Perspective is a funny thing. I'm trying to work out the timing, but my buddy and I were running a UUCP network in Manitoba, Canada round about 1988. UUNet had just connected to the internet backbone and we chatted with them briefly about connecting up with them. They said as long as we paid for a T1 from Toronto, they would let us work with them. I'm pretty sure this was before AlterNet, so it would have had to have been prior to 1990. IIRC, the cost to us would have been about $30K per month and we considered the option of starting up a commercial ISP. In the end we decided not to, but at the time I was absolutely convinced we could have made it a viable business.
When Al Gore hit my radar, I thought he was completely irrelevant. In retrospect, I'm sure that's not true because some of the legislation that he pushed through paved the way for commercial traffic. But believe me, it was coming whether he did anything or not.
He may have accelerated the process slightly, but probably not too much. His major contribution may actually have been to maintain US dominance of the internet for a couple more decades. Canada was already gearing up for it and I remember friends setting up fledgling ISPs in about 1993 (right when CANARIE had finished being set up).
Personally, I don't have any real thoughts about Al Gore one way or another. I can see he was very influential, but from my perspective he was mostly just riding the wave as opposed to creating it.