Here's hoping it's Gore to the rescue
THE ECONOMIST
Enough already. The primaries are 11 months away and the race is already growing stale. The citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire are longing for the day when they can visit Denny's without having to meet Hillary or Rudy.
And the media are busy recycling the same old stories. Can Barack Obama run for president and give up smoking at the same time? Will Hillary Clinton hand her Senate seat to Bill if she wins? Is the U.S. ready for a Mormon president? Or a black? Or a woman? Or a man who once dressed as Marilyn Monroe?
There is no shortage of money or ideas: The candidates' treasure chests are overflowing and the think tanks churn out policy papers. But there is a severe shortage of attention. People will not be able to watch the same soap opera, endlessly repeated on 24-hour cable news and pored over in the blogosphere, for months on end without getting sick of the main characters.
Which means that there is a huge opportunity for somebody to arrive late and steal the show. The late entrant will not only have the advantage of being a fresh face. He or she could also change the whole dynamic of the race, gaining enough momentum to storm through Iowa and New Hampshire.
Step forward Al Gore. Gore has enough of a national profile to command instant credibility. He has rich friends to finance him. He will also command plenty of attention in his own right over the next few months: His film "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar for best documentary on Sunday, and he may be up for the Nobel Peace Prize in the autumn.
Gore is the ideal candidate for the Democratic stalwarts who turn out to vote in the primaries. He came out strongly against invading Iraq. He has spent the past six years warning the world about global warming. And he was robbed of victory in 2000 by the man whom the Democrats loathe above all others.
What better way of wiping out the Bush era than replacing him with the man who should have been president?
Gore is adamant that he does not want to run again. But will he be able to resist? It would be one of the great dramas of U.S. political history. And James Carville, keen observer of politicians, says that, for them, running for president is rather like having sex for normal people: It is not something that you do just once if you have any say in the matter.
-- Andy