Now he tells us! Al Gore has been scooting from George Stephanopoulos to Judy Woodruff to Jon Stewart telling everyone about his new revelation: The time has come for an American version of a single-payer health care system that would cover our 40-plus million uninsured.

He’s right that Democrats need to take their ambition out of the lockbox (heh-heh) they’ve stowed it in ever since Bill Clinton’s health plan went down in 1994.

So why am I so mad at him?

Because in the 2000 Democratic primary, Bill Bradley campaigned on precisely such goals, and Gore diced him up as a big-spending utopian liberal! In other words, at a moment when we were looking at trillions in future surpluses, and Bradley was rightly urging us to think bigger about America’s unfinished agenda, Gore chose to win by discrediting the very ambition he now says is “in his heart.”

It gets worse. Gore was utterly silent when the big Bush tax cut of 2001 was being debated, licking his wounds and biding his time. Yet he was one of the few people with a megaphone big enough to have fought a plan that has now devoured the long-term surpluses needed to fund bolder domestic goals. There’s no telling if he could have succeeded, but why didn’t Gore try? This was in the spring of 2001, recall – not after 9/11, when unity was required.

Now, of course, Gore bristles when someone like Stephanopoulos calls him on his policy makeover and asks Gore why he attacked Bradley then for goals he now embraces. Gore knows this doesn’t look good, but the way he denies the obvious looks even worse.

Gore says that way, way back in 2000 – another era entirely, judging by his tone – an incremental, step-by-tiny-step approach to expanded health coverage made sense. But now, he tells us, it’s clear the system is collapsing and bolder approaches are required.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how dumb Gore must think we are to be peddling this rubbish. Everything the health system suffers from today – confounding bureaucracy, phalanxes of uninsured, soaring costs – were glaring then, too.

One likely Democratic presidential contender in 2004, who would not speak for attribution, sized up the last go-round this way. “Bradley had grabbed the ground with universal,” he told me. “Gore was put in the position of ‘me too,’ and he didn’t want to be a ‘me too.’ He didn’t know how to afford it, so he took the ground of, ‘I’m going to be the fiscally responsible one … because we’re the people who balanced the budget.’ And so he could responsibly say, ‘how are you going to pay for it?’ and make it look like it’s too big. That’s essentially what happened.”

But that was then – back when, as Gore now puts it, he was “holding back because of respect for the need to have a politically viable set of positions that could attract a majority.” In other words, “that’s what I thought would let me win then – and this is what I think could win for me now.”

If Gore is really going to try to get it right this time, why, instead of insulting our intelligence, can’t he come clean? “I goofed,” he could say. “I made a political calculation to whip Bradley by discrediting bolder ambitions. In retrospect, I think Bradley was right – not thinking bigger was a mistake, and not true to my honest sense of the country’s needs.” Isn’t it clear people would admire his honesty?

Yet here’s another truth. Though Gore’s flip-flop is disingenuous and maddening, I can’t say it disqualifies him as a carrier of this bolder message. The mere fact that he’s started talking about an American version of universal coverage has already changed the debate for the better.

That’s politics. You don’t have to love everything about a person if, at least eventually, they’re pushing for the right goals. I’m sure blacks in the early 1860s forgot all about Lincoln’s longstanding “ship the slaves to Liberia” plan once Abe found his way to emancipation.

So I can’t rule Gore out, but I need a little acknowledgment. Be a mensch and say you’re sorry, Al – and we’ll see if we can move past it together.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: mattino@worldnet.att.net.

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