It's a Great Day for Noblesse Oblige. Oh, And Yet Another Reason To Bash Al Gore

It was March of 1991 and John and Theresa Heinz stood on either side of me in my small office in the bustling newsroom of the Philadelphia Daily News. I was showing them page proofs from a forthcoming special section that I was directing on single mothers who had overcome poverty, abuse, addiction and other travails to lead successful lives.

Women's issues, especially those affecting disadvantaged women, were of special import to Heinz, a liberal Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and his wife. What could have been reasonably expected to be a brief "Isn’t that nice" walkthrough stretched into an hour-long chat, including a passionate soliloquy from the senator about how difficult it was a raise awareness in Congress about helping have-not women.

This meeting came to mind as I heard the news this morning that former Vice President Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to spread awareness of global warming.

Heinz, heir to the H.J. Heinz ketchup fortune, was born with a gold spoon in his mouth and never had to work a day in his life. Gore was born into power if not exactly wealth, but had become well to do and also could have chosen a less noble pursuit — or done nothing — when he returned home to Tennessee from Washington.

As it is (or in Heinz' case was because he was to perish two months later in a helicopter-airplane crash), both are worthy examples of noblesse oblige — the concept that with wealth, power and prestige come social responsibilities.

After all these years, Gore still can seem like a caricature of himself, although his sincerity and the influence of his good works, including An Inconvenient Truth, his Oscar-winning documentary, cannot be doubted.

But because he is a lightning rod in the debate between people like myself who have concluded that the best available scientific evidence shows that the precipitous rise in global temperatures is man made and the shrinking minority of people who are still singing from the George Bush hymnal and have alternative explanations.

Gore, in a statement after the prize announcement was made, noted that:

"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

But this will be quickly lost as the rhetoric in the blogosphere . . . uh, warms to global proportions a la the debate over expanding the S-CHIP program and health-care reform in general being drowned out in the hysteria over Graeme Frost.

So while you still have an opportunity, please bless Al Gore – and while you're at it say a prayer in John Heinz' memory.

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Gore's honor inevitably begs the question of whether he will run for president.

While that would seem to be a logical consequence, that outcome breaks down under scrutiny:

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize in and of itself does not qualify Gore for the highest office in the land. He already was qualified and should have won in 2000 had he not run such a lackluster campaign. Besides which, the peace prize has lost much of its luster since it has been awarded to thugs like Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.

Finally, I take Gore at his word when he says he doesn’t want to be president. And that’s just fine with me.

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Incidentally, Gore is the first almost-U.S. president to win the prize.

President winners have included Jimmy Carter (2002), Woodrow Wilson (1919) and Teddy Roosevelt (1906). I'm sure it's a coincidence that all but Roosevelt were Democrats and Roosevelt acted like one.

Click here for a complete list of winners.