Bob McCarty Writes

By now, Al Gore must be accustomed to feeling a breeze blowing up his proverbial “skirt”. After all, writers from some of the nation’s largest media outlets seem to be involved in a vast left-wing conspiracy (not really, I just wanted to use that phrase in a post) to boost the former vice president’s public persona.

The conspiracy began two days ago when Time.com published writer Eric Pooley’s gushing article, The Last Temptation of Al Gore, about Gore. Though Pooley didn’t quite claim Gore walks on water, he came close with his laudatory, almost-worshipful approach to the topic of a possible 2008 presidential run.

Now, it appears, another writer, James Traub, has taken the baton from Pooley.

In a piece, Al Gore has big plans, and they’re not political, originally published Friday in the The New York Times Magazine, Traub paints Gore as the perfect combination of brain surgeon, rock star and all-knowing, all-seeing mountain-top-sitting guru:

Championing Gore’s cerebral wizardry, Traub writes, “Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming.”

Comparing him to a rock star, the writer gushes, “A woman in a blazing orange shirt cried, ‘Isn’t that AL GORE?!’ as she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet…”

And, finally, on his guru-like status, Traub explains, “Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, Gore has been trying to explain that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise.”

A lot of people in the mainstream news media and elsewhere seem to thrive on speculation as to whether Gore will eventually decide to seek the Democrat presidential nomination one more time. As a former political campaign manager, I have to hand it to the man who’s provided so much fodder for this blog. The longer he holds out on declaring his intentions, the more free publicity he receives from his minions in the media.

[Note: To see other Al Gore-related posts at Bob McCarty Writes, click here.]