Gore in Florida today: 'Take it from me ... every vote matters'

The last time Al Gore campaigned in Florida, he came up 537 votes short -- at least according to the U.S. Supreme Court -- and lost the state, and the election, to George W. Bush. That was in 2000.

Today, the former vice president stumped in Florida again for the first time in eight years, exhorting supporters of Democrat Barack Obama to make sure to vote. After all, he reasoned, it can make a difference.

At a rally in West Palm Beach, with wife Tipper Gore at his side, he said:

By the way, take it from me, elections matter. Every vote matters.

-- Johanna Neuman

Doing the math on Gore's electricity plan

In a "let's-do-the-math" look at Al Gore's proposal that the next president set the nation on course to produce every last bit of its electricity through "wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy" within the decade, U.S. News & World Report's James Pethokoukis decided the plan was "almost unfathomably pricey."

It makes sense, he said, "only if you think that not doing so almost immediately would result in an uninhabitable planet."

Pethokoukis came up with this estimate for Gore's challenge: $5 trillion.

He reached that figure by playing out an estimate provided by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens for a plan to generate 20% of America's electricity by harnessing the power of the wind and building the infrastructure to transmit the electricity: $1.2 trillion.

What does this have to do with a blog named "Countdown to Crawford?" Only this: The proposal is something for the current president to think about -- and get started on, if he chooses to accept the challenge in his final months in office.

And, if only 269 votes had shifted in Florida eight years ago from Bush to the man from a small town in Tennessee, the blog you may well have been reading would have been "Countdown to Carthage."

--James Gerstenzang

Photo: Ron Edmonds/Associated Press