http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...EWS02/710210345Supporters hope to draft Gore for president By GLENN BLAIN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: October 21, 2007)
It does not matter to Linda Solomon that Al Gore has declined, at least so far, to become a candidate for president in 2008.
What matters to Solomon, the Lower Hudson Valley coordinator of a group calling itself New York Draft Al Gore, is that the former vice president has not ruled it out.
"He has not said, 'I will not run.' .... I am waiting for that Shermanesque statement," said Solomon, 56, a marketing professor at Purchase College, SUNY. She was referring to Civil War Gen. William Sherman, who answered presidential queries in 1884 by saying, "If drafted, I will not run. If nominated, I will not accept. If elected, I will not serve."
Solomon's dedication is not uncommon among Gore's relatively small number of followers, who are, nevertheless, ardently devoted. They believe the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee has purposefully left open the possibility that he will run, and they are determined to do what they can to make it happen. And their passion for his candidacy has only been heightened by Gore's Nobel Peace Prize.
"If a person is robbed of an election, you can't go back in a time machine and change that," said Gore supporter Paul Levinson, a White Plains resident and a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University. "But I think it would be very healing if Al Gore were to be elected president and became president in 2009."
Yet the biggest obstacle blocking Gore's entry into the race - aside from his own reluctance - may be the strength of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the White House, political analysts said.
"He couldn't possibly challenge (Clinton)," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "I don't think he would announce his candidacy and run unless she was out, or on the way out."
Quinnipiac's most recent national poll, taken in August, indicated that Gore was the favorite candidate of only 15 percent of Democrats. Clinton, by contrast, topped the poll at 36 percent.
The Nobel Prize, despite the buzz it has created among Gore supporters and some liberal bloggers, does not seem to have improved Gore's standing with mainstream voters. A Gallup Poll taken just after the award was announced found little change in the number of people wanting Gore to run for president.
When asked if they wanted Gore in the race, 54 percent said no and only 41 percent said yes, according to Gallup. A March poll found 57 percent opposed to his candidacy and 38 in favor.
"Every number says (Clinton) is the Democratic nominee, but it is a long way between here and the Democratic convention," Carroll said.
Clinton supporters, at least publicly, said they are not concerned about Gore entering the race.
"I think it's a pipe dream," Westchester Democratic Chairman Reginald LaFayette, a Clinton backer, said about a Gore candidacy.
Gore, for his part, has repeatedly said he has no plans to run for president. Only last week, he told a Norwegian television interviewer, "I don't have plans to be a candidate again."
Solomon and other proponents of a Gore candidacy, however, see lots of wiggle room in such comments, and they are about to step up their efforts to bring him into the race - or at least get him to definitively declare that he will not run.
Beginning Oct. 30, members of New York Draft Al Gore will launch a petition drive to obtain the 5,000 signatures needed to place Gore on the state's presidential primary ballot. It is part of a loosely coordinated effort among draft-Gore groups across the country to place him on primary ballots.
"If we get him on the ballot, he stays on the ballot until he says take it off," said Stephen Cohen, a Manhattan resident and president of New York Draft Al Gore, which is a federally registered political action committee. "That's why we are doing it. We're going to put the question to him."
In Gore, Cohen and other supporters see a potential candidate who was wrongfully denied the presidency in 2000 and who has since risen above ordinary politics to embrace a larger struggle with his efforts to raise awareness about global climate change.
In February, "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore's film about the dangers of global warming, won an Academy Award for best documentary feature.
"Our country is in really serious trouble," Cohen said. "I think we would all agree with that. I don't think we can do business as usual. I think we need heroic leadership, and I think he has proven that he can provide that."
And unlike Clinton and some of the other Democratic candidates, Gore opposed the Iraq war from its inception and has been among the most fervent critics of the Bush administration's policies, Gore supporters argued.
Solomon, a New Rochelle resident, joined the Gore for president effort after reading his book "Assault on Reason" during the summer. She was so taken with the book that, using her home computer, she created two videos urging Gore to run and posted them on YouTube using the name "algoregal."
"I think that after the movie, the Academy Award and now the Nobel Peace Prize, (Gore) has gone into the realm beyond politics," said Chris Malone, a political science professor at Pace University. "He's become a statesman, if you will."
Unfortunately for his supporters, Gore is running out of time to enter the race, Malone said. Because of the compressed primary schedule, Gore probably would have to make a decision before Thanksgiving.
"It's very likely that we will have a nominee in the Democratic Party by mid-February," Malone said. "That just gives Gore or anybody else no time to pick up the slack. ... At the same time, if anyone could make a real race of this, it would be Al Gore. He would be such an unconventional candidate."