This must keep Hillary Clinton awake at night:
Veterans of Al Gore's past are quietly assembling a campaign to draft the former vice president into the 2008 presidential race - despite his repeated statements that he's not running.
His top policy adviser from his 2000 presidential campaign and other key supporters met Thursday in Boston to mull a potential Gore campaign.
And, in the background, groups have been lobbying for Gore's return to presidential politics.
"He certainly has the right political climate. How many political candidates are being nominated for Nobel prizes and winning Oscars?" said Dylan Malone, co-founder of AlGore.org and organizer of a political action committee trying to draft Gore.
In 2002, Gore asked Malone to stop a draft effort he had begun; Malone did. Malone started up again and, so far, Gore hasn't waved him off.
"The difference is dramatic. His time has come," Malone said. "We're raising tens of thousands of dollars fairly easily. Our mailing lists are growing so quickly we have to buy new computers."
Now, if Republicans would persuade Newt Gingrich to join the fray we'd have a real contest between ideologies and ideas. Neither man is seen by their respective parties as perfect, but Al Gore is not a Kerryesque flip-flopper with his finger to the wind as Senator Clinton is. He has been nothing if not consistent in his left-wing positions. Hillary seems willing to say whatever she thinks she must to get the nomination and get elected.
Newt, on the other hand, has probably the brightest, most fertile, mind of any of the candidates in the race. He also has the virtue of being a fairly consistent conservative, a trait of which neither Rudy Guiliani nor John McCain can boast. Guiliani is a social liberal or libertarian and McCain is completely unpredictable.
A race between Gore and Gingrich would offer the voter a battle of ideas as classic as it is rare in our politics. It wouldn't be a test of who could fool the most people into thinking that they are what they're not. Gore tried that in 2000 and got burned, and it's doubtful that he'd make the same mistake again. It's too bad that neither man has indicated as yet that he will be a candidate.
RLC
