Bill And Al Go Their Own Way Back To D.C.

"Bill and Al's excellent adventure" ended tensely in the Clinton impeachment crisis and the Gore election loss — the heady '92 campaign a distant memory. Now they're back in Washington, two policy wonks cutting up the rug in the capital once more.

The old boys on the campaign bus are on separate journeys that rarely bring them in front of Washington crowds, much less on the same day. Tuesday was an exception.

The former president, a judiciously used weapon in New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, was the headliner for a fundraiser for his wife Tuesday night, pulling in more than $2.7 million from 1,000 or so guests. That was more than double the amount raised at a similar event Sunday in New York.

Bill Clinton walked the audience through his earliest years with Hillary, back to their first date 36 years ago this month, and traced his wife's advocacy for issues touching on the law, children and health.

"She wasn't elected to anything, but she was in public service," he said repeatedly, and he recalled telling her that between them, "I think you have the best combination of mind, heart and leadership ability."

For her part, a beaming Hillary Clinton said people everywhere ask her if she will make her husband the nation's secretary of state if she wins. "I think that's illegal," she said. "But I sure can make him ambassador to the world."

Earlier in the day, Gore previewed his testimony to Congress on Wednesday about the global warming issues that won Oscar accolades for his film, "An Inconvenient Truth." The former vice president wowed an audience of institutional investors who see him as a sage on patterns of future living.

Gore preached the virtues of long-term investing in a socially responsible manner, urging pension-fund executives and trustees to look beyond the impulse to reap immediate gain.

The question hanging over the crowd — as it surely must be for the Clintons — is whether Gore will eventually get into the Democratic presidential race despite his persistence in shooing away the idea, without ruling it out. He gave no hint Tuesday.

"At this point, Al Gore says he's not running for president and I think you can take him at his word on that," CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer said.

Polls consistently place Gore, the non-candidate, third behind Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — ahead of John Edwards and other declared candidates — and indicate that much of his support comes from Democrats who would otherwise back the New York senator.

"Al Gore has been running for president all his life. If things break in a certain way for him — in other words, Democrats don't seem all that happy with their front-runners they have now — I think Al Gore will get into the race," Schieffer said.

Jack Ehnes, CEO of the California teachers' retirement system, said Gore's visionary thinking is much needed in politics. Ehnes led a Washington conference bringing together investors of some $3 trillion in pension funds.

"It's not just for tree-huggers in California," Ehnes said of the speech. "It's a business message. We do not have political leaders that have taken this challenge to heart. The vice president exemplifies this type of leadership."

Gore mixed esoteric observation with practical advice, his trademark self-deprecating humor and jokes he's been telling almost since he lost the 2000 election in a Supreme Court decision.

He talked about visible lines of spectrum, internalizing externalities and how, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Gore is looser than in his buttoned-up campaign days and is obviously enjoying the praise of environmentalists who say he was ahead of his time on global warming when he wrote the 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," and is right on the money now with his film.

"He's charismatic," Rob Berridge, a Boston program manager for a coalition of environmental groups and investors called Ceres, said after the speech. "Yeah, he's a sage."

At least among those drawn to his vision, Gore is winning back the respect he lost in the 2000 race, an effort harshly judged in the aftermath by comments such as this one, in 2002, from California Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher: "Vice President Gore is a very good man who had a campaign that nobody wants to see repeated."

Clinton was among those frustrated by that campaign, in part because Gore largely sidelined him. The vice president's mortification with Clinton's misbehavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal was still fresh, and Clinton was judged a political liability.

Clinton felt Gore could have used him to tout the economic record they built over two terms. Strains deepened in the relationship between the pair of baby boomers who had campaigned in a 1992 bus tour that inspired a knockoff on the name of the time-travel movie, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."

As Gore tells it, they closed at least some of their distance right after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when he was driving from Toronto to Washington and Clinton invited him to come to his house in Chappaqua, N.Y. The two stayed up talking all night.

"It's not a brother-to-brother relationship," he told New York magazine last year, "but it's in that family."