An Inconvenient Savior
So far this week, there have been three major mentions of former Vice President Al Gore:
1. In Time magazine, Joe Klein wrote that the Democrats should end their civil war between Hillary and Obama by bypassing both of them in favor of Gore. With Gore at the top of the ticket, either Hillary or (more likely) Obama could take the Number Two job, and the party could recover enough for the general election.
2. Florida Congressman Tim Mahoney floated this very idea. It's one thing for a writer from Time to do it. It's another thing entirely for a member of Congress to do it.
3. Gore himself is on this weekend's "60 Minutes," talking about his signature issue, global climate change. He's trying to counter new scientific work that suggests global warming has either halted or the earth is in a cooling phase or that the warming itself is not man-made. In other words, he's defending his life's work since the mid 1990s. The point is he's on a major media platform this weekend, in order to remind people he's still alive. And possibly a viable choice for president? Last December as he picked up his Nobel Prize, Gore said, "I have no plans to run." That doesn't mean he wouldn't run if they were somebody else's plans.
Further, he said that if he were to re-enter the political process, "it would be as a candidate for president."
While Hillary and Obama slug it out, the most inconvenient truth for both of them may be a "Draft Gore" movement. They would be gobsmacked. And Gore just might get the biggest prize of all, after all.
