Al Gore (2)

A Nobel peace prize victory — which Al Gore has been tipped to win — could boost the chances of a 2008 candidacy, according to a report in the UK Independent.”Al Gore never quite closed the door on running for president again and his many loyalists are now pinning their hopes on Norway’s Nobel committee, in the belief that the prize must be his, this year of all years,” the Independent’s Leonard Doyle writes, adding that “people close to the former vice-president are convinced that he is looking for an opportunity to jump in the race.”

Gore spokesman Kalee Kreider, however, told RAW STORY today by email that the former vice president “has no intention of running for President in 2008.”

“He is involved in a different type of campaign — one to educate Americans and people around the world about the climate crisis,” she added.

As a candidate, Gore would certainly be well behind in fundraising, and many of the Democratic heavy-hitters who’d been holding their pursestrings saying they were awaiting a run have donated now to other candidates.

According to a recent report in the New York Times, those who said they were “waiting to see if Gore would enter the race” are pegged as “I just don’t want to contribute.”

Supporters now plan to place a full page ad in the Times.

“The supporters’ group has already gathered about 127,000 signatures this year – 10,000 of them in the last week of September alone – and is planning to take out full-page advert in The New York Times as an open letter urging Mr Gore to run,” he says. ‘We feel that if [Mr Gore] wins the Nobel Prize … then he can’t not run for president,’ Roy Gayhart, the man behind California’s Draft Gore group, told Newsweek.”

California Draft Gore, a grassroots political action committee, has hatched a plan to get their reluctant candidate off of theoretical fantasy polls and onto a real-life primary ballot.

Capitalizing on a provision of the state election law which allows for any name to be placed on a ballot provided enough signatures in favor of that candidate are secured, volunteers will begin scrambling next week to get 26,500 registered Democrats — 500 from each of California’s 53 congressional districts — to sign off on the former vice president before a Dec. 4 deadline.

If all goes well, Gore’s name will appear on ballots throughout the state when California’s presidential primary is held in February of next year.

“In 2003, Gore asked us to stand down,” Gayhart pointed out, but after contacting the Gore camp with their plans this year, the initiative has received no such suggestion this time around. “Everything he’s doing appears to be leaving open the possibility.”

In a May interview with Time, Gore didn’t categorically deny he would consider a run, but did say he had “fallen out of love with politics,” and that he wasn’t “convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play.”

Al Gore

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Al Gore, the nearly man of US politics, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, after reinvented himself as an Oscar-winning seer on climate change after his White House dreams were blown away.
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Bill Clinton’s former vice president won the prize, alongside a body of international climate experts, after helping propel global warming to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” which received the Academy Award for best documentary the same year.

The Nobel prize was awarded “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”, the Norwegian Nobel committee said Friday.

After narrowly losing the 2000 US presidential election, Gore emerged from political hibernation with little bitterness, joking in his climate change film: “I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America.”

Such one-liners came from a new-found store of wit that was not always apparent when Gore served in White House, working in the large shadow thrown by Clinton.

Once skewered by the press for being humorless and stodgy, crucified for apparently claiming to have invented the Internet (one of several notorious misquotations), the “Goracle” of climate change is now feted worldwide.

Shedding his image as a brainy but dull policy wonk, Gore oversaw the Live Earth concert in July, which elevated him to Bono-like coolness in some quarters.

“If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over,” his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff told October’s Vanity Fair magazine.

It’s Good to Be Vikram Pandit

here was a time when the rule of thumb for valuing money managers was around 2% of assets under management. But that was then. Now we’re in the golden age of hedge funds and private equity firms, and the people who run them are Wall Street’s new royalty.From the Wall Street Journal today, we learn that Citigroup is considering a $600 million acquisition of Old Lane, a hedge fund that despite its name is only a year old, and is thought to have some $4 billion of assets under management.

In other times, Old Lane — founded by former Morgan Stanley executives Vikram Pandit and John Havens — might have fetched something closer to $100 million. But with private-equity firm Blackstone getting ready to go public in a deal valuing it at $40 billion, and Fortress, the hedge fund that went public this year now worth $11 billion, Citi is going to have to pay up for the privilege.

Should it go through with the high-priced deal though, the real reason may not be that it’s trying to strike hedge-fund gold. After all, Old Lane is a peanut compared with Citi’s existing alternative-asset division, which already has $49 billion in assets and more than $1 billion of earnings last year.
Citigroup Chief Executive Chuck Prince has been busy rearranging his management ranks as the bank struggles to get out of a multiyear funk. Bringing in Pandit to run the alternative-asset division, which is apparently the plan, would bring a well respected leader to a business whose top job has been vacant for more than a year.

Still, is any one person outside of Howard Stern worth that kind of money? (And is he even worth what Sirius Satellite had to pay to get him?)

That’s why we can’t help but view today’s news as a reminder of the recent dysfunctionality under the red umbrella, where no clear successor to Prince has emerged. Should the need to look for new blood at the top of the $250 billion giant arise any time soon, $600 million may end up looking like a bargain.

Vikram Pandit

It’s Good to Be Vikram Pandit

The Beresford Building, where the rich retreat.Photo: Corbis

(To be read in the voice of Robin Leach.)Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s newish head of alternative investments, is apparently not so bothered that CAI profit has dropped 40 percent since he started with the division, or that the Old Lane hedge fund he sold them for around $800 million dropped 5.9 percent last month. He’s just plunked down $17.9 million for Tony Randall’s apartment in Central Park West’s Beresford Building, a ten-room spread that occupies an entire floor. According to the listing, it is a “truly superb residence,” with “superb light,” “impressive park views,” herringbone wood floors, a fireplace, coffered ceilings, a butler’s pantry, wine storage, and a private elevator. But none of that matters to Pandit, who told New York earlier this year that he never got into “the Gordon Gekko idea of Wall Street.” He just really, really loved The Odd Couple.

Luciano Pavarotti Is Dead at 71

Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, died Thursday at his home near Modena, in northern Italy. He was 71.

His death was announced by his manager, Terri Robson. The cause was pancreatic cancer. In July 2006 he underwent surgery for the cancer in New York, and he had made no public appearances since then. He was hospitalized again this summer and released on Aug. 25.

Like Enrico Caruso and Jenny Lind before him, Mr. Pavarotti extended his presence far beyond the limits of Italian opera. He became a titan of pop culture. Millions saw him on television and found in his expansive personality, childlike charm and generous figure a link to an art form with which many had only a glancing familiarity.

Early in his career and into the 1970s he devoted himself with single-mindedness to his serious opera and recital career, quickly establishing his rich sound as the great male operatic voice of his generation — the “King of the High Cs,” as his popular nickname had it.

By the 1980s he expanded his franchise exponentially with the Three Tenors projects, in which he shared the stage with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, first in concerts associated with the World Cup and later in world tours. Most critics agreed that it was Mr. Pavarotti’s charisma that made the collaboration such a success. The Three Tenors phenomenon only broadened his already huge audience and sold millions of recordings and videos.

And in the early 1990s he began staging Pavarotti and Friends charity concerts, performing with rock stars like Elton John, Sting and Bono and making recordings from the shows.

Throughout these years, despite his busy and vocally demanding schedule, his voice remained in unusually good condition well into middle age.

Even so, as his stadium concerts and pop collaborations brought him fame well beyond what contemporary opera stars have come to expect, Mr. Pavarotti seemed increasingly willing to accept pedestrian musical standards. By the 1980s he found it difficult to learn new opera roles or even new song repertory for his recitals.

And although he planned to spend his final years performing in a grand worldwide farewell tour, he completed only about half the tour, which began in 2004. Physical ailments limited his movement on stage and regularly forced him to cancel performances. By 1995, when he was at the Metropolitan Opera singing one of his favorite roles, Tonio in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” high notes sometimes failed him, and there were controversies over downward transpositions of a notoriously dangerous and high-flying part.

Yet his wholly natural stage manner and his wonderful way with the Italian language were completely intact. Mr. Pavarotti remained a darling of Met audiences until his retirement from that company’s roster in 2004, an occasion celebrated with a string of “Tosca” performances. At the last of them, on March 13, 2004, he received a 15-minute standing ovation and 10 curtain calls. All told, he sang 379 performances at the Met, of which 357 were in fully staged opera productions.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, when Mr. Pavarotti was at his best, he possessed a sound remarkable for its ability to penetrate large spaces easily. Yet he was able to encase that powerful sound in elegant, brilliant colors. His recordings of the Donizetti repertory are still models of natural grace and pristine sound. The clear Italian diction and his understanding of the emotional power of words in music were exemplary.

Mr. Pavarotti was perhaps the mirror opposite of his great rival among tenors, Mr. Domingo. Five years Mr. Domingo’s senior, Mr. Pavarotti had the natural range of a tenor, exposing him to the stress and wear that ruin so many tenors’ careers before they have barely started. Mr. Pavarotti’s confidence and naturalness in the face of these dangers made his longevity all the more noteworthy.

Mr. Domingo, on the other hand, began his musical life as a baritone and later manufactured a tenor range above it through hard work and scrupulous intelligence. Mr. Pavarotti, although he could find the heart of a character, was not an intellectual presence. His ability to read music in the true sense of the word was in question. Mr. Domingo, in contrast, is an excellent pianist with an analytical mind and the ability to learn and retain scores by quiet reading.

Yet in the late 1980s, when both Mr. Pavarotti and Mr. Domingo were pursuing superstardom, it was Mr. Pavarotti who showed the dominant gift for soliciting adoration from large numbers of people. He joked on talk shows, rode horses on parade and played, improbably, a sex symbol in the movie “Yes, Giorgio.” In a series of concerts, some held in stadiums, Mr. Pavarotti entertained tens of thousands and earned six-figure fees. Presenters, who were able to tie a Pavarotti appearance to a subscription package of less glamorous concerts, found him valuable.