WASHINGTON — The doors swung open and he made his entrance with cameras clicking, the wooden politician denied the presidency and derided as "Ozone Man" was coming home to the Capitol. But this time they called him a movie star and likened him to a prophet.
Al Gore left Washington seven years ago bowed by the 2000 presidential election and a little disgraced in the eyes of his party --\o7 couldn't he at least have won his home state?
\f7But he returned Wednesday reincarnated: the subject of an Academy Award-winning film, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, a 58-year-old guy who, slightly grayed and a little puffy, can share a stage with Leonardo DiCaprio and still manage to be the center of attention.
The onetime congressman, senator and vice president was back, this time to testify about global warming. The Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" -- the documentary about his traveling slide show on the ravages of climate change -- doesn't even belong to him; it's the director's. But it has pushed Gore into another orbit in Washington's universe. People started lining up as early as 7 a.m. to get a glimpse of him.
"This is the most dangerous crisis we have ever faced," Gore told a joint meeting of two House panels in an impassioned appeal for bold action. (He later repeated his case on the Senate side.) "This problem is burning a hole in the top of the world.... We need to turn the thermostat back down before that melts."
Gore, who arrived in a new hybrid Mercury, sat beside a stack of brown boxes filled with 516,000 messages -- collected over the last few days on AlGore.com -- urging "real action."
"There is a sense of hope in the country that this United States Congress will rise to the occasion and present meaningful solutions to this crisis," he said. "Congress is a repository of hopes and dreams of people all across this Earth."
As the morning hearing convened on the House side, the repository of hopes and dreams spent several minutes bickering about where the committee members should sit and how much time they had to speak.
They appeared to divide pretty much along party lines. Democrats hailed the "Goracle," who saw this coming 30 years ago, and Republicans dismissed him as an alarmist.
