Gore Wins Nobel Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today. Actually, he shares it with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- but they were both honored for their work to warn people of the dangers of global warming.

"This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now," Gore said in Palo Alto, Calif. "It truly is a planetary emergency, and we have to respond quickly."

Gore is not the first American politician to be so honored. Former President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Then-Vice President Charles Dawes (who served under Calvin Coolidge) was honored in 1925. Then-President Woodrow Wilson was a recipient of the award in 1919 for promoting the League of Nations. And another incumbent president, Theodore Roosevelt, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his collaboration on peace treaties.

The announcement has further energized the "Draft Gore" movement, which seeks to get the former vice president into the race for the presidency. Could it be that Jim Rutenberg contributed to that effort in today's New York Times? His article, headlined "Prize Caps Year of Highs for Gore," reads like a promo for a potential Gore advertisement.

Time's Bryan Walsh suggests that 2007 may be remembered as a tipping point in the environmentalist movement.

Mike Allen of The Politico points out that winning the Nobel Peace Prize heightens the drumbeat of White House speculation -- and Gore and his people don't seem too eager to blunt it in any way. There is also talk of a more influential, more important post for Gore in a possible Hillary Clinton administration -- if he chooses not to enter the race for the nomination.

"The Nobel Peace Prize rewards three decades of Vice President Gore's prescient and compelling -- and often lonely -- advocacy for the future of the earth," presidential candidate John Edwards, one of Gore's potential rivals for the nomination, said in a statement.

Also among the American recipients of the prestigious prize are

* former Secretary of State Elihu Root (1912)
* former Secretary of State Frank Kellogg (1929);
* international president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Jane Addams, who shared it with former Columbia University president and former Republican vice presidential candidate Nicholas Butler (1931);
* former Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1945);
* honorary international president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Emily Balch, who shared it with chairman of the International Missionary Council and president of the World Alliance of Young Men's Christian Associations John Mott (1946);
* Ralph Bunche (1950);
* former Secretary of State and former Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall, for the Marshall Plan (1953);
* Linus Pauling, for his campaign against nuclear weapons testing (1962);
* Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1964);
* Norman Borlaug (1970);
* then-Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger (1973);
* and author Elie Wiesel (1986).