Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize; will he run for President?
Al Gore has deservedly won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the IPCC for raising awareness around the world about global warming. Gore has made this a personal mission ever since 1992. The world would have been a better place had not five SCOTUS Justices in 2000 decided that they knew better than the American people who should be our next president of the United States. But Al Gore left one of the main questions about his future unanswered. The question becomes, I won the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar; now what?
Running for President is a logical consideration; however, Gore sees this as a moral imperative, not a political one. One question is, would Gore be able to challenge Hillary or shake up the field? It can be done; Fred Thompson, for all his sleepwalking, is a close second to Rudy in the polls. Another consideration that might apply is that after being screwed in the 2000 election, he might be cynical enough about politics that he might feel that it would dilute his message if he were to run; after all, he watered down his message in 2000 significantly. The third consideration is, can he win merely on the basis of the environment? The problem is that people might see him as a one-issue candidate in the same sense that they saw Ned Lamont as such in the 2006 election.
On the other hand, Gore might decide that he has done all that he can on the outside and listen to the voices of hundreds of thousands of people who are begging him to run for President. If he were to do so, he would probably do so in a way that would bypass the traditional channels and rely on the netroots, Current TV, and other such sources. He is still deciding these things and has not made up his mind yet.
People may wonder why the environment has to do with world peace. But the fact of the matter is that global warming has now become a national security issue. If we continue on the current path that we are on, then we will experience global chaos, as billions of people around the world will be displaced and have to move inland due to rising water levels. Countries might be tempted to develop nukes to protect dwindling resources. And this move inland is already starting to happen; for instance, there are people already starting to buy up land that was once used for logging and turning it into houses. They might be the canaries in the coal mine.
It may well be that Gore will not run for President. But that does not mean that it is the end of the world. The fact of the matter is that we cannot lean on Gore or anyone else and look on them as the last hope of civilization; that is too similar to the kind of hateful rhetoric that Tom Tancredo uses and that the rest of the Republicans have adopted. We all have the unique transformative power to change the world, and it is our responsibility to transform our part of the world for the better.
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