‘Real simple choice’: Al Gore endorses Joe Biden for US president

Former US vice president Al Gore endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday, adding to the growing circle of prominent Democrats throwing their support behind him as the party works to coalesce before the general election.

Mr Gore announced his support in a tweet shortly before appearing, virtually, with Mr Biden for a town hall-style Earth Day event. His endorsement followed one earlier in the day from governor Jay Inslee of Washington, who ran a climate-focused campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“If I was talking to one person who had not yet decided who to vote for in this upcoming election, I would just say plainly and simply: This is not complicated,” Mr Gore said at the Earth Day town hall. “If you care about the climate crisis, if you want to start solving the climate crisis, this is not rocket science.”

“This is a real simple choice,” he added later, “and if anybody has any doubt about that, come talk to me.” Mr Gore served as vice president under Bill Clinton and was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000.

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Influential

But two decades later, he is better known for his climate activism. As vice president, he helped craft the Kyoto Protocol, which president George W Bush abandoned in 2001 just as president Donald Trump abandoned its successor, the Paris Agreement, in 2017. As a private citizen, he made the climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Mr Gore comes from a very different Democratic Party than the one that exists today, and served in an administration whose policies many Democrats, especially younger ones, now explicitly reject.

But in an election in which voters have described climate change as one of the most important issues, his voice could be influential.

During Wednesday’s event, he made an explicit pitch to young voters, who largely supported senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary. Youth-led climate groups like the Sunrise Movement endorsed Mr Sanders, and they are among the constituencies Mr Biden needs to win over for the general election.

“I remember, as you do, when president John F Kennedy put out his inspiring challenge to put a person on the moon and return him safely in 10 years,” Mr Gore said, referring to an address Kennedy gave to Congress in May 1961, when Mr Gore was 13 and Mr Biden was 18. “And I remember the adults of that day and time, many of them saying that’s a reckless, expensive, unwise venture.”

But when Apollo 11 landed on the moon eight years later, he continued, the average age of the system engineers in NASA’s mission control centre was 26. “That means their average age when they heard that speech was 18, and they changed their lives and they got the knowledge and the learning to be a part of that mission,” Mr Gore said. “That’s what I feel from the young people in this country today where the climate crisis is concerned.”

Obama endorsement

It remains to be seen whether his endorsement will sway the young progressives who voted for Mr Sanders. What it certainly does is reinforce the central image Biden’s campaign is trying to present: a Democratic Party that has moved on quickly from its hard-fought primary and united around its presumptive nominee in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime threat.

Within weeks after he essentially wrapped up the nomination, Mr Biden has received endorsements from former president Barack Obama, Mr Sanders and senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another primary opponent.

His campaign has unveiled several major endorsements in quick succession as something of a show of force.