Moves

You heard it here first, right?

Well, I'm not going to say that Al Gore is in the race for 2008 yet, but he's doing some kind of campaign prep, per the NY Daily News "getting the band back together" with the hiring of presidential politics vet Roy Neel. Maybe it's just for his new movie and book, maybe it's just for a win in the marketplace of ideas. But the buzz is rising.

Check out this powerful movie trailer, and you'll find Al does something for the environment that the GOP do for terrorism: he hits the fear button. For some reason, his case seems so much more airtight than, say, WMDs in Iraq. As I said before, he's got ownership of a Big Vision Issue. Tie it in with igniting a countrywide alternative energy program to get off the oil, you've got a national security policy as well.

I'm looking forward to the Fox News smears against the picture, the phony scientists they'll trot out to "debate" the idea of global warming, the reheated Internet invention jokes. I just think Al's got a thicker skin now. He's been through the worst -- how could he care what they say?

Per my earlier argument, it's the New Nixon model, the New Gore. Just read non-Dem Roger Stone:

Mr. Gore must again borrow from the Nixon playbook and reinvent himself. The "“New Gore"” is more relaxed: He'’s had time to think and reflect on the great challenges facing America. In his wilderness years, he has found himself. He is more self-effacing, funnier, cooler, easier-going, yet articulate and firm. The Al Gore who appeared on Jay Leno'’s show after the 2004 Presidential election is the Al Gore that voters could find attractive, just as the "“New Nixon"” who emerged on Jack Paar after the 1960 election was far more palatable than the pale, sweaty, shifty-eyed Nixon of the Nixon-Kennedy debates.

Longtime political consultant Dick Morris lays out the historical precedent:

History indicates that candidates who won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College have all come back to win revenge in subsequent elections. Andrew Jackson, cheated in 1824, won in 1828. Grover Cleveland, cheated in 1888, triumphed in 1892. Samuel Tilden, who won the popular vote in 1876, never ran again, but he dealt away the White House in a deal for the withdrawal for federal troops from the South, allowing the Ku Klux Klan to take over.

I hear more negs on Gore from friends on the left than more on the right. They see a loser...until they watch the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth. Then they remember that it is in the realm of possibility, lo and behold, to have a nation's leader who can put complex ideas into normal sentences and communicate something real and important, even if the manner is a little more stilted than we all might like.

How about a President who's good at more than just breaking things?

My guess is that Gore has plenty of time now -- at least until after the mid-term elections -- to keep promoting his movie/book combo, test the waters, see if he generates buzz and if it sticks. That way, if his public reputation isn't salvaged, he can just keep on campaigning to save the planet as a private citizen, no harm/no foul.

As Dick Morris closes out:

But Gore has three things going for him: A perception that he was robbed of the White House and Hillary'’s possible stubbornness in continuing to back the war.

The third thing? The weather. As the evidence of global climate change impresses everyone who doesn'’t work at the White House, Gore looks more and more like a man whose time may have come.

Run, Al, run.