Does Al Gore Have a Fat Chance in '08?

LOW CENTER OF GRAVITAS Gore Al Gore supporters are hoping he didn't plow through too much celebratory cake after learning about his Oscar nomination for An Inconvenient Truth. Some have even floated the theory that if the once-kinda-sorta president shows up on the red carpet at the Kodak theatre looking large and in charge, he'll sit out '08: If he's thin, he's in.

The "Fat Gore" theory appears to have first cropped up in November on Mick LaSalle's Maximum Strength Mick blog on SFGate.com: "When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election ... If you see a chubby, happy Al Gore standing next to the producer and director, celebrating the win at the Oscars, forget it, he's not running."