Lights, Camera, Al Gore!

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There was plenty of renewable energy around the prospect of an Al-vs.-Hillary smackdown last week. New York magazine's cover story on Gore, written by John Heilemann, carried the headline: THE UN-HILLARY. And while Gore was basking in solar-drenched adulation at Cannes, Clinton was presenting her own energy plan in an hourlong wonkathon at the National Press Club in Washington. As Clinton showed her command of the intricacies of carbon-dioxide sequestration and cellulosic ethanol, it was impossible not to wonder whether the two of them might once again be crowding onto the same turf. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times: "Al Gore must want to punch Hillary Clinton right through the hole in the ozone layer." Gore, however, took pains to tamp down that kind of talk. As he pointed out Chelsea Clinton in the audience at Town Hall last week, he added, "I want to commend to all of you Senator Clinton's important address on environmental policy."

One development suggests that Gore may indeed be burning the bridges to his political career. In recent weeks, Democratic sources tell TIME, he has been quietly telephoning some of his biggest fund raisers and telling them to feel free to sign on with other potential candidates. And he wants them to put out the word, instructing, "Tell everybody I'm not running." Still, Gore is positioned better than just about anyone else to tap the enormous, near instant fund-raising potential of the Internet should he choose to, considering the following he has generated among bloggers and with the Net-based political organization MoveOn.org

Gore is well aware that much of the glow around him would vanish the moment he became a candidate. The irony of the current buzz is that words like passionate and authentic are being used to describe a man who showed three entirely different personalities in as many presidential debates and whose 2000 campaign is remembered mostly for the way it was homogenized and shrink-wrapped by a string of poll-addicted handlers.

His new admirers keep asking, Why didn't we see this Gore when he was running for President? "Part of it is in the eye of the beholder," Gore says. "Those who behold a political campaign do so through a thick lens of skepticism, which is not all bad, but it does affect the way candidates are seen--all the more so when the other side of that campaign is constantly painting negative caricatures. But the second answer is, I've been though a lot in the last six years, and the old cliché, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, sometimes has a grain of truth."

Gore says he has found "a different kind of campaign," one that plays more to his strengths than electoral politics did. The 2000 defeat taught him lessons about his talents and his limits. When he was considering four years ago whether to make a 2004 presidential bid, Gore told TIME, "I'm better at looking over the next ridge to try to anticipate what we're going to see there. What I don't think I'm good at is the back-slapping and political compromise that are part of being a candidate."