As part of my ongoing fascinating with Al Gore’s prospects in 2008, I find it interesting that every few weeks, a handful of new items pop up that add a little more fuel to the still largely non-existent fire. Just yesterday, two fairly high-profile Republicans said the former Vice President could be a major player.
Roger J. Stone Jr., a veteran of eight Republican presidential campaigns, for example, noted some similarities between Gore and the last VP to make a comeback eight years after losing a close presidential race.
Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 2008.” His words were eerily reminiscent of a quote from another former Vice President, Richard Nixon, who told the same Associated Press in November of 1965 that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 1968.”
Many years later, in 1992, I chatted with Nixon in his Saddle River, N.J., home. He told me that “no man who narrowly misses the brass ring ever stops dreaming of another shot at it.” If Nixon was right, Mr. Gore may be positioning himself to be the one Democrat who can defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 Presidential primaries.
Stone is hardly a Gore fan, but he nevertheless notes Gore “could end up in the White House.” In fact, taking the Nixon parallels pretty far, Stone makes a good case that Nixon did it, so Gore could do it.
Both took on key public projects that put them in the public eye (Nixon wrote “Six Crises;” Gore has Current TV and “An Inconvenient Truth”). Both skipped the race after they lost, but made key inroads with the base at the time (Nixon made 141 campaign appearances for Goldwater; Gore endorsed Dean and teamed up with MoveOn). Both showed a softer, easier-to-like side after their respective losses (Nixon loosened up on the Jack Paar show; Gore did Saturday Night Live and joked with the late-night comedians).
Of course, historical parallels are interesting, but none other than Dick Morris says Gore looks like a “completely refurbished pre-owned vehicle,” who could win the Dem nomination. As Morris put it, “His slogan might well read ‘reelect Al Gore.'”
The former vice president’s slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.
And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.
Morris’ subtle derision of Gore notwithstanding, the point of his column was to say that conditions have lined up nicely for Gore, who is well-positioned on everything from the war in Iraq to the environment. Gore, Morris said, “looks more and more like a man whose time may have come.”
For that matter, a new WNBC/Marist poll suggests there’s still a base of support for Gore. Asking Dems nationally who they’d like to see as the Dem nominee in 2008, Hillary Clinton still leads the field, but not with as much support as she used to. Clinton garnered 33%, with Gore second at 17%, and Edwards third with 16%.
Stay tuned.