DRAFTING GORE: THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE AIR.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

A very suspicious (and perhaps a tad demented) person might see more than just evidence of global warming in this heat wave that's crisping up the country of late. Clearly, there's a mysterious scheme afoot to get Al Gore elected -- or, re-elected if you like -- as president of the United States in 2008.

Laugh if you like, but chew on this: Can it be mere coincidence that a ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' a movie about a PowerPoint presentation that consists of mostly scientific exposition, by a guy once so stiff he made John Kerry seem like a drag queen, is a big box-office hit, while the new film by the ``Sixth Sense'' guy is such a dud? Or that the hottest summer in recent memory is also the summer when gas prices rose to absurd heights and stayed there?

Is it at all possible that a rare confluence of such disparate factors -- Al Gore as a movie star and best-selling author, record-breaking killer heat and a mad rush on hybrid cars before the ice caps melt and, whoops, there goes Florida -- is anything but part of a vast left-wing conspiracy?

Well, all you naysayers, it turns out there is indeed such as scheme. It's just not very mysterious or secret. In fact, the loosely affiliated ``Goristas'' behind AlGore.org, the most organized grass-roots draft-Gore campaign so far, want people to know exactly what they are up to. And what they are up to is trying to convince the world and the man himself why 2008 is the year of the Gore.

For one thing, Gore couldn't have bought this kind of political timing with all of Warren Buffet's fortune.

``We're in the midst of the most brilliant campaign launch in history, even if he didn't mean it,'' said Dylan Malone, chairman of AlGore.org, the Internet home of a growing group of ``Gore to the Core'' loyalists. Malone and his group are hoping to capitalize on Gore's current celebrity to build a vast grass-roots network of Gore supporters and raise money. So far, they have collected $10,000 in one month just through Internet donations, Malone said.

Malone first became a fan of Gore in 2000, when he and his wife appealed to the presidential candidate for help when their insurance company denied his severely disabled son, Ian, the care he needed. Gore took on the issue of Ian's plight as a core of his campaign and developed a friendly relationship with the Malones that continues to this day. When Ian died last year from the complication of his injury, the first consolation call that came in was from Gore, Malone said, even before the grandparents.

Malone and other Goristas (their own nickname for themselves) aren't the only ones who are starting to think that Gore has a real shot in 2008. Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic magazine, last week penned an editorial saying that not only is Gore a good choice, but he is electable. Earlier, Washington Post columnist George Will wrote ``the likelihood that Gore will seek the presidency is suggested not only by the logic of what he says but also by what he does not say.''

Officially, Gore isn't running for anything other than Savior of the World. His only campaign is against global warming and the emissions that cause it. So what if the main opponents of his climate change campaign are Republicans? Coincidence, surely.

``He's too good for presidential politics and too smart to run,'' Malone said. ``That's why we have to draft him.''

Malone tried unsuccessfully to draft Gore for the race in 2004. But he is convinced that Gore will see he's the only hope for the Democratic party this time. Malone's got a good point. Democrats don't have much to offer in the primary campaign. Hillary Clinton might make a good candidate at some point in the future when she won't be lambasted simply for being a tough woman. We might have come a long way, baby, but a country still seriously considering rolling back basic rights for women isn't ready for a woman in the Oval Office.

Nor do the likely Republican candidates look all that strong. Rudy Giuliani might have gotten national attention after Sept. 11, but he hasn't done much in the five years since. Sen. John McCain does have the valuable vet and moderate thing going for him, but what has he done to save the world lately? And Newt Gingrich may have reinvented himself, but he still has a hard-right conservative edge and weird hair.

The Democrats certainly couldn't do much better than the man who gets rock-star treatment on his book tour. His famous wooden persona has relaxed from years performing before a live audience. And his earnest wonkiness has suddenly become an asset in a country that's starting to realize it has a gasoline addiction that is extremely hazardous to its health.

Plus, he won once. He might be able to do it again.

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