(admittedly, more lighthearted)
The Columbia engagement, entered into quickly--Gore started teaching in February, weeks after the inauguration--suggests that he was not quite thinking things through. By most accounts, the classes themselves went well. Gore was well-prepared, he had real ideas he wanted to impart and he brought in an array of marquee names. He got Alan Greenspan to talk about coverage of the economy, David Letterman to talk about political humor, Rupert Murdoch to talk about ownership of the media. There was a legendary moment during the Greenspan class when Gore was getting very wonky, very Gorian, going on about what an economic recovery might look like, sketching graphs, saying that in one version it might look like an L, and, in another, like a U. Then he said something to the effect of: If it gets really chaotic, it would look like this. He sketched a W. Then, hard as this is to imagine, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan celebrated the joke with a high-five.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50875-2002Nov13_3.html