Since losing to George Bush, in 2000, Al Gore has reinvented himself as an environmental campaigner. That doesn't mean he won't run for the US presidency again, writes Donald Clarke
'I'm Al Gore and I used to be the next president of the United States." So begins the former vice-president's arresting PowerPoint presentation - now coming your way as a film entitled An Inconvenient Truth - on the risks that global warming poses to the planet. When Gore first dreamed up that opening for his worrying slide show, he intended it simply as a way of demonstrating how at ease he was with the gruesome manner of his relegation to private citizen.
Dozens of men have lost presidential elections. Only one has had to endure anything like the fiasco that engulfed the Gore campaign in 2000. His dry quip clarified that he was capable of contemplating all that ghastly history - the hanging chads, the premature declarations, the eventual US supreme-court decision - with grace and good humour.
In recent months, however, new ironies have begun to gather around Gore's witticism. Hillary Clinton, once the favourite to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008, has exasperated many on the left of the party with her support for the Iraq war. Meanwhile, Gore, an avowed opponent of George W Bush's Mesopotamian adventures, has begun to pick up considerable support among liberals. He might yet become the next president of the United States.
Such comebacks are not unknown in politics. In the 1930s many viewed Winston Churchill as a drunken, bellicose has-been. In the immediate aftermath of the arms trial Charlie Haughey's future looked equally grim. The failed candidate at the 1962 election for the governorship of California erroneously quipped: "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around any more." All went on to lead their countries.
Five years ago the comparison with Nixon, another two-term vice-president who lost a desperately close presidential election, would have been irresistible. Neither man was renowned for his charm or his feel for the common man. When Nixon appeared on television a scent of brimstone seemed to spread about the viewer's room. When Vice-President Gore opened his mouth, entire continents found themselves drifting into torpor.
Yet, as Gore the citizen has travelled the world arguing for a reduction of carbon emissions, something unexpected has happened: he has become more than a little interesting. He has started to tell some good jokes. Formerly somewhat stiff, he has begun to look comfortable in his skin. He has, it is said, become a human being.
Gore has arrived in Edinburgh to promote An Inconvenient Truth at three of the city's festivals. He is delivering a lecture at Edinburgh International Television Festival, doing a signing at Edinburgh International Book Festival and talking about the documentary for Edinburgh International Film Festival. Let's put him out of his misery and begin with one version of the question he will get asked at each of those events.
What formulation is he using about his intentions for the 2008 presidential election? "It is the same one I have been using for some time," he says, smiling. "I have no plans to stand, no intentions to stand and no expectations of doing so. I am not trying to be coy. It is just because I am aware of the shifting of internal gears that's been under way. I hate the sound of my gears cranking."
Mysterious. Michael Heseltine, the former British deputy prime minister, when asked whether he might stand against Margaret Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party, famously replied: "I cannot foresee the circumstances under which I might run." I take it that Gore can foresee such circumstances but is unprepared to reveal what they might be.
"Well, that particular formulation having been depreciated in this country, it is obviously not one I would use. Though I have used one similar to that. I am not playing games here. I have run for national office four times. I don't shy away from the work of it, the burden of it, the challenge of it."
Gore, considerably more portly than he once was, his feet sheathed in ill-advised cowboy boots, is clearly jet-lagged, but his political instincts mean that no amount of exhaustion is likely to propel him into precipitating an unwanted headline. In truth, rumours of his softening into a cuddly teddy bear seem to have been somewhat exaggerated. He is friendly and accommodating in conversation, but, to paraphrase Queen Victoria on Gladstone, he does tend to talk to you as if he were addressing a public meeting.
"We face a climate crisis of extraordinary proportions, and we are behaving as if it is not happening," he says, directing his gaze towards an imagined multitude over my left shoulder. "Every single day - today, in fact - we put 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the earth. We put 25 million tons into the ocean alone, making the ocean more acidic. The opportunity to sound that alarm, point to the solutions and rally a response is what this tour is all about."
Gore's new determination to speak the unspeakable, particularly about climate change, has transformed his standing in the Democratic Party. When he ran for the presidential nomination in 1988 he was seen as a safe centrist alternative to supposed liberals such as Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt and the eventual candidate, Michael Dukakis. As Bill Clinton's vice-president, Gore was perceived as tacking to the starboard of the first lady's vessel.
Now, however, we find him getting into bed with solidly left-wing pressure groups such as MoveOn.org. Ever since September 23rd, 2002 - when, after grudgingly supporting Bush's response to the attacks on New York and Washington, Gore began to lambaste the administration's aggressive foreign policy - his status as the caring person's candidate has grown. So what's going on? Has he really moved to the left? Has everybody else just moved to the right? Is he just able to say things as a private citizen he wouldn't dare utter when campaigning for national office?
"I am saying the same things I've always said," he says. "In 1988 I started my campaign for president when I was just 38 years old. I was fairly precocious, some would say foolhardy. I did it in large part to elevate the visibility of the climate crisis. I found then how difficult that was. I had a little more success running as vice-president in 1992 and 1996. I raised it at every turn in 2000. But, you know, it's odd. News organisations are very cautious in what they choose to cover."
So he is saying he hasn't drifted to the left? "Look. My position on the climate crisis is exactly what it was in 1988. Now, where the Iraq war is concerned, somebody did a comprehensive study of all the members of Congress in both the House and the Senate and all the executive members that were in office during the period of the first Gulf war and who then had some role in the Iraq war. There were something like 300 of them. Do you know how many voted for the first war and opposed the second?" He holds up his index finger to indicate one, then hinges it to point at himself. Suddenly the weariness is shaken off. He is positively animated now.
"Very few people know that. Now, you could say, 'Oh, that shows he's moved to the left.' The first Persian Gulf war occurred in the following context: Saddam Hussein invaded, occupied and annexed a neighbouring country. The United Nations passed a resolution to expel him, and our friends in the Arab nations joined a coalition to help pay for the war." He is practically shouting. If this is an act, it is an excellent one.
"Now look at the Iraq war. Saddam Hussein didn't invade another country. We invaded him! There was no UN resolution. None of our Arab friends and allies supported it. Nobody helped pay for it. The two situations speak so loudly for themselves it really surprises me that people would put them on a left-to-right axis and see it as an occasion of drift." Sorry. I, er, um . . . "I am not aiming that particularly at you," he says, laughing. "But I have heard that quite a lot."
Albert Gore Jr, an instinctive debater with formidably firm views, was born into a political family. His father, also Albert, was for 14 years a congressman and for 18 years a senator for the state of Tennessee. Most of the family's money came from tobacco farming, which caused Gore Jr much vexation when his sister, Nancy, died of lung cancer in 1984. He subsequently divested himself of any interests in the cigarette business.
Gore initially studied English literature at Harvard (where his roommate was the actor Tommy Lee Jones) but eventually graduated with a degree in government, in 1969. Then, while hawks such as Dick Cheney and George W Bush were securing student deferments or mucking about in the National Guard, Gore, though an opponent of the Vietnam War, signed up and served for several years as a services journalist. When he returned from Asia he continued to work as a reporter and took some classes in divinity school. He also spent some time studying law. Then, finally bowing to the inevitable, he successfully stood for Congress in 1976.
Gore shouldn't take this the wrong way, but his story is a little reminiscent of Michael Corleone's. Like the protagonist of The Godfather, he was well suited to the family business but seemed initially to work very hard at staying out of it. Indeed, both men surprised friends and family by signing up to fight in an overseas war before they were drafted.
Of course, a political career, like a life in organised crime, can damage a man's personal life. Gore married his wife, Tipper - later to launch a vaguely preposterous campaign against blue language in pop music - in 1970; they went on to have four children and, more recently, two grandchildren. He must sometimes regret missing important events in the family's development.
"I am not quite racked with regret," he says, smiling. "Let me answer your question more fully. I went through an experience in 1989 that's described in the movie when my son, our youngest child, had a near-fatal car accident. It was very traumatic for the entire family. During that crisis I completely reordered all my priorities."
It was at this stage that Gore, who had been haranguing colleagues about the climate crisis for a decade, began to properly develop the slide show that eventually became An Inconvenient Truth. He also wrote a rather dry book on the subject, entitled Earth in the Balance.
"On a personal basis I decided to make my family the top priority. I changed my scheduling. I looked at my diary. I really changed everything else. There were, of course, moments where I was away longer than I would have liked. But, to set one example, in 2000 my son was in his final year of high school and on the football team. I was running for president, but I still went to every single game. Some of my staff thought that was excessive, but you have to put family first."
Ponder for a moment one of the great quandaries of Gore's career. When he speaks like this he sounds entirely sincere. Yet, until recently, such pronouncements have caused many people to view him as a tad sanctimonious. Clinton, for eight years his more touchy-feely superior, could lie through his teeth about, say, the duties of young interns and still enjoy considerable affection from the American people. Clinton was the loveable rogue. Gore, square jawed, hair by GI Joe's barber, looked more like one of the wooden men with wooden pipes who appeared in 1950s commercials for corrective corsets.
When Gore, running on the back of a reasonably sound economy and as part of a largely popular outgoing presidency, could manage only a dead heat with Bush in 2000, Clinton is said to have despaired of his former colleague's poor campaigning skills. Conversely, it is believed that Gore blamed the eventual defeat partly on the Monica Lewinsky controversy and the impeachment hearings that followed. He must lie awake at night pondering what he might have done differently.
"No, no, no!" he says before bursting into hearty laughter. "I did everything I knew to do and worked as hard as I could work and had the best people I could find helping me. If one vote on the supreme court had gone differently, the postmortem might have been based on another script: How did he thread the needle between the impeachment and the recession on the one hand and desire for change after eight years on the other?
"But I certainly would not contend that I am the most skilful politician who walked the earth. I don't think those skills are part of my strong suit. I am not poor-mouthing here. I have had a lot of success, but I don't claim to be the cleverest politician in the world. I did all I knew to do."
As all non-cave-dwellers over the age of 18 will recall, the 2000 election, in which Gore won a clear plurality of the votes, came down to a battle over the eye-wateringly closely contested state of Florida. After a month in which the world woke up every morning to more talk of "chads" and "optical ballots", the US supreme court voted by five to four to suspend counting and award the state to Bush (whose brother Jeb was Florida's governor). If every voter's intention had been properly recorded and counted, what would the result have been? "I try to avoid making a headline on that. I don't want to go back and dwell on that. But I think it is pretty clear what happened." So why did he concede when the supreme court made its ruling? A great many of his supporters wanted him to continue the fight.
"In the American system there is no intermediate step between a supreme-court decision and violent revolution," he says. "And, no, I wasn't prepared to go that far. The choice I was then faced with was the choice to support or not support the rule of law. When people say 'You did the right thing' I quote Winston Churchill, who said the American people always do the right thing after exhausting every other available alternative. I exhausted every available alternative. There was nothing else to do."
After the election Gore went on a boat trip, mused on his future and, famously, grew a beard. Profiles portrayed him as faintly pathetic, somebody who might spend the rest of his life asking: What if? We have Bush's war on terror to thank for Gore's spectacular reinvigoration. Over the past few years nobody has been as articulate as Gore in condemning the administration's attitude to state-sanctioned torture, wiretapping, Hurricane Katrina and, of course, the war in Iraq. He seems, indeed, to have belatedly discovered how to spill bile in the manner of his distant cousin Gore Vidal.
What does Gore make of the president as a human being? He is often caricatured as stupid. Is that fair? "I fear that I am on the verge of losing my objectivity about George Bush," he says. "I don't think that he is unintelligent. I think he is very intelligent. But I think that he is incurious, and that puzzles me. There are all kinds of intelligences, psychologists tell us. And I think he is quite intelligent." Gore has said Bush is intelligent so many times that, suspicious of such forceful selling, you wonder whether he believes the president might actually be a subhuman cretin. Not, of course, that he has said any such thing.
"It really does puzzle me that he seems so often to lack the kind of curiosity you would naturally expect in a president. I'll give you an example. When he was beginning his presidency he picked Paul O'Neill as his treasury secretary. He met him for the first time, and talked with him for an hour, and Paul O'Neill wrote that during that hour President Bush did not ask him a single question. Don't you think that if you were a new president you'd like to ask your treasury secretary one question? I find his incuriousness very strange."
Gore contends that he has no regrets about how he ran his campaign in 2000. But if he is to stand in 2008 - and some of his comments suggest he might - he will have to address some lingering concerns. In that earlier campaign the supposed liberal media, annoyed, perhaps, by Gore's perceived lack of warmth, worked hard to portray him as a self-aggrandising fantasist. It was said he claimed to have invented the internet. He argued, we were told, that Erich Segal based Love Story on the romance between Al and Tipper. He arranged for four billion gallons of water to be released into the Connecticut River to help with a photo opportunity. A glance at the records quickly proves that none of these stories holds up (yet Bill Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman).
"I think that a candidate is viewed through a cynical lens," he says. "That is not altogether a bad thing. That is just always how it is. A candidate's opponents will try to show him in a bad light."
As our conversation has progressed, Gore has, thankfully, become less Gladstonian. If he can maintain that degree of warmth the press might not feel the need to portray him as an upmarket Jeffrey Archer next time. One assumes the tempering of his personality results from his experiences in 2000. "There is a cliche that I think is very true here: whatever does not kill you makes you stronger." That's a line from Nietzsche, isn't it? His inner politician suddenly perks up. "Is it? Oh, I hope not," he says, worriedly. Messianic Gore in Nazi philosopher shock! There's a headline for the Al bashers in 2008.
•An Inconvenient Truth opens at selected cinemas on Friday