It is hard to begrudge Al Gore his consolation prizes, first the Academy Award and now the Nobel for peace. None of it quite makes up for the bitter loss of the 2000 election, but his concern about the climate “emergency,” as he invariably calls it, is long-standing and plainly sincere. The issue has preoccupied him for decades and now, thanks in no small measure to his efforts, it preoccupies a great many people all around the world. Such influence is rare, even for Presidents.

But there is no prize like the Oval Office, and Gore knows it. His latest best-seller, The Assault on Reason, is a peculiar distillation of the hurts and grievances that still weigh on him from 2000 (see my review of the book in the September issue of COMMENTARY). Will he run again? Can the prophet return from the wilderness? Some Democrats hope so, as the “Draft Gore” campaign suggests, and Gore himself has not absolutely ruled out the possibility. But it won’t happen.

It is not just that Gore is fat and happy these days, basking in a kind of popular adulation that he never knew even at the height of his political success. Nor is it that he has now reached a plane above mere politics, which has become the conventional wisdom among Democrats eager to keep him from joining the race. “Why would he run for President when he can be a demigod?” Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and Democratic strategist, told the Times with an apparently straight face. “He now towers over all of us because he’s pure.” This will be news to anyone who has dipped into Gore’s virulently partisan book or heard him speak lately in something other than his unctuous “save the planet” mode.

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Seven years ago, in an article for COMMENTARY called “Yes and No to Gun Control,” I briefly endorsed the views of constitutional scholars who argue that the Second Amendment’s right “to keep and bear arms” actually imposes practical limits on gun-control laws. The article generated a storm of criticism in our letters section, and I replied at length. With the Second Amendment now in the news, thanks to last week’s federal appeals court ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, the case against what the New York Times editorial page calls “the right to ban arms” is very much worth rehearsing. Here are the relevant sections of my December 2000 reply to critics:

A noteworthy feature of the letters from Michael Beard of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and Eric Gorovitz of the Million Mom March Foundation is the complete absence of any mention of the Second Amendment. Indeed, as far as the organized gun-control movement is concerned, this part of the Bill of Rights is completely irrelevant to the present-day policy debate, and imposes no limits of any kind on the sort of legal restrictions that may be placed on firearms and their owners.

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Staking out a distinctive position in today’s debate over Iran is no easy matter. Every foreign-policy maven has a formula to suggest or a wider strategy in which to embed our dealings with the Islamic republic. Regime change or containment, carrier groups or sanctions, rhetorical confrontation or bilateral talks, Sunni balancing or Shiite cooptation—what’s the right mix? But most analysts agree on one thing: Iran is a problem, a growing threat, an ambitious and aggressively ideological power with designs on regional domination. Here, then, is where there’s room to make a mark with a bold counterintuitive claim: maybe Iran isn’t so bad.

So says Ray Takeyh in an article entitled “Time for Détente with Iran” in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the Islamic republic has been misunderstood. In the American imagination, “a perception of Iran as a destabilizing force” has been allowed to “congeal,” based on little more than “visceral suspicion.” Whatever Iran may have been in the early days of its Islamic revolution, it is no longer, in Takeyh’s estimation, a “revisionist” or “revolutionary” state. Indeed, its foreign policy has long been “quite pragmatic.” To take advantage of this fact—and to deal with the “manageable challenges” posed by Iran’s nuclear program and its “penchant for terrorism”—the U.S. must accept a “paradigm shift,” offering immediate normalization as the “starting point of talks” and ending the regime’s economic and diplomatic isolation.

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Robert Knight of the Media Research Center, a conservative watch-dog group, is unhappy with me. In a piece I wrote for this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I criticized Concerned Women for America (CWA), a group whose Culture & Family Institute Knight once directed, for the way it uses religion in the service of social conservatism. As I wrote:

For a taste of [intolerant fundamentalist] views, visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America, which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from CWA’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in hell.”

Knight calls this a “vicious mischaracterization,” so gross a distortion “as to constitute a lie.” My “out of context” quotes, he writes, have nothing to do with CWA’s position on “spiritual outreach.” Indeed, “nowhere does CWA state or imply that people will be sent to hell because of their views on public policy.”

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Don’t fret too much if you missed Sunday night’s debut of The 1/2 Hour News Hour. The program—Fox News Channel’s answer to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—was awful, not a real contender against its Comedy Central rival. It wasn’t just that the jokes on the Fox spoof often failed. That’s par for the course in satire, political or otherwise. It’s that the whole atmosphere of the show was grimly, thuddingly unfunny. The question is, why?

For Alessandra Stanley, the chief TV critic of the New York Times, the problem was the show’s conservative slant—that is, its single-minded focus on targets like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and global warming. The debut completely spares Dick Cheney and President Bush, the constant foils for Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. As Stanley complained, “The Fox News comedy only leans on the Left.” For his part, the show’s creator, Joel Surnow, one of Hollywood’s few outspokenly right-wing big wigs, is happy to admit that The 1/2 Hour News Hour is “unabashedly coming from a certain point of view. . . . We’re not looking to be balanced.”

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First, a confession: I really like Barack Obama. I like his look, his poise, his ready intelligence. His voice is a marvelous instrument, and he is unusually articulate (especially for a . . . politician). Watching him announce his candidacy on Saturday, I found myself cheering along, pleased that a black man with an exotic name was standing where Lincoln stood and eloquently invoking his example. And I’ve been impressed by the patriotic breadth of his rhetoric. As Kay Hymowitz recently observed, Obama is one of a new group of black leaders “touting old-fashioned American self-reliance and ingenuity, with nary a hint of racial resentment.” His chief selling point, he told “60 Minutes” last night, is that he can “pull together the different strands of American life and focus on what we have in common.”

The question, of course, is what sort of substance this rhetoric will serve. Obama may radiate moderation, but his positions, to the extent that he has set them out, are well to the Left, even in the Democratic party. This is most obvious with respect to his proposal on Iraq, the irresponsibility of which is visible from as far away as Australia. But there is also reason to wonder about his views on the key divisions in American society—the ones that he promises to heal.

Though Obama speaks openly about the importance of his own faith and regrets the liberal tendency to chase religious believers from the public square, his views are utterly predictable on all the hot-button issues of the culture war, from abortion and gay rights to stem-cell research. Moreover, his own religiosity is hardly mainstream. The church on Chicago’s South Side to which he has long belonged—and where he had his conversion experience—is Afrocentric, with overtones of black separatism. Its principles include a “disavowal of the pursuit of ‘middleclassness’” (along with, it should be said, a commitment to the black family and work ethic).

As for divisions of class, it is useful to remember that Obama got his start as a “community organizer” in these same neighborhoods, and he brings along that baggage. His announcement speech included a quick endorsement of the “living wage,” a kind of minimum-wage-on-steroids beloved of groups like ACORN but disastrous for urban economies. And he pledged to “allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country’s middle-class again.” This is not, to say the least, Robert Rubin’s corner of the Democratic party.

Finally, on race, Obama is careful to a fault, but at some point he will have to spell out where he stands on affirmative action, welfare reform, crime, family disintegration, and a host of other issues. His rhetoric as a Senator has not always been so conciliatory or free of racial rancor. In remarks about issuing a national apology to the victims of lynching and their descendants, he spoke about “completing the unfinished work of the civil-rights movement, and closing the gap that still exists in health care, education, and income. There are more ways to perpetrate violence,” he went on, in words reminiscent of Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, “than simply a lynching.”

Last night’s interview on “60 Minutes” was most interesting for two unscripted moments. Asked by the reporter whether he is troubled by questions about his blackness, Obama replied that “nobody’s confused about that” when “I’m catching a cab.” When his wife was asked about concerns for his safety on the campaign trail, she answered that “as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” This prompted the candidate to look down, in obvious discomfort, as if to say, “Not part of the narrative, honey.”

Obama’s success has come in part from his ability to combine the appealing rhetoric of the Democratic Leadership Council with the policy priorities of his party’s left-wing zanies. How long can the balancing act last?