Give up on Gore

In 1996 a remarkable recovery occurred. The patient was afflicted with odd physical mannerisms, inexplicable verbal tics and an unfortunate degree of detachment from self. Few felt the situation would improve, these people would later be proven wrong when the monotonous voice and unchanging facial expressions disappeared seemingly overnight. The cure, in this case, was losing the 1996 Presidential election and the patient was Bob Dole.

Once the election was over, the most boring man in America went from someone who referred to himself in the third person to a self deprecating, relaxed, enjoyable to see person capable of remarkable wit and the best Viagra pitchman to date. The reason for the transformation isn’t hard to fathom, running for President is a high stress task, not only is any legitimate candidate handled so carefully as to remove any shred of humanity and controversy from their public persona any candidate with a soul has to be walking around in a constant state of fear that they might actually win and find themselves in way over their head.

Which brings us to Al Gore. A lot of people want Al Gore to run for President. DailyKos, to cite but one example, has straw polls wherein Al Gore is purposefully excluded because he trounces every other candidate. The love for Al doesn’t stop with those who are convinced the answer to all the woes of the Democratic party can be met by a bunch of bloggers with overly cute screen names (pollytick07 is full of crap but when pollytickO9 speaks up, people listen!), mainstream folks want Al to run as well.

The allure of a Gore candidacy isn’t hard to see. Running against mostly unknowns, Gore would have hard to beat name recognition and a near insurmountable ability to raise funds. Likely, people envision an Gore campaign as Al just standing on the podium and promising to bring back the good old days when America was fixated on celebrity murder trails, bad music and dotcom stocks. In imaginations everywhere Al’s entire campaign consists of him standing on a podium and saying “Just like the old days, but without interns in knee pads.”

The rub is, of course, Al isn’t running. Those who pay even momentary attention to the television have seen Al go from uptight Presidential nominee to bitter failed nominee to wallowing in self pity chunky guy with a beard to reborn, de-stressed suddenly engaging Al Gore the private citizen. Sure, it took Al a little longer than Bob Dole but he got to the same happy place.

But what about a draft Al Gore campaign? If enough people come begging and pleading Al to save the country from either Hillary Clinton or Newt Gingrich surely Al would be forced, as a loyal American, to accept the nomination. Right?

Unfortunately, for fans of Al, it is too late for that. It is impossible not to notice that Al has tied himself very closely to global warming. Al has a movie, business interests and a speaking schedule all fully devoted to global warming. Al might be truly passionate about the environment or it might all be a sham, either way it has made Al as one dimensional as Paper Mario

American public. People might willingly fret about ice sheets melting but when they think about the next President, they think lower gas prices and getting out of Iraq.

Al Gore’s mellowing is likely not a conscious change, but his choice to tie himself so closely to the global warming debate is a move made with full understanding of the longer-term repercussions. You can, of course, discount Al’s denials as an indication he won’t run, politics after all. Still, it all adds up to one thing: Al isn’t running no matter how badly people want him to.

Get your mind off it:Year you were born