ABC News: Tipper Gore Ready to Support Another White House Run
Tipper Gore Ready to Support Another White House Run
Gore Says She Doesn’t Think About What Might Have Been in
June 13, 2006— – She’s spent five years recovering from the last run at the White House, but Tipper Gore says she’s ready if her husband wants to do it again.
“If he were going to run in the future, of course I would support him,” Tipper Gore told ABCNews’ Claire Shipman in her first television interview in four years. “I think he’d be a fantastic president. He already got a majority of votes of people in this country once, and so that says something.”
Al Gore is back in the political spotlight with his new documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and some are wondering if he’ll make another run for president.
“I can’t say yes, can’t say no,” Tipper Gore said. “He is saying he’s not interested in running in ’08.”
At the premiere of his film, Al Gore was more circumspect, however. His exact words were, “I don’t have plans to be a candidate again.” His wife said not to read too much into the phrasing, however.
“Let me say it exactly,” Tipper Gore said. “He has said, ‘I’m not interested in running in ’08.’ Now, as he also says, he’s 58. He’s got many more years. He probably figures, ‘Who knows what might come?’ He never imagined he’d be in the movies, walking up a red carpet in Cannes.”
Both Gores seem to be relishing their new-found liberation from politics. Tipper Gore — an accomplished photographer — has turned her hobby into a business. Her friends, designers Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams, convinced her to market some of her work through their furniture company. The photos range from about $1,000 to $6,500, and a portion of the sales benefit The Climate Project, a non-profit organization founded by the Gores dedicated to saving the planet.
Tipper Gore’s photograph’s range from nature shots to portraits of world leaders, representing the unique vantage point she had at the White House for eight years. Once of the most dramatic images is the historic hand shake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.
“I was attending the ceremony with my husband,” Tipper Gore said. “I took my camera and I could not resist.”
Focusing on her art once again has been one means of healing from her husband’s brutal loss in the 2000 election.
“The first couple of years anyone can imagine were rough,” Tipper Gore said. “We did what we’ve always done. Good times or tough times, that is that we really leaned on each other.”
It was Tipper Gore who pushed her husband to refocus on his longstanding interest in environmental issues, as a means of moving on.
“I thought, I was reconnecting with my old friends with photography and other things that were important to me, and I thought that was something that would be important to him.”
The success of “An Inconvenient Truth” has created a buzz about Al Gore’s political future and speculation about whether he’d run simply to take on the former first lady, Sen. Hilary Clinton.
Many have said Al Gore and Hilary Clinton were often rivals in the White House.
Tipper Gore would only say she finds that kind of talk juvenile.
“The whole thing reminds me of junior high school,” she said.
Tipper Gore insisted neither she nor her husband dwell on what might have been if her husband became president in 2000.
“You have to move on, take the hand that’s dealt you. Find other good things in life and other ways to serve,” Tipper Gore said. “He also seems to be quite content with life the way it is right now. I told somebody the other day I went to bed with a recovering politician, and I woke up with a movie star, and it’s great!”
Tipper Gore said her husband will be able to affect policy and the public debate on key issues even if he never enters politics again.
“He can continue to be a senior statesperson,” she said. “That’s something he believes in deeply — there’s not enough reasoned discourse on the issues in this country. If he can go out there and stir that pot, he’s going to continue to do that.”
ABC’s Claire Shipman originally reported this story for “Good Morning America.”
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