2007-10-13

WASHINGTON — With Friday’s announcement of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore’s fans are pressing anew to persuade him to jump into the campaign for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination.

But it’s late in the game, with only 12 weeks before voting starts. Democrats in general are largely satisfied with their field of candidates and are hardly clamoring for him. And the country gives him only middling grades.

Gore himself was coy Friday, urging attention to global warming rather than his potential candidacy while continuing to sidestep a flat-out refusal to run for president again.

“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity,” he said in a statement. “It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

Despite a live global stage, Gore did not take questions from reporters, avoiding the issue of a presidential run next year. His aides repeatedly say he won’t enter the race. Gore donated his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan nonprofit organization devoted to changing public opinion worldwide about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Gore shared the Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel on the environment.

“For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and the recognition from this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency,” Gore said in brief remarks. “It is a planetary emergency and we have to act quickly.”

In announcing the award earlier in the day in Oslo, Norway, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, Nobel committee chairman, said the prize was not a slap at the Bush administration’s current policies. Instead, he said it was about encouraging all countries “to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming.”

Gore is the first former vice president to win the Peace Prize since 1906 when the award went to Theodore Roosevelt, who by that time had become president. Sitting Vice President Charles Gates Dawes won the prize in 1925. It went to former Presidents Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

Since losing the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, Gore has focused largely on the fight against global warming. His book “An Inconvenient Truth” became a best seller and the movie based on it won an Academy Award.

To a group of people trying to draft Gore to run for president, the Peace Prize is both a ratification of Gore’s work and a calling card into the campaign.

“It confirms our judgment of the man, his principles, vision, experience, efforts, as well as promise. He is in a unique position not only to lead our country, but to make America once again an agent for peace in the world,” said draftgore.com, a North Carolina-based group.

After his 2000 defeat, Gore became an early and vocal critic of Bush’s policies, particularly the Iraq War. But he passed up a chance to run in 2004, throwing his support behind former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

Since then, he consistently has said he isn’t planning to run next year, but also has consistently refused to rule out a run.

Some close to him speculate he still would like to be president and would accept the nomination if handed to him, but that he wouldn’t want to slug it out with the well-financed campaigns of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama — and perhaps lose.

But to get the nod, he would have to fight for the nomination and begin building a campaign organization in early voting states such as Iowa in just weeks.

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards already have widespread organizations in Iowa, where it’s important to have field operatives to organize the town hall-like caucus meetings and where it’s more difficult to win than in a simple primary where people merely show up and vote.

Also, while some Democratic activists want Gore to run, there’s no broad hunger for someone like him to come in and save the party from a weak field of candidates. A recent Gallup poll found that three out of four Democrats are satisfied with the field.

“The party is content with who is running,” said Erik Smith, a Democratic strategist.

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