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.

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 indication, he is likely to win the Democratic nomination--a prospect that fills many Democrats with dread. Like global warming, Gore's candidacy is huge, scary, and probably inevitable. But if he can be persuaded to talk smartly and passionately about the environment, he could turn out to be the best hope the Democrats have in 2004.

From Ozone to No-Zone

In 2000, Earth in the Balance was reissued with a new introduction tied to the election. It includes a tremendous list of Gore's accomplishments on the environment while in Congress and the White House. In a de facto stump speech, he writes, "We're cleaning up the great American rivers. We've strengthened the Superfund to clean up hazardous chemical waste sites. We refused, despite all the special-interest lobbying of Congress, to let up on big polluters who have a responsibility to clean up hidden poisons in our neighborhoods and on land where our children play ... we have seen in the past seven years greater gains for land conservation than at any time since Theodore Roosevelt."

He notes that all this progress occurred during the longest economic expansion in American history--proof positive of his long-held view that prosperity and environmental protection need not be mutually exclusive.

Finally, Gore plants the flag, declaring his intention to make the environment the centerpiece of his campaign: "I believe the environment should be a central issue in the year 2000, because, like it or not, the environment will be a fateful issue in the next decade and the new century."

Yet the passionate and decisive Al Gore found in Earth in the Balance remained tucked safely inside the pages of the book during his campaign for the presidency. As early as 1997, people inside and out of the White House were urging Gore to steer clear of contentious environmental issues as he positioned himself to run for president. They did not see his visionary efforts on climate change as an asset, but as a huge liability that could galvanize formidable opposition to his candidacy should he actively promote it. The utility industry, for instance, which produces 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gasses, had been generating studies predicting economic disaster for the United States if the Kyoto protocol were implemented. Furthermore, the dirtiest power plants are in the Midwest, along with the hub of the auto industry, and Gore desperately needed those states, and their union supporters, to win the election.

As Clinton's former Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Tim Wirth explained recently in the Harvard International Review, "Global warming was an issue best kept off the political stage in the view of many, if not most, in the White House."

That view dominated the campaign, where Gore's advisers feared that making the environment an issue would scare off business supporters and detract from his centrist "New Democrat" image. One of Gore's campaign consultants, Carter Eskew, concedes that the candidate wanted to talk about the environment far more than his advisers were willing to indulge. "We felt as though we had other business to do," he says. "From a political standpoint, the environmental commitment was already established."

He argues that the campaign team was sticking to what it knew worked--research and polling--and the polls said that the public wasn't focused on the environment, which is considered a second-tier issue, behind education, Social Security, and the economy. Gore consultants could point persuasively to the week in the summer of 2000 when Gore unleashed a string of big policy speeches on energy and the environment, only to be ridiculed by the media for being a "techno-nerd" and talking about things no one cared about. (This was, of course, before the lights went out in California.)

Not everyone in Gore's camp, however, agreed that the vice president should abandon the environment. People like Kathleen McGinty, a longtime Gore aide and chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and campaign manager Donna Brazile, as well as allies in the environmental movement like League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan, who had worked on Gore's 1988 campaign, argued that the high-paid consultants' formula might be the right one for any other candidate, but not Al Gore.

They saw the environment as a place where Gore had a demonstrated track record and could showcase his vision and leadership. They were also convinced that the consultants' belief that environmental advocacy equaled economic suicide was simply outdated. More importantly, Gore's passion for the environment was so well known that if he failed to run on it, he risked looking as if he'd abandoned his principles.

"The environment isn't just an issue for Al Gore. It is at the heart of who he is. It is a strong measure of Al Gore's integrity and commitment to principle. That is what standing for the environment really is about," says McGinty. "Unfortunately, some in the campaign did not appreciate that." To a certain extent, she says, issues are less important than authenticity, which the average person relates to. "Authenticity for Al Gore is the environment."

Even on a more basic level, though, the most compelling reason for Gore to create his own terrain on the environment was that Bush was so clearly vulnerable on it. Texas, with less than 7 percent of the nation's population, is responsible for a seventh of its carbon emissions. Of the 50 largest industrial companies in Texas, 28 violate the Clean Air Act. Texas also ranks first in the nation in cancer-causing toxic air emissions from industrial facilities. As governor, Bush only made it easier for those companies to do business as usual, and those same companies smogging up Texas repaid the favor by bankrolling Bush's presidential campaign.

The green contingent inside the campaign also knew first hand that voters react strongly when they believe that the environment is threatened, as they showed after 1995, when the new Republican Congress tried to roll back environmental laws and privatize national parks. Gore himself had persuaded Clinton to focus on the environment in what turned out to be a shrewd and successful strategy against the new majority--one he failed to employ on his own behalf in the race for the White House.

Scorched Earth 

Faced with the issue on the campaign trail, the visionary environmentalist looked like a deer in the headlights. Gore rarely attacked Bush on the environment in any pointed fashion. Paralyzed during the debates, he failed to win a single point on the environment, sticking to vague references about "big oil" that made him sound like an old man railing against the Rockefellers.

Eskew says that Gore actually did devote a fair amount of time to the environment, but that the media largely ignored it. "The press that traveled with us was like, well, Al Gore is talking about the environment. So what else is new?" But when Bush talked about the environment, he got noticed, says Eskew. "It's more news when someone plays against type."

Part of the problem was that Gore's approach was conspicuously tepid--two sentences here, a minute there, mixed in with endless speeches about putting Social Security in a lockbox. He could have taken a play from George H.W. Bush, who sank Michael Dukakis in part by standing in front of the polluted Boston Harbor and accusing the governor of failing to clean it up. Unlike the elder Bush, who had a terrible environmental record himself, Gore would have been on moral high ground if he had, say, taken a well-publicized stroll through the toxic morass of Texas's Refinery Row. There, he could have surrounded himself with poor Hispanic children stricken with asthma and other pollution-related illnesses and demanded to know why Bush was willing to sacrifice the children for oil profits. The image would have stuck with people, especially critical Hispanic voters, and shown a powerful difference between the two candidates. And the media would have eaten it up.

Bush fact worried about such attacks--so worried, in fact that shortly before one of the September presidential debates, he released a proposal for mandatory reductions in carbon emissions that was more significant than anything Gore had done. (Of course, Bush promptly reneged on it once in office.) But he needn't have bothered. Instead of hammering away on Bush's record, Gore nattered on about his allegiance to "the people not the powerful," while sidestepping specific environmental issues that would have rallied his base.

During more than four hours of televised debates, the environment came up for discussion for a grand total of 15 minutes. When the issue of clean air did arise at one point, instead of pressing the need to clean up dirty power plants, Gore touted the potential benefits of "clean coal," clearly pandering to the swing state of West Virginia, where "clean coal" mining companies have indefensibly razed the tops off mountains--and which Gore ended up losing anyway.

As the campaign progressed, Bush steadfastly stumped on a platform that he knew the public was not wild about, like cutting taxes for the super-rich, but that were very popular with his conservative base. Meanwhile, Gore refused to go to the mat on positions that were popular with the public, crucial to his base, and which everyone knew he cared deeply about. The immeasurable but undeniable effect was that Bush looked principled and strong while Gore looked insincere and overcautious.

Long-time Gore supporters were mystified. Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff and strong Gore supporter, told the press that the environment is "a gut issue" for the vice president, who shouldn't "tiptoe around these issues. He ought to make this part and parcel [of the campaign]. This is who he is."

Green Meanies 

In downplaying the environment, both Gore and his advisers ignored Lyndon Johnson's famous rule of politics: It's better to have your adversaries inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Bush had learned this lesson the hard way, watching his father lose in 1992 to Bill Clinton after being assaulted from the right by fundamentalist Christians who thought he was ignoring their interests. When Bush entered the race, he made sure that he reined in the more unruly fringes of the GOP, cutting deals with Christian conservatives and bringing them into the tent with the unified goal of simply winning the election.

Gore and his camp may have factored in Jesse Jackson, but they made no such calculations when it came to environmentalists. As a result, they were completely unprepared when a lot of them began dampening his tent. Environmentalists had been mounting increasingly heated attacks on Gore during his last term in office for failing to do more on climate change. In 1997, the Sierra Club ran TV ads in early primary states urging Clinton and Gore to "stand up to the special interests" and push for stronger clean-air rules. Environmental groups sent a polemic to editorial writers deriding Gore's comments on global warming as "hot air" In 1998, Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, and others met with Gore and asked the administration to mount a fight in Congress to reduce emissions from electric utilities. The meeting broke down into a shouting match after Gore flatly refused, yelling "Show me one vote! Name me one senator who'll support me on this!"

As the campaign progressed, and Gore back-burnered his green views, the environmentalists felt Gore was taking their votes for granted, which made it difficult for the environmental leaders who did sincerely support him to rally their troops. "The candidate wasn't helping us," says the League of Conservation Voters' Deb Callahan. "We could only take it so far. If he had done more, we could have done more whipping up people."

But former Gore campaign staffers and Clinton administration officials suggest that the environmentalists bear much of the blame for putting Bush in office. Carter Eskew, Gore's message man, says, "They weren't exactly unified behind Gore, rah-rah."

At the grassroots level, many activists showed little understanding of the compromises necessary to get one of their own elected. Some went on to protest Gore outside the 2000 Democratic Convention, and in some cases only grudgingly gave him their endorsement. (At least one major group endorsed Bill Bradley during the primary.) During the campaign, Republicans gleefully touted a 1999 email from Sierra Club board member Michael Dorsey, in which he accused Gore of holding natural resources "hostage to the highest bidder," adding: "With this legacy, no real environmentalist could ever endorse Al Gore."

The Sierra Club quickly reaffirmed its support for Gore, but the environmentalists' public unhappiness with Gore left the door open for a left-wing assault from Ralph Nader, who forced Gore to wage a real and expensive battle in places like Oregon, where Democratic presidential candidates had easily prevailed since 1988.

Activists in Oregon pushed Gore to come out in favor of removing dams from the upper Snake River to help restore the wild salmon population. But Gore was caught between an electoral rock and a hard place. The dams were actually in Washington, where the state leadership was adamantly opposed to removing them because of their role in providing electrical power, and Gore needed Washington as much as he needed Oregon. Gore insisted that he sincerely cared about the salmon and promised to convene a "salmon summit" as soon as he was elected, much the way Clinton did to broker a compromise over the spotted owl controversy in the early `90s. But as one Clinton official puts it, "Their expectations were just impossible."

Nader pounced on Gore's vagueness on the salmon issue as proof that there was very little difference between Gore and Bush on the environment--a perception Bush happily capitalized on. Gore advisers believe that the environmental groups allowed that impression to stand unchallenged until the very end of the campaign, when the race came down to razor-thin margins. But by then it was too late, and now; the current president flat-out opposes removing the dams and most other measures to revive the salmon habitat. As one Gore campaign consultant laments, "The environmentalists blew it giving Gore a hard time. It's a case study in how interest groups often don't know what's good for them."

Too Yellow to be Green?

Nowhere was the impact of environmental politics more apparent than in the hotly contested race for Florida. While much has been written about how Gore could have done things differently during the recount, largely overlooked was his dismal campaign performance in a state that is home to 325,000 members of major environmental groups, not to mention thousands of others sympathetic to the cause. Because of its importance to the tourism industry, the environment is so critical to Florida politics that even oil-dynasty Gov. Jeb Bush has opposed offshore drilling there. In a brazen move to shore up Jeb's reelection prospects, the president didn't think twice about spending several hundred million taxpayer dollars to buy out oil-drilling leases off Florida's Gulf Coast.

The League of Conservation Voters did a survey to see whether members of environmental groups voted more than the general public. In 1996, they did not, so the group orchestrated a "get out the vote" campaign to rally environmental voters to the polls. After the 2000 election, they went back to check to see how successful it had been. "In Florida, the number of environmental group members who voted dropped by 9 percent," says Callahan.

She suspects that one reason for the drop-off was Gore's failure to pick a side in the fight over the future of Homestead Air Force Base. The base had been severely damaged by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and was slated to be closed. Local politicos in Miami-Dade County, including Democratic mayor and Gore fundraiser Alex Penelas, quickly seized the moment to hand over the development rights to a group of investors who included the son of legendary Cuban leader Jorge Mas Canosa. The group intended to turn Homestead into a commercial airport. The problem, however, was that the base was situated right in the middle of the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, which environmentalists feared would be badly damaged by pollution and traffic.

The Clinton EPA and Interior Department both came out against the airport, as did Gore's rival in the Democratic primary, Bill Bradley. Polls also showed that two-thirds of Floridians opposed the airport. But once the campaign heated up, Gore inexplicably refused to take a position, infuriating many South Florida environmentalists who had watched him give a passionate speech at the Capitol announcing the administration's plan to spend $8 billion restoring the Everglades. "He spoke for 20 minutes without notes," says Alan Farago, who led the fight against the airport. "We were blown away by how much he knew."

Yet on campaign swings through South Florida, says Farago, Gore adamantly refused to even discuss Homestead. "Gore's silence made us doubt that he knew himself what his campaign stood for," says Farago.

In February 2000, Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen wrote a scathing editorial in The Miami Herald attacking Gore for his lack of position, writing, "Vice President Al Gore, who claims the greenest pro-environmental credentials of all the presidential candidates, is showing a flash of yellow ... braced with South Florida's most controversial environmental issue, the environmental vice president has elected to wimp out and keep quiet ... If he doesn't take a stand soon, we can assume that the self-proclaimed green candidate isn't referring to the green of the Everglades, but rather the green that Alex Penelas is stuffing into Democratic coffers."

Green voters' suspicions deepened further when they learned that the vice president's point man in Florida, land-use lawyer Mitchell Berger, had financial ties to one of the developers involved in the airport proposal. Environmentalists became so furious that they threatened to picket Gore's appearances, at one point forcing him to cancel a campaign stop. Disappointed with Gore, many environmental-minded voters supported Ralph Nader, who took a very public stand on Homestead and garnered more than 95,000 votes in Florida. National exit polls later suggested that about half of Nader's votes would have gone to Gore, which would have been more than enough to put Gore over the top.

"Gore lost Florida because of environmentalists," says Callahan. "If Al Gore had inspired environmental voters in Florida and not been ambiguous on some issues like on the Homestead development he would be president today."

Mercury Rising

Much has changed since Al Gore conceded the election in December 2000. If the environment wasn't a top-tier issue then, it will certainly be in 2004, if only because George Bush has made it one. Barely a year and a half into office, Bush proposed abandoning stricter regulations for arsenic in drinking water and scrapped plans to limit snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park even as photos of park rangers wearing gas masks flickered across the airwaves. He's pushed for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other sensitive areas to oil drilling, gutted EPA's enforcement budget and the Clean Air Act, pulled out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, reneged on an agreement with the auto industry to raise fuel efficiency standards, and allowed Enron to write the administration's energy policy.

Even without Bush's proactive agenda, the environment has emerged as a pressing concern again simply because the public is starting to realize that something is seriously wrong with the way the earth is supposed to work. As Tim Wirth puts it: "We're frying."

The public didn't need the recent National Academy of Sciences' report, or the EPA assessment to the United Nations, to confirm their suspicions that global warming is not only happening, but also that humans are playing a huge role in it. Just since the beginning of the year, the media have produced a litany of foreboding stories about the strangely behaving global climate. The year 2001 was the second hottest year on record, behind 1998. The East Coast this winter resorted to water rationing on the heels of a four-year-old drought. Olympic athletes in Salt Lake City held global-warming education rallies as they realized that the Winter Olympics was an endangered species.

In Alaska, where the average temperature has risen about seven degrees since the 1970s, roads are buckling, spruce forests have been wiped out by beetle epidemics, fires are raging across the state, and entire coastal towns may soon have to be abandoned or moved inland because of rising sea levels. Even the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline is in danger of collapsing into the melting permafrost. Taken together, these phenomena have been so disturbing that even one of Congress's most anti-environmental senators is now talking about the reality of global warming. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) admitted recently to The New York Times that, "Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world."

The newspaper reports are eerily familiar, having been largely predicted in Al Gore's book a decade ago. "Everything we've learned since then has just reconfirmed what we knew in the 1980s," says Dr. Robert Watson, the former chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He notes that not only is the science more solid, but the projected temperature increases are now actually higher than they were when Gore wrote Earth in the Balance.

The observable evidence of global warming on the planet has convinced the rest of the industrialized world to move forward with a sense of urgency to address the problem. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has come out as one of the world's most forceful leaders on climate change, and his country's emissions have dropped by 5 percent since 1990; Germany's emissions fell by 19 percent, even as U.S. discharges went up 18 percent during the same period. The E.U. and Japan have ratified Kyoto, and Russia is slated to do the same by the end of the year. A handful of multinational corporations, including BP, Shell, Toyota, and DuPont, have begun making voluntary reductions in their emissions, in part because they realize they otherwise won't be able to compete in a post-Kyoto world. "Most people are getting it, except the U.S. administration and U.S. Congress," says Watson.

Carpe Diem 

Al Gore understands these issues more than just about any politician alive, and if he chooses to run in 2004, he has much to gain and nothing to lose from campaigning on them. Bush and the Republicans may have worked hard to brand Gore as an extremist for his environmental views, but the polls also say that nearly everything Gore supports, the public does, too.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe the federal government isn't doing enough to protect the environment. Even higher percentages favor higher emission and pollution standards for industry, stronger enforcement of environmental regulations, and higher auto emission standards for cars. And despite Gore's advisers' fears that the public would view his support of Kyoto as a liability, after Bush pulled out of the treaty negotiations, 61 percent of Americans told ABC News pollsters that they thought the United States should sign it.

The environment could energize key Democratic constituencies, such

as the young people who flocked to Ralph Nader's campaign. Polls also suggest that the environment is a key factor in winning the votes of the ever-critical independents. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the decision by maverick Sen. John McCain to take up the issue of climate change. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain began holding hearings on climate change two years ago, and in February this year, he joined with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Ct.) in introducing legislation that would increase fuel efficiency, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

From the Senate floor, McCain said it was clear that soon there would be a world marketplace that "rewards improvements in energy efficiency, advances in energy technologies, and improvements in land-use practices and we are running the risk that America is not going to be part of it." McCain's bill has been endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and most other Democratic presidential contenders.

But while Democrats are seizing the moment to display their environmental bona fides, and fighting Bush's attempts to roll back environmental protections, Gore is taking a powder, missing a tremendous opportunity to exercise leadership on his favorite issue. His absence is noticed. As one former Clinton official says with exasperation, "Where the hell is Gore?"

Since conceding the election, Gore has made a few speeches, and on Earth Day, wrote an editorial for The New York Times on global warming. Yet just as during the campaign, his recent speeches and writing have been long on anodyne calls for new investment in clean technology, but notably bereft of bold positions, such as supporting mandatory caps on carbon emissions, which every other Democratic contender has taken. An early June speech to the Wisconsin Democratic Party convention shortly after the flap over Bush's EPA report on global warming didn't even make national news.

Should he run in 2004, Gore will not be able to nickel and dime his way to beating Bush, who in 2000 successfully blurred the distinctions between the two candidates on issues like Social Security and Medicare, and managed to portray himself as a moderate on the environment--the one area where that should simply not be possible. Gore has a natural, authentic advantage on the environment, but only to the extent that he makes an issue out of it.

He'll have to do it boldly, taking on a few choice, controversial issues in a way that cuts through the media chatter. He should pin Bush to the ropes in the process, reminding the public at every possible turn that the current president is the same man who, when running for Congress in the 1970s said, "There's no such thing as being too closely aligned with the oil industry in West Texas."

If this plan seems too radical, Gore should recall his own words on global warming from Earth in the Balance, in which he predicted that "proposals which are today considered too bold ... will soon be derided as woefully inadequate."

STEPHANIE MENCIMER is an editor of The Washington Monthly.