It would be very hard not to be bitter. Many people would be, if they were Al Gore, if for reason other than the closeness of the election. It would be good for the country if he would get over his bitterness.
Yes he's bitter - bitter that as the sitting vice president, in peace time and in a strong economy, he somehow lost to a man whom he perceives as a inarticulate cowboy bumpkin (never mind W's own Yale-and-Harvard and family pedigrees). And bitter that he was denied, in such an agonizingly razor-thin decision, what he had pointed his entire professional life to, and what he felt he practically deserved as a birthright, i.e. the Presidency. And bitter that he served loyally for eight years to the Horny Hick from Hope, patiently awaiting his turn only to be denied. All those tens of millions of dollars he's collected and the love of the tree-huggers and the doomsday mongers can't fill that emptiness.