Prince Albert In the Can?

He's back! The man whose presidential campaign cycled through bipolar moods of manic class war populism and smug moral superiority thinks his moment has re-arrived. A week after the Democratic Party's defeat in the mid-term elections, former Vice President Al Gore has emerged to begin his 2004 presidential campaign. Gore's return to the national stage has been carefully orchestrated, including a tediously earnest attempt at a yuckfest with David Letterman and a mutually gratifying softball interview with Barbara Walters.

Apparently deciding that the overworked soccer mom vote is the key to victory in 2004, he and his wife Tipper have also just published a new book of family advice, Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family. The man who grandiosely warned in his environmentalist doomsday book Earth in the Balance that we must radically transform our lives in order to "make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle of civilization," now lectures us about how to raise our families. (No doubt he learned a lot from his own kids' problems.)

As he contemplates 2004, perhaps Gore is watching NBC's West Wing series, which producer Aaron Sorkin has described as portraying the campaign that Al Gore should have run against George Bush. (Al the brain vs. George the boob.) Of course, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson tried something similar against Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, and he was trounced. Despite the Gore media blitz, the latest polls suggest that only hardcore Republicans are enthusiastic about a Gore repeat in 2004.