Al Gore: The nearly man turned Nobel laureate

WASHINGTON: Al Gore, the nearly man of US politics who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, reinvented himself as an Oscar-winning seer on climate change after his White House dreams were blown away.   

Bill Clinton's former vice president helped propel global warming to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film 'An Inconvenient Truth,' which received the Academy Award for best documentary.   

The movie was the product of years of lectures, often delivered to audiences numbering in single digits, as the Democratic politician vied to wrench climate change back on to Washington's radar.   

Save for a Supreme Court verdict in late 2000, Gore, 59, could have been driving the agenda on the topic instead of speaking from the chilly political wilderness.   

But the court handed that year's agonizingly close presidential election to George W. Bush, who promptly abandoned US support for the international Kyoto pact on climate change while a devastated Gore rued his fate.   

However, Gore emerged from political hibernation with little bitterness over his electoral loss, joking to one audience, "I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America."   

Such one-liners came from a new-found store of wit that was not always apparent when Gore served in the large shadow thrown by the outsized Clinton from 1993 to 2001.   

Once skewered by the press for being humorless and stodgy, crucified for apparently claiming to have invented the Internet (one of several notorious misquotations), the 'Goracle' of climate change was now being feted as the decent loser who bowed to Bush and refused to extend America's electoral agony.   

Shedding his image as a brainy but dull policy wonk, Gore oversaw the Live Earth concert in July, which elevated him to Bono-like coolness in some quarters.   

"If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over," his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff told October's Vanity Fair magazine.   

Gore's eloquence about the potential catastrophe of global warming has won him a new army of admirers, and fostered enduring speculation that he may yet enter the 2008 White House race.   

The man himself discounts that notion, at a time when former First Lady Hillary Clinton is consolidating her lead among the Democratic contenders to succeed Bush. But he has not ruled a future return to politics.   

"I don't have any plans or intentions to be a candidate again and really the main reason is I'm involved in a different kind of campaign," Gore said in July, describing climate change as "the most serious crisis our civilization has ever faced."   

Gore served in the House of Representatives for three terms and was a two-time senator from Tennessee before becoming vice president under Clinton during one of the country's greatest economic booms.   

Born in Washington on March 31, 1948, Gore shuttled between his home in Tennessee and a hotel in the capital while his father served in the House and later in the Senate.   

He opposed the war in Vietnam, but nevertheless enlisted in the army in 1969 so that "someone else wouldn't have to go in my place."   

Just before leaving for Vietnam he married his girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson. The couple now has three grown daughters and one son.   

The arrest in early July of Albert Gore junior -- who was pulled over in his car for speeding and found to be in possession of marijuana and prescription drugs -- has failed to derail his father's political rehabilitation.   

In 1988 Gore jumped into the presidential race, but had a disappointing showing in New York and failed to get the Democratic nomination.   

Four years later, Gore put aside his own aspirations to serve as Clinton's deputy, often chafing at not having greater responsibility in the White House and then seeing his political career careen to a halt in 2000.   

Then, he looked down and out. But few today would accuse Gore, Oscar winner and Nobel laureate, of being a failure.