The big Al Gore profile in New York magazine, which touts him as a 2008 candidate, features this blind quote which perfectly summarizes the state of play in the party right now:

[T]he Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s march to her party’s nomination. “Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences,” observes a senior party player. “One: ‘She is the presumptive front-runner.’ Two: ‘I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God’s sake!’ And three: ‘If she’s our nominee, we’re going to get killed.’ It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it.”

The second sentence is the key. If party elites are too scared to coordinate against Hillary, she will probably win the nomination. That’s the lesson of research on the modern primary process being done by a team out of UCLA (PDF).

For all of Gore’s weaknesses, which center on the media’s hatred of him, I agree with the GOP strategist quoted in the article, who says “Gore has liabilities of his own,” but “there’s just no question that hers are much deeper than his.”

Still, both Gore and Clinton have terrible favorability profiles even after years of positive press since 2000. Fox News puts Clinton at 50 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable and Gore at 41 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable. Those are awful numbers for a presidential race because it is much harder to move someone with an unfavorable opinion into the other column than to shape the perceptions of undecided voters. For those who missed it, here’s my take on that problem:

Negative stereotypes of Hillary have deep roots, and many voters are likely to revert to them once she comes under serious attack. I worked for a Nevada Senate candidate in 2000 (Ed Bernstein) who had similar image problems to Hillary. He was well-known to most Nevadans and had a highly defined, polarizing personality. Over the course of the campaign, we built up his favorable/unfavorable ratings from 21/33 in late 1999 to 44/36 in Sept. 2000, and pulled within four points of our opponent in a DSCC poll. But when the Republicans unloaded a million dollars in negative ads on us, all that went out the window. Voters snapped back to their initial perceptions of Bernstein, his unfavorables spiked over 50 percent, the DSCC dropped us, and the race was over. Hillary is a better politician than Bernstein, but I think the dynamics are likely to be similar. As I’ve said before, a bad economy could put her over the top, but the combination of a polarizing persona and a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.