NYT: Gore Supporters’ Movement Lacks a Candidate
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 11, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — With talk of a Nobel Peace Prize in the air and election deadlines looming, supporters of Al Gore have been raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for petition drives and advertising campaigns in a last-ditch effort to draft him into the Democratic presidential primaries.
Draft Gore, a national group that for several years has been trying to pull Mr. Gore into a presidential race, ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, as well as commercials on liberal radio talk shows, saying he had an obligation to seek the presidency again and address from the White House a variety of moral issues facing the country.
The group said it had collected small donations over the Internet to pay for the ads. The Times advertisement alone cost roughly $65,000, a standard rate for ads not slotted to run on a particular day, a spokeswoman for the newspaper said. Other groups, from New York to Iowa to California, are running drives to put Mr. Gore on primary ballots or make him an option in caucus rooms.
Yet, as of now, the movement is without a candidate.
Mr. Gore’s representatives say he has no plans to run or interest in doing so. He himself has been coy. Roy Gayhart, an organizer of a group trying to get him onto the primary ballot in California, said Mr. Gore, walking by a petition booth as he left a speaking engagement Tuesday night in the city of Cupertino, merely smiled, waved, shook hands with a volunteer and offered a simple “thank you.”...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/politics/11gore.html?hp