Right on schedule. In the third week in February, speculation about Al [tag]Gore[/tag]’s future picked up considerably with high-profile columns from Roger J. Stone Jr. and Dick Morris. In the third week in March, a cover story for The American Prospect renewed talk about another [tag]presidential[/tag] [tag]campaign[/tag] for Gore, which prompted the former VP to say he’s not “planning to be a candidate again,” but he hasn’t “reached a stage in my life where I’m willing to say I will never consider something like this.”
Now it’s the third week in April. Guess what the hot topic of conversation is.
[tag]Al Gore[/tag] is getting the band back together. In a move that could inch him closer to another bid at the presidency in [tag]2008[/tag], the former vice president has hired Roy Neel, a veteran of presidential politics, to help run his current campaign to raise awareness of global warming.
“His profile is going up considerably because of his work on global warming,” said Neel, a longtime Gore aide who also ran Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. The presidential speculation, Neel said, “is clearly flattering, but he’s doing nothing to plan a presidential campaign right now.”
Neel will coordinate a growing effort. Gore is starring in a new documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which opens next month. He’s written a new book, and another aide said he will soon open a training institute, all focused on bringing political will to bear on rising global temperatures.
For that matter, it raised a few eyebrows yesterday when National Journal reported that Gore paid $40,000 to his former pollster recently. Was it related to 2008? A Gore advisor said the payment “is related to an ’00 campaign commitment.”
The scuttlebutt prompted the WaPo’s Richard Cohen to write, “[O]n paper, he is the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008.”
Among other things, he won the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he supported the Persian Gulf War — right both times. He is smart, experienced and, despite the false caricatures, a man versed in the new technologies — especially the Internet. He is much more a person of the 21st century than most of the other potential candidates. Trouble is, a campaign is not a film. Gore could be a great president. First, though, he has to be a good candidate.
In the meantime, he is a man on a mission. Wherever he goes — and he travels incessantly — he finds time and an audience to deliver his (free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the peril we face, nor do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried and failed to gain the presidency, he has raised his sights to save the world. We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.
Here’s a link to the trailer for Gore’s new movie and the Amazon listing for Gore’s new book. Stay tuned.