We'll go to the ends of the earth to answer reader questions. OK, maybe not exactly that far. But if we happen to notice Al Gore on Ellen . . .

Earlier in the week, when I invited readers to tell us what's on your mind, among the interesting responses was:

I am interested in the "campaign" that Gore has been running for the Oscar/Presidency. I like Gore and so far he is my choice, even though he has the ring of the past and I am tired of running southerners.

Nevertheless, I still feel like he had gravitas. After all, he WAS elected president and
• he was right about the Internet,
• he was right about the war - he's right about our constitutional crisis
• and lord knows he's right about the environment.

And he is like the energizer bunny in that he never ever gives up, he just keeps promoting his issues on and on and on. (In my heart I'll always love Howard Dean, but my brain says marry Gore.) But I like the wild man Gore, not the sane moderate one.


Today I happened to catch the ex-veep on Ellen, promoting the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth. Naturally, Ellen asked if he's going to run for anything.

I don't think I'll ever do that again. I don't have any intention or plan to do it, and the only reason I haven't made a kind of a what they call a Shermanesque statement--"under no circumstances" . . . I was in it for so long. It's the mental shifting of gears. But I've kind of fallen out of love with politics, to tell you the truth.

I don't rule out being involved in some way at some point in the future. But I actually am involved in a different kind of campaign, to try to change people's minds about the climate crisis, and I think it's worth doing.

Ellen ventured that "Whoever is our next president, we really do need to make a shift, or we're in trouble," and Al agreed.

Absolutely, and it needs to happen in both political parties, and the whole political process has been paralyzed now for way too long on this. This is a very, very serious--the most serious crisis we've ever faced. And the only way it's really going to change, Ellen, is if there is a change at the grass-roots level, a real sea change, and whoever does run walks down the sidewalk and every other person they meet says, "What are you going to do to solve the climate crisis?" And in order to bring about that change, there has to be a lot of communications at the grass-roots level.

Now we like "the wild man Gore" too, but he sure doesn't look or sound like a guy who would run without an awful lot of persuading, and in modern electoral life "draft" movements just don't happen. Running for president involves such a huge personal commitment, and personal involvement, not to mention personal soul-selling, that a candidate is most unlikely to be teased into the race.


SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO AREN'T RUNNING, IT SEEMS LIKE EVAN BAYH IS PROBABLY ONE--AND IS ABOUT TO MAKE IT OFFICIAL

"CBS News has learned that there's intense speculation among Democrats that Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh won't run for president in 2008. Details soon."
--"BREAKING NEWS" announcement on cbsnews.com

OK, noted.


UPDATE: (FROM TIERRA DEL FUEGO!) HOWIE ADDS THIS NOTE ABOUT THE EX-VEEP'S QUAINT IDEA OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WALKING DOWN A SIDEWALK

Whomever he meets when he walks down the sidewalk??? Is he kidding? That gets to the very nature of the problem. The likely candidates don't walk down the sidewalk. Our political class, and those whose interests they serve--and the mass media and political operatives who serve them--don't walk down the sidewalks either. It's part of the Inside the Beltway bubble they've constructed for themselves. Sort of like a better-entrenched version of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

No less out of touch, no less incapable of comprehending the lives of the people they govern . . . and, hard as it is to believe, no less impermanent.