Gore Could Give Dems a Run for Their Money

While Gore has not been raising funds for a presidential bid, others have been raising money for him. An all-volunteer group boasting tens of thousands of activists is waging a grass-roots campaign to raise money online for him at sites like AlGore.org. There, the senior counselor for Gore's 2000 campaign, David Moorehouse, is quoted saying, "Gore can wait longer than other candidates, because he can raise money on the Internet. ... Should he decide to run, he can raise $15 million in two days."

Personal Financial Ties

While he's not a candidate, Gore has been raising money for the Alliance for Climate Protection, a charitable organization based in that Silicon Valley that he chairs.

The group promotes civic action on global warming, an issue that Gore forced into the national discourse with his Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He also wrote a book by that title, and more recently, he published a book called The Assault on Reason, an indictment of the Bush administration's alleged rejection of reason in favor of "the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism and blind faith." He also founded an independent media start-up called Current TV.

The current details of his personal finances are not available to the public, but Gore has presumably raised a fortune for himself through these efforts as well as his various causes. He's also chairman of Generation Investment Management LLP, a London-based asset management firm that makes investments focusing on "sustainability factors, including social and environmental responsibility and corporate governance."