Look Out, Here Comes Al Gore

Like a completely refurbished "pre-owned vehicle," Al Gore seems to be positioning himself to Hillary Clinton's left and greener than John Kerry for a run at the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. His slogan might well read "reelect Al Gore."

The former vice president's slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.

And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book "Earth in the Balance." He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug - Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

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