Vox's Ezra Klein is worried about the future of the Democratic Party. Having been "robbed" of some of its key issues—like healthcare, same-sex marriage, and "foreign policy fervor"—and unlikely to win the House any time soon, the Democratic Party, Klein suggests, is in a bit of crisis. A Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren presidency, Klein argues, wouldn't look much different from one another—and both wouldn't be radical enough. The savior just might be Al Gore amid the "existential threat" of global warming.

The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and whom no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore. Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.

After arguing that Gore—whose Oscar-winning film has been exposed for its flood of distortions, deceptions, and false prophecies—has the "combination of credibility and commitment" in the climate change field to win him praise from all sides, Klein says Gore "has proven himself the opposite of those politicians who love the game more than they care about the issues."

At one particularly telling moment, Klein underscores the potential for Obama-esque executive tyranny from Gore in the name of his pet issue:

Moreover, in an era in which very little moves through Congress, climate change is an issue where the president has real unilateral authority. The Environmental Protection Agency has the power to aggressively regulate greenhouse gas emissions — a process the Obama administration has begun, but that the next president will need to continue. Much of the crucial work on climate change requires coming to agreements with India and China — and that, too, is an arena where the president can act even if Congress is paralyzed.

Klein also insists that Gore is far more "in line" than Clinton with "Democratic Party activists" on other key issues, particularly single-payer healthcare:

Single-issue candidacies rarely go far in American politics, but then, Gore need not be a single-issue candidate. Indeed, the rest of his positions are closer in line with Democratic Party activists than, say, Clinton's. He opposed the Iraq War and endorsed single-payer health care, for instance. His Reinventing Government initiatives, mixed with his Silicon Valley contacts and experience, look pretty good for a post-Healthcare.gov era.

Despite his efforts to gin up some Gore momentum, Klein admits that there's not much hope he'll actually run as Gore hasn't shown "scintilla of interest." The other big problem is, as Klein puts it, "Gore," who can be a "wooden candidate," has a bad relationship with the press, and is too old for millennials to get enthused about. Another issue: he's made an "insane sum of money" and thus an easy target for conservatives, "who find his environmentalism to be rank hypocrisy from a jet-setting, Davos-attending mansion dweller."

Klein's adoring piece was published just a few days after Al Gore told a crowd of millennials at Austin's South by Southwest festival that it's time to financially punish climate change deniers. "We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends," said Gore, "and in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”