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Gore has been marching leftward into treacherous issue terrain. His speech on the economy nine days after he spoke out on Iraq was timid and unfocused, sidestepping the question of how to respond to Bush's tax cut. Gore now tells TIME that he would "scrap the whole thing and start over," with less dramatic cuts aimed at the middle class. Last week he startled an audience in Manhattan with the revelation that as the country copes with a health-care system in crisis, he has "reluctantly" come to support a radical idea that has long been a liberal dream: single-payer health care. In such a system, currently practiced in Canada, health care is financed by taxes, and the government pays everyone's medical bills. It would be a far bigger step than even Hillary Clinton's 1994 proposal, which never made it to the floor of either house of a Democratic Congress.
How voters will react to the new Gore is unknowable. But running behind such bold initiatives could be his only shot. "There's a front runner in terms of name recognition. There's no front runner in terms of the passion we know we need, the leadership and the vision," says Donna Brazile, Gore's 2000 campaign manager. "Al Gore, if he decides to run, has to come out with a platform and a vision and stick to it regardless of what anybody says."
But how much about himself can he really change at the age of 54, and how much is embedded in his DNA? Gore now acknowledges that he micromanaged his campaign into incoherence. "I don't think I'm a very good political tactician. As a matter of fact, I think I'm pretty lousy at it," he told TIME. "I don't think I'm a good campaign manager, particularly not good at managing myself as a candidate." Or managing others: Where Bush relied on--and trusted--a few key advisers like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, Gore's team was a shifting cast of backbiting pollsters and strategists, none of whom were ever sure where they stood with the candidate. His wife and kids seemed to be the only people he really trusted.
Throughout his career, Gore's main assets have been his ideas, his decisiveness and his ability to discern things before just about anyone else. As Clinton agonized over Bosnia, it was Gore who convinced him that bombing would bring the Serbs to the peace table. Gore coined the term "information superhighway" in the 1970s, and he was already worrying about global warming when he was in college. His strengths, he says, are "listening and translating what people are telling me into practical plans for making it happen. I think I'm better at looking over the next ridge."