Now What? (with update)

Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He's sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I'm sure the Extreme Right will attack the award on the basis that climate change -- whether it exists or not -- has nothing to do with peace. The problem with that argument is that even Bush's Defense Department believes that climate change is one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- security threats our country currently faces. No matter -- the Extreme Right doesn't much care about the facts anyway.

The issue now is whether Gore will try to take advantage of all this positive press and run for president. For a long time, I thought that Gore would run, but only if no clear front-runner emerges early from the current Democratic field.

Well, Hillary has emerged as the clear front-runner. Yes, it is still early and anything can happen, but there it is. One year ago, I thought it would have been a mistake for the Democrats to nominate Hillary -- and thus essentially neutralize Iraq as a campaign issue for the 2008 General Election -- but one of the underpinnings to my thinking in that regard was that the GOP would run a candidate who could actually win the presidency.

Fortunately for the Democrats, that is not happening. Giuliani, the current GOP front-runner by some accounts, is a cross-dresser who is so hated by the Radical Religious Right that they are threatening to run a third-party candidate if Rudy gets the GOP nomination. Giuliani is even hated by his own children, for God's Sake.

Romney is not only hampered by being a practicing member of a religion that some folks think is akin to a cult, but is also the biggest flip-flopper in American political history. He'd get crucified in the General Election.

The one Republican I thought might have a chance -- Fred Thompson -- is reportedly the laziest campaigner in the world, and he also thinks the Soviet Union is still a real country. Plus, he's probably the most right wing of the GOP field, and that alone might sink his chances in the General Election because Bush is the most right-winged president in American history and I think that folks are a bit tired of having an extremist in the White House.

Anyway, my current thinking is that Gore will probably not run for the 2008 nomination. But I hope he proves me wrong because I believe he would make a great president.

Gore/Obama 2008.

UPDATE: For what it's worth:

A source involved in Gore's past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.