Former U.S. Senator and Vice President Al Gore has been back in the news as of late with the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," his feature film documentary on the earth's global warming crisis. The movie has been well received by the film festival circuit and the general public, and places Gore back in the spotlight as a spokesperson for the environment and other liberal-leaning issues.

That's a natural role for Gore, who is identified by the majority of respondents of a recent Rasmussen Reports survey as liberal. Twenty-one percent (21%) say he's a moderate and 12% call him conservative.

Among Republican voters, the overwhelming majority (74%) label Gore as liberal. Eleven percent (11%) say he's moderate and 9% say he's conservative. Ratings are slightly more evenly distributed among Democratic voters. Forty percent (40%) rate Gore as liberal, 30% moderate and 15% conservative.

Fifty percent (50%) of men under age 40 rate him as liberal; that number jumps to 61% for men over 40. Women are more balanced in their liberal assessment. Fifty-two percent (52%) of women under 40 call him liberal, as do 51% of women over 40.

Gore's ideological stance places him 60 points to the left of the American political center, five points beyond New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who usually represents the liberal extreme.

The political center is calculated by subtracting the number of liberals from the number of conservatives among the general public (35% conservative, 18% liberal for a net +17). For Gore, 12% conservative minus 55% liberal equals a net minus 43. The minus reading for Gore is 60 points away from the plus 17 reading for the general public.

Though he insists he does not intend to seek his party's nomination for the 2008 presidential election, several grassroots Web sites are popping up on the Internet encouraging the former second-in-command to reconsider. Perhaps the success of "An Inconvenient Truth" will lead him to devote his full-time energies to tackling the entertainment world; he's also president of Current TV, the first 24-hour television network based around viewer-generated content.

Crosstabs available for Premium Members only.