Al Gore, former vice president and environmentalist jet-setter extraordinaire, released a desperate fundraising plea to help his fellow Nobel Laureate and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Where to start? “The last thing we want is the Republican Party — a party that’s been hijacked by an extremist fringe — to win the White House and tighten its grip on Congress,” Gore wrote. “Extremist fringe” — that’s the phrase used by the man who compared global warming skeptics to the racists of an earlier generation. “[S]lowly the conversation was won,” Gore said last year. “And we still have racism, God knows, but it’s so different now and so much better. And we have to win the conversation on climate.”
Moving on, he warned that Republican victory “would spell disaster for our economy and our environment.” Gore, like all good environmentalists, supports the carbon cap-and-trade policy that would kill 3 million manufacturing jobs by 2029 — according to the Heritage Foundation — and cost $4.8 trillion in lost economic growth.
Gore might think that cap-and-trade is good for the economy because he has made tens of millions of dollars as an environmentalist since leaving office and would have made another fortune if the legislation had passed in the 111th Congress.
“Karl Rove and the ultra-conservative Koch brothers are pouring millions of dollars into this campaign,” Gore warned. “Democrats are depending on the individual support we get from people like you.”
Gore requested a $3 donation from all those individual supporters before acknowledging that the Democrats have some big money supporters of their own.
“This deadline is so important that a group of Democrats have agreed to match your contribution 2-1, tripling your impact,” he says. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., often suggests that the Democrat/Republican divide this year is a divide between democracy and plutocracy. Presumably, though, she approves of this fundraising tactic.
No word in the Gore email, though, about whether the wealthy Democratic backers will cut one big check or match the donations in $3 increments, in order to keep the amount of the average donation low.
