The first presidential candidate I cast a vote for was Michael Dukakis in 1988. It was my freshman year of college and I’d just turned 18. The school I attended was overwhelmingly Republican, but I’d already signed up with the campus Democrats, and when I refused the “BUSH/QUAYLE” window signs a dorm neighbor was distributing door to door, telling him I wasn’t a Republican, he went pale as the face of death and said, “What are you, then — a communist?”

The first candidate I ever really loved, though, as a semi-autonomous semi-adult, had been Al Gore, though I wasn’t old enough to vote in the ’88 primaries. In my senior AP government class (which my father taught), we filled out little Newsweek bubble sheet exams to help us determine not only our partisan identities but which candidate’s views most closely lined up with ours. I was not a political junkie. I was not a member of the debate team. I spent most of my spare time writing poems and stories and interlibrary loaning every article about U2 that had ever been printed. That, I suppose, should have been a clue to which way I was leaning. I remember being shocked and awed by Bono’s refusal to sit on the same dais as Ronald Reagan on one occasion — who didn’t like Reagan? But when I worried about government it was still usually the administration of my little high school, the bastards.

Al Gore changed that. Once it was clear he was my candidate I had to defend myself at every turn, first from myself, since I despised his wife’s anti-rock music crusading, then from nearly everyone around me, Reagan/Bush-lovers all, Iran-Contra be damned. But bubble tests don’t lie, and straight down the line he was my man. To declare support for a Democrat in my town — let alone in my family — was a little like growing up in Salt, Jordan, and declaring you want nothing more than to open a McDonald’s franchise when you grow up. All hail The Great Satan!

Even if you only reluctantly voted for Gore in 2000, even if you despised his clumsy public persona or his bad handlers, even if you think Florida really went for Bush and wasn’t stolen, your throat will catch in the first few minutes of An Inconvenient Truth, which you not only have to see, but have to convince people you know to see, too. On its merits as a movie it would be worth it: Who would have thought that a documentary about a guy on the road with his environmentalist laptop slideshow — and that guy is Al Gore, no less — could be so terrifically gripping? He’s human, he’s funny, he’s a good lecturer — a little nerdy but self-deprecating about it, too. Can you imagine having had an intelligent president these last six years? It’s almost too much to bear.

I walked into the film wistful about the Gore presidency that might have been; I walked away pretty much converted to his scientific scenario–that in the last fifty years or so, greenhouse gas emissions have escalated so dramatically, and continue to rise at such an unprecedented rate, that within our lifetimes we’ll come to realize that last year’s “natural” disasters were only the beginning of global devastation. We’ll see sea levels rise, flooding millions in Asia. We’ll see storms intensify. We’ll see glaciers finally disappear. It’s gonna get all Book of Revelations on your ass.

I use the Biblical reference and the word “converted” deliberately. The biggest obstacle the film faced in convincing me, in fact, was its reliance on tropes more generally associated with apocalyptic religious rhetoric. Not only the end-times imagery: Gore himself comes off as something of a prophet — lucky enough to have found the truth as a young man (one of his teachers at Harvard conducted the earliest global warming research), laboring his entire political career — and in the six years since he “lost” — to get others to understand just how serious the consequences will be if we continue on our reckless course. He’s a wanderer in the wilderness, despised and rejected of men, living on milk and honey, I suppose. We see him climbing on and off planes, flying coach, going through security checks (wouldn’t his belt set off the metal detector?), constantly tinkering with his slide show while he travels to remote parts of the globe to visit scientists in the feld or to deliver his (free!) lectures. He’s always alone: just himself, the slideshow, his memories good and bad, the cosmos. Doesn’t Tipper ever travel with him? Of course she does, but the film aims to give you the righteous man against the unrighteous masses, the man with a truth that can’t be ignored. It’s just not convenient. There’s an emotional pull to setting him up this way. Perhaps it’s self-serving. But I think it also aims to intensify the message itself, and maximize the possibility of converting viewers. I’ve been around enough evangelical media in my day to know the tricks of the trade, and this one does go a little over the top at times in its desire to bring you into the fold.

And yet, I let myself be led. Maybe because the arguments are rational (as opposed to, say, stories about God wiping the world clean with a giant fiery handiwipe). Maybe because what I read about global warming over the rest of the weekend continued to make sense and supports the claims Gore had made. I also forgive the filmmakers for their evangelical lapses because I recognize that this film will only make inroads among conservatives very gradually, if at all, and based on individual family interventions. I’ll give my parents a copy for Christmas. They may not watch it: in 2000, my mom said she thought Gore was “scarier” than Clinton. Clinton was just an adulterer; Gore, on the other hand, loves owls more than people. But the last six years may have softened my parents, who fiercely oppose the war and have come to despise Bush. In the last election they actually voted for John Kerry. They understand arguments, and I think if they listen to this one, they may come to realize we’re talking about more than owls here.

In one of the movie’s best moments, in fact, Gore shows a slide developed by Bush the Elder, who held a summit on the environment in the late 1980s to pretend he was on top of the science. The image is a giant scale, with gold bars on one side and the earth in the balance on the other. Bush’s message: we have to balance environment and economy. Gore puts the image on the screen. His eyes glisten and he flashes a wicked smile. “Mmmm. Gold. That looks delicious,” he says in a cartoon villain voice. Then he glances at the earth. His message? No earth, no gold. Same goes for people whose livelihoods depend on cutting down trees.

If An Inconvenient Truth gets viewers to go home and start reading about global warming, it’s done its job. It won’t change the most conservative minds: they’ll point out that Gore the treehugger hypocritically prints books and pollutes the environment with all his global air travel. They’ll whine that not having access to SUVs would be to surrender our liberties. They’ll complain that academic peer review for the undisputed scientific validation of the basic outline of Gore’s global warming scenario has to do with the fact that scientists can’t think outside the orthodox box if they expect to get tenure and their cushy government grants (which might explain why science research funding is shrinking under this joker?). They’ll say that this is one big, early campaign ad, and every ticket is a soft money contribution. We could only be so lucky.