Gore wins the Nobel Prize

What happened

Former vice president Al Gore and the U.N. climate change panel have won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work against global warming. The news was widely anticipated—Gore’s climate-change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award this year. “I am deeply honored,” Gore said after the Nobel award was announced early Friday.

What the commentators said

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It’s “not quite clear” what exactly what Al Gore “has done to advance peace,” said Tom Gross in National Review Online’s media blog, but it’s obvious enough why the Nobel committee is so smitten with him. He’s a “left-wing politician” pushing a left-wing agenda. So, in that sense, he’s certainly worthy of a prize that has gone, in years past, to Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat.

Gore’s “dogged—and now celebrated” work on the environment might put him on a path to another prize, said Mike Allen in The Politico. The White House. Supporters who think Gore was cheated out of the presidency in the 2000 recount want him to take another shot, and the Nobel “victory is likely to increase calls from a fragmented but vocal group of backers for him to make a late entry into the 2008 presidential race.”

“If Al Gore gets into the presidential race,” said Eric Pooley in Time.com. “I'll eat my copy of An Inconvenient Truth.” It won’t be the giant logistical hurdels of making a late bid, or the huge head start Hillary Clinton would have on him. It’s just that Gore is living “the kind of life he has always wanted” now that he has left politics behind and sublimated his ego for “a larger goal,” and he doesn’t want to risk losing “his hard-won happiness.”