If the numbers seem startling, it’s because the “global war on terror” that Bush chose to launch in the wake of 9/11 has long seemed like an especially vivid affirmation of the truism that elections have consequences. You could argue that virtually any president would have signed off on the invasion of Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, but Iraq was a war of choice, and as Bush was making his case for it in the fall of 2002, Gore’s was perhaps the loudest voice in American politics saying, “No!” The question of whether the world would be much different today has President Gore been in power seems like an open and shut matter. How could it not be?

And yet, there actually is a strong case for the public’s skepticism.

It starts with remembering just how conditioned Americans in 2001 were to view Saddam Hussein as the source of much of the world’s evil and instability — and just how easy and painless they had come to believe war was.

This was a product of the first Gulf War, which had been sold as a noble and necessary effort to check the aggression of a brutal tyrant with dreams of regional hegemony. “We’re dealing with Hitler revisited!” George H.W. Bush famously declared in the fall of 1990. Americans bought in and rejoiced when Operation Desert Storm ended with Hussein’s army evicted from Kuwait, and with surprisingly minimal Americans casualties.

But the ease with which victory was attained also led to hubris, and politicians from both parties, media commentators, and average voters spent the rest of the decade lamenting Bush’s failure to “finish the job” — that is, to pivot when he had the chance from Kuwait to a full-scale invasion of Iraq that would have ended Hussein’s reign. Hussein’s own actions only encouraged this thinking. After the war, he quickly resumed his menacing posture, crushing a Kurdish uprising and taunting U.N. weapons inspectors for years to come. Americans were also told that he’d tried to arrange the assassination of Bush in 1993.

This explains why, during one inspection showdown in 1998, a Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans wanted President Clinton to use airstrikes to target Hussein himself (instead of just his supposed weapons installations), and 60 percent wanted American ground forces to launch an invasion. Clinton, like Bush before him, recognized that this was “unfeasible,” but he felt compelled to balance his desire to avoid war and occupation with voters’ intense hatred and fear of the Iraqi madman. Thus, he attacked Hussein as aggressively in his speeches as Bush had, approved some airstrikes, and signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which put the U.S. government on record supporting regime change.

So while there were no Iraqi nationals on any of the 9/11 flights, it was easy for foreign policy hawks — and, in particular, the neoconservatives who had long seen the forced removal Hussein as the first step in the democratization of the Middle East — to convince the public that at least part of their thirst for vengeance should be directed at Hussein. It was only natural for Americans to assume that a man they saw as “Hitler revisited” must have some way, somehow been involved in the attacks on their homeland. And even if he hadn’t, well, surely he’d be behind the next one — unless we acted now to stop him.

The story of how Bush bought into this is well-known. His instinct after 9/11 was too think big and aggressively, and his inner circle was littered with neocons and other hawks who’d been waiting for just the right opening to push for an invasion of Iraq. This, supposedly, would not have been the case in a Gore White House.

But look a little closer and you’ll realize that President Gore would have been hearing the same pleas. His own vice president would have been Joe Lieberman, perhaps the most hawkish Democrat in Washington on Middle East issues. Marty Peretz, his old friend and confidante, would have had Gore’s ear and filled it with arguments for going into Iraq. Loud, influential, non-conservative media voices — like Tom Friedman and Peter Beinart — would have amplified these calls on the outside. Republicans would have been screaming for an invasion, and the public would have been on their side. Clinton could barely hold them all back in the ‘90s; after 9/11, would Gore have stood a chance?

Here it’s worth remembering Gore’s own history. In the 1980s, he made his name as a senator and presidential candidate by positioning himself as one of his party’s foremost hawks. One of the reasons, in fact, that Clinton put him on the Democratic ticket in 1992 was Gore’s vote for the Gulf War, which most Democrats had opposed. You could argue that Gore was a changed man by 2001 and 2002, and that he saw the world in a fundamentally different way, and maybe that’s true.

But it should be noted that when he announced his opposition to Bush’s war push in the fall of ’02, Gore endorsed the basic goal of removing Hussein and securing his (supposed) WMD stockpiles. What he objected to was more the go-it-alone nature of Bush’s approach. In other words, you could also argue that Gore, still stung by the 2000 election outcome, may have been motivated in some way by his desire to stage a big, principled fight with Bush — and that a different result in ’00 might have produced a different, more hawkish response from Gore, one that would have led to … an invasion of Iraq.

Or we can give Gore the benefit of the doubt and say that he would have delivered the same speech opposing a war with Iraq even if he had been president — and that he would have resisted overwhelming pressure from Republicans, the media, the general public, and even some members of his administration. Would the country’s war fever have eventually died down until Americans gratefully concluded that Gore had been right all along? Sure, it’s possible. But it seems more likely that the same taunts that haunted Bush throughout the ’90s — “He should have finished the job!” — would have then dogged Gore, and that the political consequences would have been profound. Maybe Gore would have pushed through some new type of sanctions, or a few more rounds of weapons inspections. Hussein would have just thumbed his nose at all of this, and every time he did, the chorus in America would have grown louder: Why is President Gore letting this tyrant push us around — especially when it could lead to another 9/11?!

If the 1991 Gulf War is what shook America’s Vietnam syndrome, then the occupation of Iraq is what shook the hubris that followed the Gulf War — and made Gore and Clinton and George H.W. Bush look prophetic. But without the Iraq war, Gore’s wisdom probably would have gone unappreciated for years to come. If anything, it would have been a serious political liability — the sort of thing that his Republican opponent in 2004 (John McCain? Bush again, anointed by a GOP still furious over the “stolen” election of 2000?) would have been well-positioned to exploit.

Obviously, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if Gore had been president on 9/11. But here’s guessing that, one way or another, America would have gotten the invasion of Iraq that it had been itching for since 1991.

Gore also emphasized that he does not see the Tea Party as an example of grassroots political activism, largely because the movement has the support of billionaires like the Koch brothers pushing agendas in Washington.

Watch the “Countdown” clip below:

The fact is, Gore didn’t single out the president in “Climate of Denial”; most of his piece indicts the media for indulging in “debate” about whether climate change is real and human-made, when the science is unanimous that it is, as well as turning news into entertainment, to the detriment of serious reporting on global threats, in search of bigger audiences. He also calls out Fox News as a 24/7 purveyor of disinformation and Republican propaganda, on the heels of Jon Stewart’s great takedown last night. But Gore’s critique is just, like, too complicated, and kind of a downer, and maybe hits too close to home. So a lot of outlets are just saying: “Hey! Look over there! It’s not us — It’s Obama! Fight!”

What Gore is ultimately saying about Obama, that he “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change,” has been said by plenty of other advocates on plenty of other issues, particularly about domestic economic issues. It points to an inconvenient truth about politics right now: President Obama came to power with a mandate for “change,” but no one agreed about exactly what that meant, and in these first two-plus years, on divisive issues, he’s tried to split the difference. He and his team assumed that the biggest problem in Washington was dysfunctional partisan gridlock, and if you committed to compromise on the big problems, you could “do big things.”

But with a Republican Party whose strategy consisted of saying no to everything, no matter how reasonable, that approach didn’t work. The Obama team also thought they could make progress by cutting side deals with the powerful interests that block change, promising big healthcare interests, for instance, that the public option was off the table. Healthcare reform ultimately passed, but without a public option or other methods to contain costs, and the side deals contributed to public cynicism about the process and the product. Likewise on the failure to pass a climate change bill, Gore says, “Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return.”

Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson’s story, linked from the Gore piece, fleshes out that disappointment. After a strong climate bill passed the House, the Senate took up the issue, and a “tripartite” team of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham made progress. But advocates said “the administration applied the same backroom approach it took to health care reform. Instead of waging a public debate to pit the American people against the corporate polluters, Obama gave the polluters a seat at the negotiating table. In private, big energy firms were offered sweetheart deals to acquiesce to the climate bill, including expanded offshore drilling for oil giants like BP and taxpayer subsidies for coal and nuclear interests that outstripped those for clean energy.” The deal fell apart anyway, and just after Obama unilaterally announced that his administration would extend offshore drilling, without any climate change concessions on the part of industry, came news of the BP oil spill, which ensured that coddling oil companies would be remembered as a bipartisan folly. 

The question for Obama, and for Democrats more broadly, now that compromise and co-optation hasn’t worked is: What next? On one level I react to complaints about the president failing to use his “bully pulpit” with a little weariness: More speeches? Really? We need action. And I sympathize with the president about the lack of backing in Congress for bold change. But at the heart of the many calls for Obama to take the lead in defining the dire problems we face — on climate change, on income inequality, on the troubled economy more broadly — is a deep and widely shared frustration: The president hasn’t seized a moment of profound crisis and opportunity to tell Americans exactly why the status quo isn’t working anymore, except for a tiny sliver of America, and what we’re going to do about it.

Right before I read Gore’s piece I finished an article by Mike Tomasky that made almost the same exact case on the issue of economic inequality. Peter Whoriskey’s terrific Washington Post report, “Breakaway Wealth,” got everyone’s attention: It’s unconscionable that the share of wealth that goes to the richest .01 percent of Americans has shot from 2.5 percent in the mid-1970s to more than 10 percent today. That inequality threatens the foundations of our country. It’s part of why we have an economic crisis in the first place: Unemployment is sky high, wages are stagnant (or falling, for those at the bottom), people are using services that drain tax revenue instead of doing work that produces it. The concentration of economic power leads that elite to have more political power, which they use to protect their economic power. This threatens democracy, even if they don’t talk about it at Tea Party events.

Tomasky concludes: “God forbid also that a Democrat — the president, let’s say — make this argument and draw these connections for the American people … Mr. President, Democrats: it would seem that now is the time.” Paul Krugman has likewise noted, going back to the debate over the inadequate size of the 2009 stimulus: OK, maybe the president is right, and he couldn’t have gotten more money from conservative Democrats and Republicans. Still: If he’d made a stronger case about the broken economy, raging economic inequality, and the imperative to spend government money now to get things moving again, the worst that could have happened is that he’d lose, but Americans would know what Democrats believe we’re up against — and what we believed would work, even if Republicans blocked it. And who knows, a rousing call to bold action might have galvanized Americans to demand more from Washington. We’ll never know.

The frustrating thing about the lack of a bold approach to climate change is that action on this massive threat has the potential to ease several problems at once, not just environmental ones: Massive public and private investment in alternative energy and conservation technologies could spur a renaissance in research, development and manufacturing, and provide jobs at every level, from top scientists to underskilled workers weather-proofing public buildings. And of course, reducing our dependence on gulf oil would enhance national security by making intervention in that region less tempting, giving us more freedom to pursue both human rights and genuine American interests in oil-producing states.

But it would also require that Democrats take on the people who profit from the status quo, and as Gore lays out, that’s not easy. I wish Gore had talked a little about his own role with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and ’90s, pushing his party to be more friendly to business, which is part of what’s led to the sad reality that both parties compete to serve corporate America. I don’t say that to be insulting; I’m sure Gore has some important insights about what was right, and wrong, about that endeavor. We live with its legacy today. He makes one point I’ll quibble with: that the slow but certain demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should inspire climate-change activists, because it shows the power of hard work and activist organizing to do what’s right. With no disrespect to the legions of DADT advocates whose work I admire: Strong advocacy wasn’t the whole story. DADT fell for two primary reasons: Americans are coming to accept gay rights more broadly, and it was a win-win solution. The military gets more soldiers, and gay people get more rights. Maybe most important: It didn’t cost corporate America a dime. It didn’t require higher taxes. It was a tough sell but far easier than what Gore is proposing. We’re winning the social issues, and losing on the economic ones.

I recently ran across a comment Franklin Delano Roosevelt made on the eve of becoming president in 1933, when the Depression shocked the country into reappraising virtually everything about itself .”All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified … [I]t needs to be reaffirmed at this juncture that the United States is one organic entity, that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all.” Obama took office in just that sort of time, and sympathetic critics, like Gore, wish he’d seized the sort of moment FDR described. For better or worse, though, it’s not too late: The climate change crisis gets worse every day, and the economic crisis isn’t going away any time soon either. 

I discussed the Gore piece with Rolling Stone’s Eric Bates on Hardball today:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Current’s already launched Olbermann’s page on its website.

Nothing is more vital to a free America than a free media, and nothing is more vital to my concept of a free media than news produced independently of corporate interference. In Current Media, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have created the model truth-seeking entity. The opportunity to partner with Al, Joel and Mark Rosenthal makes this the most exciting venture in my career.

Reactions so far have been positive. David Shuster tweeted almost immediately after the news:

Brilliant business move, excellent journalism effort by currentTV in hiring @keitholbermann. The prime time show sounds terrific.

Also via Twitter, Mother Jones’ Washington editor David Corn remarked:

Right now on Current TV: “Viral Videos,” featuring “Keyboard Cat.” Later, “Kill It, Cook It, Eat It.” KO will be rebuilding a network-again

————-

Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host turned tweeter about the weather, will announce his next move today. According to the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, Olbermann will team up with Al Gore’s Current TV in some sort of Internet-meets-teevee jujitsu. Since the former “Countdown” host is contractually forbidden from working in television, Current seems like an interesting choice.

Started in 2005 by Al Gore and cronies, Current TV originally set out to break the cable mold with a mixture of user-generated content, Internet-friendly short segments called “pods,” and some sort of partnership with Google. These ideas never really worked out, and after massive layoffs during the recession, Current could use some new wind in its sails.

Enter Keith. His harried departure from MSNBC left many viewers, fans and even foes wondering what the polarizing pundit would do next. And let’s not forget the great gossip about who would fill his slot at MSNBC. A new Keith Olbermann show on Current TV would both offer Olbermann the independence he longs for and the flexibility to work on the Internet in the near term.

Of course, we’re still in the gossip arena, and speculation abounds. The Times blog post came after an announcement Monday that Olbermann would announce “the next chapter in his remarkable career” Tuesday at 11 a.m., less than 24 hours before Current TV is set to make a big announcement to advertisers. This is dizzying. It’s entirely possible that Olbermann, who once wrote a column for Salon, will announce something entirely different, that he is doing his own thing. In a way, the crumbs lead in that direction as Olbermann has already set up a new Twitter account (@FOKNewsChannel, or “Friends of Keith News Channel”) and someone registered a pretty obvious domain name (TheOlbermannShow.com).

Keith and Current are not the weirdest pair ever. Since Al Gore invented the Internet — we couldn’t help ourselves from that joke — what better place to experiment than with his channel. The politics make sense, the brands make sense, and everyone’s a little sick of speculating.

We’re on the edge of our seats.

Another Republican blasted from both sides of the spectrum for his record on emissions, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, said he is “not terribly concerned” about taking heat from green groups for his criticism of EPA action on carbon emissions.

“The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore,” Kirk said in a brief interview last week.

I think this means that when Al Gore split with his longtime wife, Tipper, in 2010, there was no longer overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. It just makes sense.

There is maybe an explanation for this! Mark Kirk divorced his wife in 2009, and the next year it was revealed that he repeatedly lied about his military service and other aspects of his biography. So maybe he just assumes that everyone else is constantly making things up, until they get divorced.