Friends of former vice president Al Gore tell the New York Times that he "is mostly at peace these days with losing the presidency in 2000." The observation comes a dozen years after Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to President George W. Bush.

Gore will not be at the Democratic convention in September in Charlotte, the Times reports. "As for rubbing shoulders with the Washington elite, it is so unappealing that Mr. Gore has chosen to skip the Democratic Party convention in Charlotte, N.C., and will instead spend the next two weeks on his cable channel, Current TV, leading the coverage of both major-party conventions from New York. Offering color commentary in a television studio is a lifetime away from another August convention, just 12 years ago, just before the decline and fall of the House of Gore began. But for Mr. Gore, Current TV is about living in the present; the cut and thrust of politics is the past."

But though he is no longer in politics, Gore remains active:

AL GORE lives alone now, in a 10,000-square-foot colonial in Nashville, where magnolia trees shade the house and geothermal wells, buried beneath the driveway, cool and heat its 20 rooms. Some weeks Mr. Gore heads to San Francisco, where he has a luxury apartment at the St. Regis tower, to work on venture capital projects or visit his new girlfriend. And some nights he checks into the Regency in New York, where three of his children live. At 64, even after accumulating more than $100 million in wealth, Mr. Gore races like a man making up for lost time: blog posts to write, business deals to close, a global climate to save.