By PHILIP GAILEY, Times Editor of Editorials
Published May 29, 2006
Ozone Man is back - and this time people are taking him seriously.
After winning the popular vote but losing the presidency in 2000, Al Gore largely disappeared from the political scene to ease his personal pain and to build a new life for himself outside politics. To his credit, Gore refused to be consigned gently to that scrap heap where defeated Democratic presidential candidates go in humiliation, rarely to be heard from again. The former vice president ruffled some party feathers with his out-of-the blue endorsement of Howard Dean for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. And while other leading Democrats were cowering, Gore became a roaring critic of the war in Iraq.
Now Gore has re-emerged as a prophet of environmental doom, and this time you don't hear a lot of snickers or wisecracks from Republicans when Gore talks about global warming. Remember the elder President Bush warning in 1992 that if Gore were ever in charge we would be "up to our necks in owls and outta work''? The way things are going on this planet, being up to our necks in owls sounds like the least of our worries.
Since Gore returned to private life, skepticism about the threat of global warming has been melting faster than the arctic ice caps, and Gore has now taken his message to a theater near you. His new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, opened last week in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the film got rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in France and is being touted as a strong contender for an Oscar for best documentary. Gore's horror show gives his view of what we can look forward to on Planet Earth if we don't embrace environmental sanity before it is too late - melting glaciers, drowning polar bears, the spread of disease, rising ocean levels and freaky weather patterns. It's enough to give children under 12 nightmares.
It's interesting to see Gore untethered from his campaign consultants and pollsters. On their advice, Gore abandoned his signature issue - global warming - in the 2000 campaign. It was a loser, his advisers warned him. In those days, Gore was so stiff and robotic he could have played a supporting role in March of the Penguins, last year's documentary sensation. His friends kept insisting that was not the Al Gore they knew.
Now political commentators and Democratic activists are cooing about the New Gore they see on the circuit these days. One pundit described him as "funny, warm and relaxed.'' He recently wowed a Saturday Night Live' audience. A film critic for Bloomberg News recently wrote that the Gore of yore ''displayed the charisma of a tax accountant,'' but since leaving the political rat race, "he's loosened up, cut down on his geek-speak and ditched those widely lampooned robotic gestures.''
Sounds like the greatest transformation of wood to flesh since Pinocchio.
So does all the buzz Al Gore is creating in political circles mean he could be lured into the 2008 presidential race? He keeps saying he has no interest in running, but stops short of a Shermanesque statement. Why does the possibility of Gore's political resurrection have such a hold on so many people? Maybe they believe a Gore candidacy would give Florida voters a chance to repent for the hanging chads and butterfly ballots that tripped him up in 2000. But is it fair to blame it all on Florida when Gore would have been president had he carried his home state of Tennessee?
What's really going on here is that political reporters are looking for a good story and antiwar Democrats are looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton, the presumed frontrunner for the 2008 nomination. Gore may come closer than other potential presidential hopefuls to being the "Not-Hillary'' candidate they yearn for. He has been moving to the left at a time when Hillary Clinton has been inching to the right. He opposed the war from the start; she supported it and still does. A Gore-Clinton primary contest could leave other Democratic hopefuls on the sidelines. It would be the mother of all nomination battles - former first lady vs. former vice president in the same administration.
Still, you have to wonder why Democrats would want to reach into the past just as it appears their party has a future after all. If they really want to go with a loser, Gore certainly makes more sense than John Kerry, a flop in 2004, or Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, both of whom are contemplating another run. There is a certain amount of sympathy for Gore but very little for Kerry, who ran a miserable campaign against Bush.
My bet is that Gore will bask in the attention he is getting these days and then just say no to running as the "Not-Hillary.'' Maybe he understands that what voters will really be looking for next time will be the "Not-Bush.'' Gore has the country's attention now on global warming, and he should not allow the temptation of a political comeback to distract him from the cause he foolishly tossed aside in his last presidential bid.
