Sharing the Nobel Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given rise to a lot of talk about yet another Al Gore run for the White House. Nobody looked more uncomfortable Friday morning than Hillary Clinton, the current front-runner for the Democrat nomination, who clearly saw her own star fading fast as Al accepted the highest honor offered any international leftist.
The Draft Gore Campaign was eager to capitalize on the news that their 2008 presidential dream candidate had just joined the ranks of Jimmy Carter, Rigoberta Menchu, Wangari Muta Maathai and Yasser Arafat as an esteemed Nobel Peace Prize holder, an accomplishment which is only a pipedream to ex-president still in search of a legacy, Bill Clinton, and well beyond Hillary's reach.
To some, like the
Union Leader, Gore's Prize represents yet another Fraud on the People. Gore received the Nobel for the same work product that won him an Oscar and an Emmy from like-minded Hollywood political activists. But as the Union Leader points out, "on Friday the prize was given to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change. Two days before, a British judge ruled that Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," contained so many errors (read: lies) that it could be shown in British public schools only if accompanied by a fact sheet correcting the errors."
To others, like those working to draft Gore into the 2008 presidential race, Gore's best-selling book, internationally acclaimed Global Warming thriller and Nobel Prize represents an opportunity for Al Gore to take one more stab at his birthright, the American presidency.
A three-time loser?
Gore lost a 1988 bid for the Democrat nomination to Michael Dukakis after alienating the black vote with what Rainbow Coalition candidate Jesse Jackson called "racist" campaign tactics, by initiating the infamous "Willie Horton" campaign strategy, later used to derail the Dukakis campaign in the general election.
He was gearing up to make a second run in 1992 when his son Albert was nearly killed in an automobile accident while leaving the Baltimore Orioles opening game. Leaving Bill Clinton a largely unchallenged candidate for the party nomination in '92 helped Gore secure the Vice President's position in the '92 and '96 Clinton administrations. But by 1999, that friendship had become so fractured that Gore would not even allow Clinton to campaign for him in 2000.
Gore made his third run at the Oval Office without Clinton in 2000, and although he lost to the Electoral College system, he did win the national popular vote by roughly a half million voters. He lost the legal battle over "hanging chads" in Florida to end his third bid for the White House. But it was actually losing his home state of Tennessee that cost him the election and caused him great personal disappointment.
The Gore name was now tainted in the Democrat Party as a three-time loser. Though he remains a very popular icon to the polarizing far left-wing of the Democrat Party, he is seen by many Democrat voters as a waste of vital political resources.
Should he run again in 2008?
Despite all of the above and the fact that Hillary has a lock on the DNC nomination thanks to Bill, this remains a valid question.
The 2008 Democrat field has only one viable national candidate, former First Lady and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. Obama's star is already predictably fading and John Edwards
JB Williams——
Bio and Archives
JB Williams is a writer on matters of history and American politics with more than 3000 pieces published over a twenty-year span. He has a decidedly conservative reverence for the Charters of Freedom, the men and women who have paid the price of freedom and liberty for all, and action oriented real-time solutions for modern challenges. He is a Christian, a husband, a father, a researcher, writer and a business owner.
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