Will the Oscar-winning ex-VP take up the debate challenge?

The current third favourite in the betting on who will be the Democratic nominee in next year’s White House Race is the failed candidate from 2000 who has yet to enter the race. Yet still the money continues to be put on Al Gore and he’s how at a not-so-generous 5.6/1.

For the former Vice-President and failed candidate in 2000 has taken on a new lease of life with the climate change issue and incredible success of his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, for which he won an Oscar.

In the polls Gore is running at a fairly consistent 12% and he appears to be waiting in the wings should something happen to the front runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But could Gore’s presidential hopes be undermined by the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley who is placing advertisements several times a week in the New York Times and Washington Post challenging Gore to a public debate on climate change?

For Monckton, who worked for Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, has become the leading spokesman globally for those who cast doubt on the global warming theories following a series of closely argued features in the Sunday Telegraph last November. In March he issued this public challenge to Gore which has been taken up by many in the blogsphere.

“The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley presents his compliments to Vice-President Albert Gore and by these presents challenges the said former Vice-President to a head-to-head, internationally-televised debate upon the question “That our effect on climate is not dangerous,” to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President’s choosing.

Forasmuch as it is His Lordship who now flings down the gauntlet to the Vice-President, it shall be the Vice-President’s prerogative and right to choose his weapons by specifying the form of the Great Debate. May the Truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalet.

Given at Carie, Rannoch, in the County of Perth, in the Kingdom of Scotland, this 14th Day of March in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand And Seven. God Bless America ! God Save The Queen!”

Monckton has clearly formulated this in such a way so that it will appeal to a US audience.

The move has led to a very active online petition in favour of a debate and it is reaching a stage where it is hard to envisage Gore running for President without dealing with it. Either he agrees to the debate with Monckton with all the risks that that involves or he is seen to have chickened out. Either way it is not good for the former V-P’s White House hopes.

The Monckton campaign is starting to get a lot of media attention and there was a two page feature in the review section of the Observer on Sunday.

Mike Smithson