Maybe he’s afraid of a vast Clinton conspiracy

Al Gore is refusing to run:

The win is also likely add further fuel to a burgeoning movement in the United States for Gore to run for president in 2008, which he has so far said he does not plan to do.

Kenneth Sherrill, a political scientist at Hunter College in New York said Gore probably enjoys being a public person more than an elected official.

“He seems happier and liberated in the years since his loss in 2000. Perhaps winning the Nobel and being viewed as a prophet in his own time will be sufficient,” says Sherrill.

Two Gore advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to share his thinking, said the award will not make it more likely that he will seek the presidency. If anything, the Peace Prize makes the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race less appealing to Gore, they said, because now he has a huge, international platform to fight global warming and may not want to do anything to diminish it.

One of the advisers said that while Gore is unlikely to rule out a bid in the coming days, the prospects of the former vice president entering the fray in 2008 are “extremely remote.”

Frankly, that’s all a lot of blah-blah. The guy’s been lusting after the President Presidency since 1991, and he’s felt since 2000 that it was stolen from him. (And on that last, you might find interesting this Big Lizard’s post.) With this kind of momentum push, you’d think he’d leap for the ring.

Thinking on that this morning, it occurred to me that, perhaps, just perhaps, Gore doesn’t want to have to go up against Hillary Clinton. And that’s not just because she’s a fierce campaigner, but because she knows him. With Edwards and Obama, Clinton is digging around, trying to learn things about them. With Gore, however, Hillary shared the White House with him for 8 years.

It’s not inconceivable that Hillary has information about Al that he simply wouldn’t like to have come out. And by that I don’t mean blackmail type information, which could start an ugly tit-for-tat that Hillary wouldn’t want any more than Al, but more what I would call intellectual information: stories about bad decision-making, ill-thought out remarks, etc. Little bites, not big chunks, but things that would, nevertheless, work to Al’s serious detriment over the course of a long campaign.