WASHINGTON — The beard is magnifique. So Continental, so Pepe Le Pew.

In all those pictures from Europe, the newly hirsute Al Gore, looking like Orson Welles,
strolls contentedly after a repast in Rome with Tipper.

He has a sly, freshly liberated expression that you usually see only on guys of 18, when they're finally
old enough to escape from their parents, principals and guidance counselors, go off on a trek to Europe
and grow a goofy-looking beard.

It took Prince Albert, who has to choreograph spontaneity, decades to break away — to escape
from his alpha-male coach, media mercenaries and overshadowing political sibling, go off on a trek
to Europe and grow a goofy-looking beard.

With his Hemingway growth and Heineken girth, all Mr. Gore needs is a pack of Gitanes and an
earth-tone beret. It is très formidable that Al can be so insouciant, playing the romantic, carefree
expatriate when he is really the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

All the fervid speculation last week about whether Mr. Gore would run again in 2004 — despite Tipper's
resistance — was piffle.

Of course, Al is in the ring. The way he sees it, he isn't starting all over. He is running for re-election — against a
man he has already defeated. He just needs to evict the Occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania, the Scalia squatter.
After all, W. is never there anyway. And even when he's there, he's not there.

Mr. Gore has been playing hard to get, like George Washington or a Rules girl, waiting for the clamor of his
party and his public. It is likely to be an interminable wait.

Even though he may have technically won, most Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, the party
chairman, and a pack of bitter fund-raisers, still rate him a loser. He was never surrounded, as Reagan and W.
were, by rabid loyalists. And one top Gore campaign aide confessed recently that there was not a single day
during the race when he thought Al would win.

After a lifetime in politics and eight years in the West Wing, the vice president spent the campaign trying to find
himself and fine-tune his wardrobe's palette.

He could never figure out how to capitalize on a popular, if flawed, president, chafing to campaign. And he
isolated himself, relying on the advice of his wife and daughter as he lobbied the elite media clique.

At W.'s inauguration, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore walked down the stairs, Bill stopped at James Baker's row.
"You were good in Florida, man, damn good," Elvis told the Velvet Hammer. Gesturing toward Mr. Gore, he
went on: "But if this [epithet] would've listened to me and put me out on the trail, you'd of never had the chance
to be good."

Does Mr. Gore really think that all the Ken dolls — John Edwards, Evan Bayh, John Kerry — much less his
eager ex-protégé, Joe Lieberman, will simply step aside and say, "Oh, O.K., Al, you go again"? Does he think
he'll get a green light from Tom Daschle, the clever, potent Senate majority leader who de-pom-pommed
Mississippi cheerleader Trent Lott?

Democrats are exasperated all over again by the plodding, self-conscious way Mr. Gore is backing into his
re-emergence by hosting a political academy for recent college graduates in Tennessee (the home state he
couldn't carry). His speech is not open to the press. "It is just like Gore," sighs a Democratic official, "to try not
to look political when what he is doing is so obvious."

He's trying to act as if he has a machine, but it's a chimera. What are his passions, except getting what he feels
he earned by toiling in the High Chair King's court?

As W. and Uncle Dick went about strip-mining the nation, allowing arsenic in the water and turning Alaska into
a gas station, Democrats assumed Mr. Gore would lead the opposition. He was the champion of Kyoto and
author of a chicken-little polemic warning of "an ecological Kristallnacht" and "wasteland" that looks mild
compared to the toxic dreams of the Houston Oilers.

But he was too busy licking his wounds and calculating his comeback to respond when the Earth really was
In the Balance. He was too caught up in an image of himself as a bearded, buff Russell Crowe, standing in the
Coliseum, listening to the mob scream his name: Maximus, Maximus.

Poor Al.
He is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and yet he never will be.