Tennessee Just Says No To Al Gore…Again!

He has won a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award.  For eight years he was a heartbeat away from the Presidency.  In the 2000 Presidential Election, he won the popular vote by a large margin, only to lose the election by one vote (Justice Scalia’s).  But back here in his home state, on Election Day 2000, Al Gore was snubbed by his fellow Tennesseans.  And last week, he got snubbed again.

Eight and a half years ago, the voters of Tennessee went to the polls and rejected their not-so-favorite son, delivering the State’s eleven electoral votes, and in the process, the White House, to George W. Bush.  If Al Gore had just carried his own state, he would not have had to worry about a Florida recount, butterfly ballots, hanging chads, or the U.S. Supreme Court.  In fact, after living in the White House for eight years, he would now be building the Al Gore Presidential Library in Carthage, and an Al Gore robot would be featured at the Hall of Presidents at Disney World.

After 2000, Al did an admirable job of coping with defeat.  He moved to Hollywood, grew a beard, and made about a billion dollars as he travelled around the world warning about global warming.

But last week, Al Gore was Tennessee—dissed one more time.  Incredibly, he lost another vote in the Volunteer State, once again, by one, single solitary vote.  Just before mercifully adjourning for the year, the Tennessee State Senate, by a vote of 15-14, rejected a resolution that would have authorized the building of a statue of Al Gore outside the Tennessee Capitol building in Nashville.

The proposed Al Gore statue would not have cost Tennessee taxpayers a penny.  There was private financing for a statue not only of Al Gore, but also for a statue of the late Cordell Hull, another Tennessean who like Al, won the Nobel Prize.

Some of the state senators who voted against the Al Gore statue resolution claimed they felt it would be a bad precedent to build a statue in honor of a living Tennessean (Maybe after Al dies…).  But if that was really the reason they voted no, why did the state senators also vote against the authorization of the statue of the late Cordell Hull?  (For poor Mr. Hull, it was probably a case of guilt by statutory association.) And does anyone really believe that the Republican-controlled Tennessee State Senate would reject a resolution to build a privately-funded statue in honor of the very much alive statesman Howard Baker? 

No, the inconvenient truth is the Tennessee State Senate, like the voters in Tennessee in 2000, just said no Al Gore.  It was in the words of United States Supreme Court Justice Yogi Berra, a case of déjà vu all over again. 

Poor Al Gore.  He is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Volunteer State. 

But I have a compromise proposal that I believe could win the support of Republicans in the Tennessee State Senate and allow both Al Gore and Cordell Hull to get the statutory recognition they deserve.

In light of the Tennessee Legislature’s recent enactment of the Guns-in-Bars bill, I would propose that the new statue of Al Gore feature the former Vice President holding a handgun in one hand and bottle of Jack Daniels in the other.

This will bring Republicans and Democrats in the legislature together, and soon thereafter, the Tennessee Capitol grounds will be graced with a stone version of Al Gore that will look remarkably like the real-life wooden Al Gore.  And standing by Stone Al will be his fellow Nobel Prize winner, Cordell Hull.  And to be on the safe side, maybe the stone Cordell Hull should be wearing camouflage and toting a shotgun.