands during the election, or even start a third party spoiler.

The one good thing that might come out of it would be more debate on the absurd environmental views he has proposed - his wacko over-hyped grossly exaggerated global warming hysteria. That'll make it hard to paint Republicans as alarmist on terrorism (a favorite Democrat ploy).

I think there's a mistake somewhere. The Tibet article is about Richard Gere, not Al Gore..

Al Gore, Jr. enjoys being loved and adored. People seem to believe he is whatever they want him to be. Marty Peretz admires him for being strongly against the Muslim extremists---while the Daily Kos does so for the exact opposite reason! Obviously someone is deceiving themselves. This craziness would end instantly once Gore was on the campaign trail. A presidential candidate is compelled to disappoint a lot of folks. Al Gore, Jr. will ultimately decide to sit on the side lines. That love stuff is intoxicating. Also, the blacks will remain angry and sufficient numbers will stay home on Election Day. There is no sense for Gore to jump on a train about to crash. John McCain will likely serve only four years. Everybody can wait until 2012.

Al Gore for Prez, Barack Obama for Veep. That's gotta be the dream ticket for Dems. Everyone will be happy except for Hillary and Bill.

We'll have 16 years of Dem Presidents, and 5-7 new Supreme Court justices appointed by them.

With the Court, the new U.S.government Healthcare system, and the new U.S. Global Warming initiatives -- these two Democrats will affect us and our children for 50 years to come.

Gore won't run. Mr. Wonderful is in the midst of a $100 million IPO scam. Via Busniessweek:

Al Gore's Convenient IPO
CurrentTV's parent is launching a public offering whose terms, though sweet for the company's high-profile founder, may be inconvenient for investors

What's an Emmy worth? If you're former Vice-President Al Gore, it's worth just north of $1 million a year and roughly another $48 million in stock...

Where's Gore getting the dough? From a tiny, lightly watched cable TV channel called CurrentTV...

Cash and Control
Or maybe it's an IPO bust waiting to happen? In the financial election of his life, Al Gore is betting that investors will vote with their dollars for him and his big idea. CurrentTV's parent company, Current Media, hopes to raise $100 million in a public offering it filed on Jan. 28...

Something about this deal just doesn't sit right with me. Gore isn't just taking piles of cash. According to the filing Gore, who is listed as executive chairman, and his CEO partner, lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, each loaned the company $1 million to get it started. They'll get that back in the IPO. But the two guys also collect hefty salaries for a company that hasn't shown a profit in three yearsï¿½taking down $491,677 apiece last year in cash, plus bonuses of $550,000 each for, in Gore's case, helping get the company new affiliate agreements, broadening exiting agreements, and putting together a management team. The two currently receive $600,000 a year in salary and are eligible for additional bonuses, according to the IPO filing.

By comparison, at the time of the Google IPO in 2004, its two founders were each taking home a total of $356,556 in salary and bonuses, while sitting on top of a company that had earned nearly $106 million the year before.

Outsize Shareholder Clout
What really sticks out to me, however, is that Gore and Hyatt, who started the company in 2002 (and jump-started it with a broken-down Newsworld International channel they bought for $70.9 million) will have the kind of hammer-lock control over the company decried by shareholder rights activists and many of the same unions that supported Gore for years. According to the filing, once the dust has settled Gore and Hyatt will control all of the company's Class B shares, which give them 10 votes for every vote a common shareholder gets with a Class A share.

The company hasn't said how many shares it will issue, so there is no way of knowing just how much control Gore and Hyatt will exercise. But the Google founders, who also control their company's Class B shares, hold nearly 56% voting control of the company (of course, far as I know, they never ran for public office).

CurrentTV executives say they can't comment during the IPO quiet period. But a source with knowledge of what the board was thinking says that it gave Gore and Hyatt B shares to maintain the channel's editorial integrity and vision, and for advertisers to be sure of its future direction. The board, according to this source, believes Current TV isn't a typical media company in that it has a mission to make sure young people can share their views. Other media companies, including the New York Times Co. (NYT) and Dow Jones (NWS), have issued B shares so that their founders could maintain their editorial voice as well. (The New York Times is now facing a proxy battle with its largest shareholder to elect its own shareholders in a battle of wills with the B shareholders.)

Sorry, but I don't buy the rationale for this preferential treatment. This Class B share stuff just stinks, especially for a man of the people like Al Gore. "That's hardly democraticï¿½with a large D or a small d," agrees University of Delaware corporate governance expert Charles Elson. "The irony is that this is coming from a Democratic leader."

Dissent on the Board?
Who voted Gore and his partner big money and even bigger control? The IPO filing discloses that the compensation committee used an outside counsel to determine salary and bonuses for Gore and Hyatt. But there's also a question as to whether every board member agrees with the way the compensation has been structured.

There are other red flags in the prospectus. How much of Gore's time will shareholders get for the $1 million or more they're paying him? That is hard to tell. The proxy notes that the former Veep "has a number of other commitments that limit the amount of time he can devote to our business." And, in fact, Gore doesn't even have a contract. Six months down the roadï¿½at the end of a lock-up for him to sell his stockï¿½he could bolt altogether, the proxy notes. Were he to leave, the company says, "our relationships with key distributors and our business could be materially and adversely affected."

Is It Worth It?
All of which makes me think this IPO will be one tough sell for JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which is managing the deal for several underwriters. There is no date set for the filing, and Current Media has yet to say how much it intends to ask per share. But SECinvestor.com, which tracks federal filings such as IPOs, figures it could go for between $13 and $15 a share, making Gore's 3.7 million A shares worth somewhere north of $48 million. One assumes that building the value of that stock would give him incentive enough to stick around.

Still, I'm left wondering why anyone would want to invest in Al Gore's dream, worthwhile as it may appear...

Simply put, this is a very big leap for an investor to make. And not many will want to try. I like Al Goreï¿½his politics, his steadfast defense of a cleaner environment, his forward-looking view of the world around him. The one time I interviewed him, he even sent along his best wishes to my mother, who, as I had told him, was one of those in Florida who voted for him in 2000 (hanging chads and all). But I am totally bewildered by what possessed a good man to make a bad decision like this IPO. Talk about your inconvenient truths.

Sorry about the bad link. Expunged. Hey, Gere-Gore--two Hollywood guys (but only one of them has the Oscar).

Meanwhile, yes, Al, is making a skillion at Current TV, on paper anyway, but I'm not sure that absolutely negates a run. There is such a thing as a blind trust, as we know.

Al Gore: Deus ex machina. But is this play composed by Euripides or Aristophanes?

It should be noted that McCain in his way is somewhat more charismatic and is surely more verbally facile than W. Substituting Gore for the Red Witch does not materially raise the Dem candidate's charisma level.

Harkening back to 2000, Gore had incumbency, and was unable to meet the charismatically challenged W. For those with short memories, his performances in debate and on the hustings were pedestrian when they weren't huffy and pedantic.

This just ain't gonna happen. Derbyshire should go back to writing about math...

Now I admit I'm a mathematics aficionado, but I think Derbyshire's Prime Obsession, the story of the Riemann Hypothesis, is one of the best books of any kind I have ever read. In addition to getting filled in on a ton of interesting mathematics, one gets a virtual education in modern European history.

This just ain't gonna happen. Derbyshire should go back to writing about math...

Two wounded, angry animals locked in a steel cage match. The winner gets to face a fresh challenger. Hillary, as winner, will alienate the blacks, Obama the whites. Not much choice for the Dems either way right now. Plus, the winner gets to explain Spitzer to the nation.

I actually do not see Obama getting past this all-black church demagoguery thing. It doesn't matter how many Obama fans stop by here to attack Roger Simon – that ain't gonna feed the bulldog.

And the bulldog is very, very hungry right now. He will probably just help himself. Woof.

Gore, who is listed as executive chairman, and his CEO partner, lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, each loaned the company $1 million to get it started.

Joel Hyatt aka Howard Metzenbaum's (who died a couple days ago) son-in-law who ran for Howard's Senate seat and got thoroughly trounced. Put together a buncha legal clinics for the "people" that are the equivalent of check cashing services in the inner-city. Really stepped in it during 2006 when convicted of illegal discrimination for firing one of his managers for having AIDS; the offense was so outrageous that punitive damages were tacked on. Pure scum; you can really judge weird Al by the company he keeps. An inconvenient truth.

No, she'd get on her victimology train and offer them some of the most magnificant panders since the Roman Emperors had to buy their own lives and careers in the currency of immense donatives to the Army.

Why is the "dream ticket" either "Al Gore for Prez, Barack Obama for Veep" or "Hillary for Prez, Obama for Veep", not the other way? The last time I read Drudge, Obama was leading in delegates count. Someone is subliminally racist here, no?

Absolutely right, ic. It's racism. You got it nailed, guy. It's always racism. Good work.

John Derbyshire, the columnist at National Review Online, has been predicting - for the past year - not only that Gore will be the Democrat nominee, but that he will be the next president.

You know, Heather, I love John, he's a good friend, but he really should look into Prozac or something. Luckily, I don't recall him ever getting one of the Ee-yore predictions right.

For Gore to enter the race after the state primaries had finished would mean that he was missing out on any opportunity to gain a mandate from the party activists. He could only win through shady backroom deals with the delegates at a brokered convention, so to most party members it would surely look like the fix was in. Many activists would probably see parallels with the 2000 election, but with Gore in the role of George Bush. After all the hype about the possibility of the first black president or the first female president they also wouldn't be too thrilled about a rich white guy dropping-in to take the nomination at the last minute. Rather than being the unity candidate Gore would be the disunity candidate.

As for his chances against McCain, Goreâ€™s sensationalist environmentalism would prove to be a major liability. The Republicans would use Gore's own words against him, to portray him as an alarmist who wanted to shut down huge swathes of American industry and raise taxes sky-high. The message to blue-collar voters would be "vote for Gore and he'll take away your job". The message to middle-class voters would be "vote for Gore and he'll tax you up to the eyeballs and make you drive a small car - oh, and he's a billionaire so he'll be living it up in his mansion while you struggle to pay your mortgage". The worse the economic downturn the better those messages would play.

March 15, 2008: "You Know Me Al": With Obama Wounded and Hillary Unappealing, Will Gore Finally Surface?

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