I like Frank Rich. I think he's perceptive and often keeps his eye on the big pictures when other opinion writers don't. But I thought his column this morning on Al Gore got catty at times.

He writes:

"If this [Gore's leadership on global warming and Iraq] were the whole picture, Mr. Gore would seem the perfect antidote to the Democrats' ills. But it's not. The less flattering aspect of Mr. Gore has not gone away: the cautious and contrived presidential candidate who, like Mrs. Clinton now, was so in thrall to consultants that he ran away from his own administration's record and muted his views, even about pet subjects like science. (He waffled on the teaching of creationism in August 1999, after the Kansas Board of Education struck down the teaching of evolution.) That Gore is actually accentuated, not obscured, by "An Inconvenient Truth." The more hard-hitting his onscree slide show about global warming, the more he reminds you of how much less he focused on the issue in 2000. Gore the uninhibited private citizen is not the same as Gore the timid candidate."

He goes on to argue that "there are considerable chunks of 'An Inconvenient Truth' that are more about hawking Mr. Gore's image than his cause."

I find the use of the words "cautious and contrived" near the beginning of the long initial excerpt interesting. Rich says these less flattering aspects of Gore "have not gone away."

When I think of what Al Gore has been doing on global warming over the past five + years, on Iraq for four of those years (oh, and we might as well throw in his powerful speeches, the best anyone has given by far, on the threat to liberty posed by various Bush Administration actions), those words do not come to mind.

Rich find Gore's response to the question of whether he will seek the presidency again (he has "no plans to run") an example of Gore being "Clintonesque." No, Rich does not mean this as a compliment.

Frank, if it were you, and the truth was that you really didn't know if you were going to seek the presidency again, what would you say? How do you know that isn't exactly what the situation is?

Rich finds the movie "larded with sycophantic audiences, as meticulously multicultural as any Benetton ad..."

Frank, it's an advocacy movie. He's trying to get people to pay attention to global warming and pressure their leaders to act before it is too late. The environmental movement in general is stereotyped as being lily-white, yuppie tree huggers. If you have some audiences listening to the presentation who defy that stereotype wouldn't you think it would be helpful to show footage from those talks rather than from others that reinforce it, again given that your purpose is advocacy?

If Gore's image benefits from that why do you seem to hold that against him, if you think that he's doing outstanding work in the service of a cause that desperately needed someone of his stature and perseverence and smarts to give it life? Sheesh. He's the one who's been out front on this, taking the risks and the hits, and doing the hard work. Do modern journalistic practices mandate snarkiness under even circumstances such as these?