It took only one presidential loss - although surely the most controversial one in U.S. history - to send Al Gore onto the true believer's lecture trail spreading the doctrine of catastrophic climate change.

After taking a brief respite from politics to dabble as a college lecturer, Gore has been touring the national TV and town hall lecture circuit sharing his apocalyptic vision of our future - one that not so coincidentally resembles that in the disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

To be sure, he has wandered from his "the sky is falling" litany to denounce the Bush administration for its questionable pursuit of nation-building in the Middle East. But other than to drop real world matters to thwart the evil forces of future global warming, he said little about how he would stymie the here-and-now forces of global terrorism. We also know only what we can assume on how he would address such pressing domestic issues as Social Security, immigration, tax reform and health care.

Still, whatever his current disclaimers, it seems certain he currently is in training for a run at the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 - if only to derail the megastar senator from New York, the more moderate, brighter and harder-working Hillary Clinton.

Gore, whose Tennessee roots were re-cultivated and arguably refined at his boyhood home on the top floor of Washington's luxurious Fairfax Hotel, has resented the Clintons ever since Bill relegated him to second-fiddle status in the 1992 campaign.

The resentment turned into smoldering outrage in 1997, when Gore jumped a last-minute flight to Japan to sign the United States on to the Kyoto global warming treaty only to have President Clinton refuse to send it the Senate for ratification.

Clinton, a master at detecting even the slightest wind shifts of political opinion, deferred to a 95-0 Senate resolution urging him to deep-six the treaty after various government and private studies showed its draconian mandates would plunge the nation into a deep-recession.

Gore responded by declining any substantial help from Clinton on the 1999 campaign trail, a decision that almost certainly cost him his home state of Tennessee and probably several other key states as well.

He and a number of other old Democratic bulls, including John Kerry and Joe Biden, would like nothing better than to plant some political land mines in the path of Hillary Clinton, the clear front-runner for their party's nomination. Gore's political allies are quietly whispering to key Democrats that Mrs. Clinton can win the primaries, but can't win the general election because of her high negatives.

But many of those negatives are starting to disappear. Hillary has moderated her views substantially since her election to the Senate six years ago - or at least, the expression of those views. She has learned the art of compromise and reached out to her colleagues across the aisle - even earning their praise at times for her hard work and reasonable attitude.

In short, she has become the antithesis of Gore, who has become increasingly bitter and partisan as he pushes his green agenda around the country. Whoever takes the oath of office in January 2009 must be, for the good of the country, a person amenable to reason - and reasonableness. Hillary may be a better alternative of the two.

Gore has shown no capacity for compromise and, indeed, is building his base only on the far left with the help of MoveOn.org and Howard "The Scream" Dean's squadrons of online zealots.

It is he, not Hillary Clinton, who is too far to the left to win the general election.

Eric Peters is a columnist for The Army Times and AOL.online.