Weather 'tis nobler in the mind: Al Gore lost in 2000 by going soft on the environment. He can win in 2004 by getting tough.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

TEN YEARS AGO, WHEN AL GORE FIRST published his book on the environment, Earth in the Balance, some of his Senate colleagues believed it was so radical it would ruin his career. President George H.W. Bush called him "ozone man," and claimed, "This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme, we'll be up to our neck in owls and outta work for every American. He is way out, far out, man."

Gore took nothing but grief for calling the internal combustion engine a "mortal threat" to human civilization that should be made obsolete in 25 years. His insistence that global warming was a serious and growing crisis was also greeted with Bronx cheers, as conservatives insisted that global warming was a fiction conjured up by extremist environmental groups. Columnist George Will declared the book "a jumble of dubious 1990s science and worse 1960s philosophy."

Eight years later, the book was still a favorite Republican prop for Gore-bashing. On a campaign stop in Michigan, George W. Bush held up a copy and declared that Gore "calls autoworkers his friends, but in his book, he declares that the engines that power your cars are his enemy." Republican fact sheets declared that, "Like Gore's nearly quarter-century of public life, Earth in the Balance is plagued by a combination of liberalism, elitism, hypocrisy, and hyperbole, punctuated by an unhealthy extremism."

Gore parried by saying that he wore the attacks like a badge of honor. And then he went down for the count, losing the election to the most anti-environmental candidate since Ronald Reagan. In a bittersweet epilogue, however, Gore's environmental manifesto was finally vindicated. In April this year, with 50 mpg Japanese hybrid electric cars selling in the United States like hotcakes, and Detroit years away from producing its own, Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler--who not so many years before had branded Gore a threat to the auto industry--announced the creation of a state-funded $700-million energy research center. Engler conceded that the center's research would eventually make the internal combustion engine obsolete.

A month earlier, in an alarming harbinger of the seriousness of global warming, the 12,000-year-old Larsen B Antarctic ice shelf, the size of Rhode Island, collapsed into the sea--30 years before scientists had expected it to. And in June, George W. Bush suffered a minor public relations debacle after his own Environmental Protection Agency released a report declaring conclusively that not only is global warming real and ongoing, but that it is also caused by human activity. The report, which directly contradicted Bush's position that the jury was still out on the issue, might be called `Al Gore's revenge" The Bush administration had to release the report because it was mandated by a 1992 international climate agreement that Gore helped negotiate as a senator.

Say what you want about Al Gore, but when it comes to difficult, complex matters of public policy, he has an impressive record of calling it right when others called it wrong. As a senator, Gore was the only Democrat to vote in favor of the Gulf War. He didn't "invent" the Internet, but he did sponsor the congressional spending bill that allowed it to expand outside the Pentagon. He was one of the hawkish members of Clinton's inner circle whose early advice to bomb Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing was both morally and strategically right. He was also a fiscal hawk who argued that cutting the deficit would lower longterm interest rates and lead to prosperity--a policy that worked beyond everyone's wildest expectations, lie headed up a commission on airline security, whose recommendations, had they been followed, might have helped prevent September 11.

But more than anywhere else, it is on the environment that Core can claim to have what every leader needs but few possess: vision. Before the rest of the world had ever heard the term "global warming," Gore was holding the first congressional hearings on the subject--in 1980! Whi1e Republicans like George H.W. Bush were denying the existence of global warming, Gore was helping gather evidence. While researching his book, Gore took a trip to the North Pole on a nuclear submarine and realized that: the US. Navy had 40 years' worth of data on the thickness of the Arctic ice cap. Recognizing the untapped potential in the vast and largely unused information, he brokered a deal to release it to civilian scientists, who discovered that the ice cap had thinned by 40 percent just since 1970, a story that made world headlines.

The only thing more amazing than Gore's command of environmental issues is his almost complete failure to use it in the 2000 presidential race. After months of rehashing the Florida recount, revisiting that race is firing, to say the least. Because the race was so close, with 20/20 hindsight, you can pick almost any factor that might have turned the tide in Gore's favor. But his inability to exploit his biggest strength and Bush's biggest weakness stands as one of the least appreciated screw-ups of that whole period.

As political strategist Dick Morris writes in his recent book, Power Plays, "This was truly amazing. Al Gore, who had boldly staked out the environmental turf fifteen years earlier, had gained no advantage over Bush on the issue. It was as if Richard Nixon had received no credit for a tough stand on law-and-order, or Reagan was bested on the issue of tax cuts."

It was a screw-up in which Gore had help from all the forces that have long made the Democratic party dysfunctional: environmental groups who portrayed Gore as a :sellout; big-money donors with conflicting agendas; consultants peddling a paint-by-numbers populist message that focused only on the dangers and not the opportunities inherent in running on his trademark issue. Still, Gore made the final decisions, and it was his legendary caution that led him to stifle an issue that, in retrospect, could have won him the White House.

This political Shakespearean tragedy is not just a matter for historians. Thanks to George Bush's highly unpopular anti-environmental agenda, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has declared the environment is one of the top three or four issues Democrats will campaign on this fall. It's a wise strategy given that polls consistently show that almost 90 percent of Americans deeply distrust congressional Republicans on the subject. Likewise, nearly every Democratic presidential hopeful is pushing a pro-environmental agenda and attacking Bush.

Every one, that is, but Gore. The man who should be out front leading the environmental charge--for the benefit of House and Senate Democrats this fall and his own presumed candidacy in 2004--has been maddeningly vague, indeed almost completely invisible, on the environment just as it is retaking center stage in a way it hasn't since Newt Gingrich tried to abolish the Energy Department.

Gore is showing every indication that he plans to run again in 2004, and if current polls are any...