"If the Patriot Act is what the election of 2004 revolves around, the Democrats are not likely to do very well, because I don't think most Americans think they have lost constitutional rights," May said. "There is a reason we haven't been attacked on American soil since 2001, and I think the Patriot Act is part of that."
Virtually all of the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates have criticized Bush's civil liberties record, but Gore's remarks are among the sharpest attacks that any Democrat has offered on the issue. Gore's comments follow an equally confrontational speech in August, when he accused Bush of misleading the country on the war in Iraq and a wide array of domestic issues.
Like that speech, Sunday's address was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group. It was cosponsored by the American Constitution Society, a liberal group established to offset the influence in law schools of the Federalist Society, an organization of conservative lawyers.
Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, received a sustained standing ovation when he arrived and several more throughout the speech.
Intermittent chants of "Run, Al, run" bubbled up from the crowd, but Gore, who took himself out of the Democratic race in December, waved them off without responding. He did not take questions from reporters after the address.
In the speech, Gore charged that the Bush administration "had turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head" by seeking to withhold information about its own activities, even while acquiring ever more information about the activities of private citizens.
Gore said Bush was frustrating the public's right to information about its government by resisting independent and congressional investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks; by instructing federal agencies to resist requests for documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act; and by refusing to disclose details about individuals of Arab descent detained after the attacks.
At the same time, Gore noted, the administration has pursued new authority to investigate Americans it considers security risks by monitoring their e-mail and Internet activity, their conversations with lawyers, and even the lists of library books they have checked out.
Linking his new critique to his earlier criticism of the war in Iraq, Gore declared: "It makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden."
