What if Gore wins Nobel?
John Brummett

The Nobel Prize for Peace for 2007 will be awarded Oct. 12 in Norway. The buzz says it might go to Al Gore for educating and warning the world about climate change.

That is both a titillating and significant prospect, on many levels.

It titillates to imagine the lather into which such a selection would send the already irritated - in fact, the always irritated - American right wing.

This recently controlling segment of the American electorate finds itself in decline because George W. Bush, its embodiment of the Peter Principle, has pretty much ruined it by disastrous ineptitude.

It denies global warming, detests Gore and has long dismissed the Nobel Prize as some kind of socialist Scandinavian plot against the free, logical and self-sufficient, at least since Jimmy Carter nabbed his.

All we know for sure is that Gore has been formally nominated.

Should he win, the right will say again, despite all evidence to the contrary, that global warming is not happening. If failing there, the right will say that hand-wringing about the alleged predicament has nothing to do with peace.

But Gore's using his status to sound the alarm about dire effects to natural habita- tions, and to encourage people to change their ways, surely serves a peaceful cause. Trying to save the planet carries certain inherent peaceful connotations, don't you think?

Another titillating aspect of Gore's selection would be the ensuing tempest of political speculation that, most likely, would be contained to its teapot.

The prospect of Gore's Nobel already has some pundits wondering if it might propel him into the Democratic presidential primary.

Some think he could still ruin everything for Hillary Clinton, whose methodical campaign has become a bit of a bore and with whom Gore never quite got in sync when they served as cochief deputy presidents.

It surely won't happen. World statesmanship is not something from which one can easily return for pedestrian and provincial political pursuits.

A Nobel Prize is a rare honor and a matter of good will, but it probably lacks a great deal of American political capital. It's like being a Harvard graduate in Arkansas. Ask Gov. Bill Bristow and U.S. Sen. Nate Coulter about that.

Even less likely is another Clinton-Gore ticket. If pursuit of the presidency is beneath a Nobel winner, then the mere mention that the Nobelist might accept the vice presidency would surely qualify as an insult.

Finally, a Nobel for Gore would remind me again of something said by Rod Bryan, the progressive bicycling independent candidate for governor of Arkansas last year. It was that Gore could emerge as champion on the environment only because he didn't win the presidency.

Had he won, Bryan believed, Gore would have fallen victim, like all other politicians as usual, to the cautious, conventional, establishmentarian and special interest-influenced.

The point seems to be that changing the world is something you can do anymore only outside of politics as usual.

It's that so-called transformational leadership can come only from those freed of the modern political restraints applied by money and spin.

Notice how Hillary already has gone into a prevent defense, determined to say nothing even remotely bold lest it put at risk her lead in the polls. Notice how Barack Obama, potentially a transformational leader, has lost his footing at times, mainly because of concern in the context of politics as usual about whether he has the requisite traditional experience.

Notice the minimalist accomplishments of Bill Clinton as president, then compare them to the noble ambition of his postpresidential work through his foundation. Notice, of course, that Carter was a failed president, and a beloved world leader only after.

It is possible that the Supreme Court's vote in Bush-Gore was the best thing to happen to Gore and, by the way, the planet - in terms of climate, anyway, if not Mideast stability.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews. com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.