KEY POINTS:
On that bleak evening of December 12, 2000, when Al Gore sat with his advisers pondering what seemed like life's crowning disappointment, the presidency of the United States snatched from him by the Supreme Court, who could have imagined it would come to this?
Yesterday's Nobel Peace Prize caps an astonishing journey of rebranding, redemption and self-rediscovery that transformed a defeated former vice-president into the world's most famous environmentalist. It has also rekindled hope that Gore will enter the 2008 presidential race, and seek the one office that has eluded him.
The past 10 months have been a political strategist's wildest dream: a hit movie, an Oscar, and now the Nobel prize, lending Gore a moral authority no potential rival next year could possibly match.
"America and the Earth need a hero right now," pleaded the "Draft Gore" campaign in a full-page ad in the New York Times this week, urging him to run.
Yet, yesterday again, he gave not the slightest indication he will. After all he has been through, one suspects Al Gore knows better.
Defeat, in an election that most felt he ought to have won with ease, was a blow he is still reluctant to discuss.
Oddly, with politics lifted from his shoulders, Gore became a more convincing politician. In December 2002, he took himself out of the 2004 White House race, but was already an outspoken opponent of the war against Iraq, and a more eloquent critic of Republican excesses than he ever was as a candidate.
In the meantime, he founded a cable TV network, joined the board of Apple, and served as a senior adviser for Google.
Most important, he hurled himself into the environmental issues that had fascinated him since his Harvard days in the 1960s, when one of his science teachers warned how greenhouse gas emissions could devastate the Earth.
In 1976, Gore was elected to the House of Representatives, where he organised the first congressional hearings on global warming.
In the Senate, where he represented Tennessee from 1984 until 1992, when he was picked by Bill Clinton as his running mate, he pursued the issue. As Vice-President he helped broker the 1997 Kyoto protocol (never ratified by the US and explicitly repudiated by George W. Bush).
But that activism pales beside the peripatetic Gore of recent years, as he travelled the globe, lecturing, lobbying, and starring in the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, spelling out the perils of global warming.
He wrote The Assault on Reason, a devastating critique of the Bush administration. All the while, honours and awards rained on him, culminating in the Nobel prize.
If ever Gore's hour had come, it was now. But "I have no plans to do so," is his reply to the endlessly posed question of whether he will run.
Yesterday, at an appearance in California, he ignored it utterly. Now was the time to "elevate global consciousness" about the crisis, he told his audience. "I'm going back to work," he said, ignoring shouted questions about his future.
His cause is a higher one, he implies, better served by the public advocacy his celebrity makes possible, than by political office with its constraints and compromises. "The range of things we're talking about now will come to seem so small. This [climate change] is not a political issue but a moral and spiritual challenge."
Were he to declare his candidacy, Gore would come to the game late, less than three months before the first caucus and primary votes, and US$80m in fundraising behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
But suppose the ever-more centrist Clinton continues to lap the Democratic field, and Obama and John Edwards fall further behind, even as polls show Clinton faring less well in match-ups with Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani.
A "left-of-Hillary" space would open up. Who better to fill it than the battle-tested, lionised Gore, now clad in the mantle of saviour of the planet?
- THE INDEPENDENT
