A movie about Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation about global warming doesn’t sound all that exciting, but if you liked “March of the Penguins,” you’ll love “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore is as relentless in his travels to save the planet and faces almost as many obstacles as those penguins making their way across the tundra.

Getting the country to face up to global warming is his life’s mission, and it could be his ticket to the presidency. Voters yearning for a principled leader who truly believes in something may find what they’re looking for in the former vice president. Gore told NEWSWEEK that he’s in the middle of a campaign, but it’s not a campaign for a candidate. “Been there, done that,” he said.

Nobody believes him. By not playing the overt political game, Gore may be putting in place the first issue-driven campaign of the 21st century, one that is premised on a big moral challenge that is becoming more real with soaring gas prices and uncertain oil supplies. A senior Democrat who once ran for the White House himself but harbors no illusions the party will turn to him in 2008 looks at Gore and marvels, “This guy is running the best campaign I’ve seen for president.”

Whether he is or isn’t running almost doesn’t matter. Gore has the luxury of waiting until late in the political season to announce. He has universal name recognition, a proven ability to raise money, and he can tap into the MoveOn.org machinery to launch a grass-roots campaign. Unlike front runner Hillary Clinton, there is no doubt about where Gore stands and what he believes in. He opposed the Iraq war, he was against the Patriot Act and he spoke out forcefully against President Bush’s torture policies and warrantless eavesdropping. Gore has become the darling of the left, yet global warming is not, or shouldn’t be, a partisan issue. The days when the first President Bush mocked Gore as “Ozone Man” are over, relegated to the dustbin of history. Conservative evangelical Christians see themselves as stewards of the earth. When asked at a screening of his film in Washington this week what he would say to Bush’s claim that global warming needs further study, Gore quipped, “I hope he finds the real killer,” adding quickly, “I shouldn’t have said that.” 

There is a parallel for Gore in another president who lost narrowly, retreated to private life and then returned to win the presidency. His name was Richard Nixon. He lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 in what was then the closest race in American history. Written off by the political establishment, Nixon went to New York and practiced law. Then in 1964, the Republicans took a drubbing with Barry Goldwater, a conservative whose loose talk about going to war scared the country, and suddenly the uptight and sober Nixon looked pretty good to a party desperate to regain the White House. John Kerry came much closer to winning than Goldwater, but Kerry turned out to be a wind-surfing dilettante who in retrospect reminded Democrats they had a better candidate in Gore. “It’s like the [line in] “Mrs. Robinson”: ‘Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you’,” says a Democratic strategist recalling the Simon & Garfunkel song from the movie, “The Graduate.” 

This could be the ultimate remake for Gore, whose struggles with his persona during the 2000 campaign made him an object of ridicule. He’s older now, 57, and the pounds he’s put on have robbed him of that princely patrician look that the voters never liked anyway. He seems more approachable, and he’s a first-rate teacher as he explains in “An Inconvenient Truth” about the inescapable march of global warming, along with its consequences, that first captured his imagination as a college student. The film is not apocalyptic; you don’t leave the theater feeling all is lost. Gore says he deliberately left out recent scientific predictions that the world has just 10 years to reverse global warming or a tipping point will be reached beyond which it cannot be stopped. Reflections about the 2000 presidential race (“It was a hard blow, but you make the best of it”), a childhood split between farm life and a hotel room in Washington and his beloved sister’s death from lung cancer interspersed with the slide show give the movie a biopic feel that makes viewers wonder what might have been if history had taken a different turn. 

Gore is not anything like Nixon, but there is an underlying psychological subtext they have in common. Once you’re bitten by the presidential bug, you stay bitten. The only cure is formaldehyde. This is his Richard Nixon remake. “He would get in if the timing’s right,” says a Democratic strategist. “The question is—is he willing to challenge [Hillary Clinton]?” That’s a question not even Gore seems to be able to answer.