Gore joins Clinton on stump in Florida
Former VP bolsters climate message; urges young voters to turn out
MIAMI — Retired Democratic warhorse Al Gore was trotted out at a rally here Tuesday with Hillary Clinton to highlight an issue he has long championed — combating climate change — and to remind voters how important voting can be to the outcome of close elections.
Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential race following an aborted recount here in Florida, vouched for Clinton’s credentials on increasing the use of solar power and other renewable energy and said voters face a stark choice in the election next month against embattled Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Her opponent, based on the ideas that he has presented, would take us toward a climate catastrophe,” said Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on putting climate change on the world’s political agenda.
Appearing clean shaven and considerably grayer than during his years in office, Gore sounded professorial as he talked about atmospheric changes, and he came across as a little rusty on the political stump. It was his first and expected to be his only appearance this election with Clinton, whose husband he served under for eight years in the White House.
The Democrat’s emphasis on climate change was intended to resonate with millennials, a voting bloc that has been slow to warm to Clinton and that in polls consistently ranks the issue as a greater concern than their older counterparts. Trump has famously referred to climate change as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
Clinton told the audience at Miami Dade College’s Kendall campus that she would turn to Gore for advice on climate change upon entering the Oval Office and called him “one of the world’s foremost leaders” on the subject.
Gore’s presence Tuesday also was also intended as a cautionary note to Democratic-leaning voters who may consider sitting this election out or peeling off to vote next month for Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
In 2000, Democrats say, Gore would have become president if not for Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, who siphoned more votes from Gore than Bush.
“Your vote really, really, really counts,” Gore told the audience assembled in a gym here. “You can consider me as an Exhibit A of that.”
Chants broke out of “You won, you won, you won.”
Florida was a poignant choice of venue for Gore. Had he prevailed in the state in 2000, he would have succeeded Bill Clinton as president instead of George W. Bush. Florida’s status as a key battleground again in this year’s presidential race was evident elsewhere in the state Tuesday, with Bill Clinton and Trump also making appearances.
It has been 10 years since the debut of “An Inconvenient Truth,” an Academy Award-winning documentary that traced Gore’s efforts to educate citizens of the dangers of global warming that led to his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He remains active on the issue, heading the Climate Reality Project, a global advocacy group.
Tuesday’s event was part of an effort by Clinton to continue a partial focus on policy issues in a race that has become dominated by the fallout over a 2005 video on which Trump was captured talking about women in extremely lewd terms — leading to a historic internal crisis among Republicans about his candidacy.