Cringe-Making Concerts

One might imagine that the Live Earth concerts celebrating our communal guilt for hastening global warming would be a hot ticket, if you'll excuse the pun, but apparently not.

The organizers, among them Vice President Gore, were hoping to attract 2 billion viewers to their cause but managed a slender 2.7 million.

You can put part of the fizzle down to the quality of the music. Whose bright idea was it to bring back the late unlamented the Police? Who thought that anyone would take a lecture on material restraint from the queen of conspicuous consumption, Madonna? As for the all-smiling communist girl band live from Shanghai, it is little wonder everyone in America turned off the Maoist propaganda and tuned into the film, "Monsters, Inc."

All this leaves Mr. Gore facing an inconvenient truth — enough to make him grow another beard. Ever since his disappointment with the election result of 2000, after a lackluster bid in which he rashly forswore the talents of the Democrats' greatest living campaigner, Bill Clinton, the vice president has been plotting his return. Like the brooding, sulfurous Richard Nixon, he opted for the long haul, ignoring those who implored him to try for a rerun against his nemesis in 2004 and aiming instead for 2008.

The grand plan envisioned a trophy-laden road to success. First he would wow the voters by saving the planet with his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," whose best line would show that in defeat he had learned a little humility and acquired a much needed sense of humor: "I'm Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States of America."

Then he would leverage the film into an Oscar. In fact, the film won two Oscars, though Mr. Gore did not win either of them. Still, thanks to the generosity of the filmmakers, he was allowed on stage alongside the real winners and was photographed holding the Oscar aloft, which, in the public mind, amounts to much the same thing.

The next trick, apparently, involved a Nobel Prize, though what exactly Mr. Gore had done to deserve such an honor has always been rather unclear. Not for literature, for sure. His book, "The Assault on Reason," shows that his writing style is every bit as leaden as his speaking style.

In February, it emerged he was to be nominated for the Peace Prize. According to the prize rules, you don't have to promote peace to win a peace prize; spreading anxiety about climate change is quite enough. Come to think of it, the qualifications for winning a peace prize are famously perverse: among those blessed with it are the terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat, and Kurt Waldheim, who lied about his Nazi past. Those who put Mr. Gore's name forward for a Nobel turned out to be a former Norwegian Conservative environment minister, a woman from the Norwegian Socialist Left Party, and a Canadian Inuit activist.

According to the original comeback strategy, Mr. Gore would be well set to mount a late bid for the Democratic nomination: an Oscar in February, hotly followed by a Nobel nomination, then a Nobel Prize announced in October, topped off by a suitably fancy Nobel awards ceremony in December.

The clamor for the much delayed Gore presidency was scheduled to reach fever pitch at the turn of the year 2008, demanding he put his name forward in the early primary states in February, and, backed by an army of young green enthusiasts dressed in hemp who had signed on to the Gore cause after seeing his inspirational example during Live Earth, he would trounce Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and the rest.

Things don't seem to be going according to plan. First, the election race started shortly after last November's elections and, unlike Republicans whose disappointment in their homogeneously gray field leads them to hanker after the phantom candidate Fred Thompson, the Democrats seem pleased with the variety and range of their candidates. All polling suggests that no one is thinking about a Gore presidency except, perhaps, Al Gore.

Even had Live Earth proved as potent a piece of political theater as Bob Geldof's Live Aid or George Harrison's concert for Bangladesh, it would still not have proved a suitable launching pad for the Gore nomination.

The besuited, buttoned up Mr. Gore, whose rotund girth suggests he casts a carbon footprint larger than a fleet of East German Trabants, cut a wholly incongruous figure, even as a hologram, among the likes of Snoop Dogg and Ludacris. And his invitation to join him in pledging to goad our lawmakers to pass laws to reduce carbon emissions was as cringe-making as any photo opportunity since the jump-suited President Bush declared two long years ago aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that the Iraq mission was accomplished.

As it turned out, Live Earth was pompous, hypocritical, middle-aged, and lame — and another high profile failure on which Mr. Gore can hang his name. Though if it saved us the embarrassment of having him enter the Democratic lists only to fail a second time, it can be said to have served a useful purpose.

Correction from July 12, 2007: May 1, 2003, was when President Bush made his announcement about the Iraq War on the USS Abraham Lincoln. The date was misstated in a column headlined "Cringe-Making Concerts" on page 8 of yesterday's New York Sun.