Am I the only person who sees a problem with this strategy? The New York Times reported last night that Hillary Clinton and her team have realized that voters on the Left simply aren’t buying her candidacy and believe they have rational alternatives to the Clinton Restoration in Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. They have reached out to Al Gore to come aboard as a surrogate in order to stop voters from drifting to those alternatives, which is … ironic, to say the least:

The principal “super PAC” supporting Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, Priorities USA Action, has concluded from its polling and other research that the reluctance to embrace the Democratic nominee among those who intensely dislike Mr. Trump is not going away and must be confronted.

“We’ll be launching a multimillion-dollar digital campaign that talks about what’s at stake and how a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump, who is against everything these voters stand for,” said Justin Barasky, a strategist for Priorities USA.

Mrs. Clinton may also get an assist from one Democrat who has been largely quiet about the race, but can testify to the importance of resisting the third-party temptation: former Vice President Al Gore. Her staff has had conversations with aides to Mr. Gore about bringing him onto the campaign trail to emphasize the importance of supporting Mrs. Clinton if they want to make progress on combating climate change.

How does this work, exactly? We can go in reverse chronological order. First off, Gore spent years pushing climate change hysteria, even producing a documentary that Hollywood couldn’t gush over enough, while building Current TV into … not a whole lot. Rather than hold onto Current TV as a platform to fight global warming, Gore turned around and sold Current TV to Al Jazeera — the network owned and controlled by oil emirs in Qatar — for a cool $500 million of petro-bucks for its cable-system access. If anyone could serve as poster boy for selling out, it’s Al Gore.

But let’s not forget that Al Gore might have been president had he been able to convince voters in Florida not to support Green Party nominee Ralph Nader in 2000. He failed at precisely the same task that Team Hillary wants him to fill now. Perhaps they think that he could use that experience as a cautionary tale, but how effective will Gore be for Hillary when he couldn’t even make that sale for himself? His years-long resentment over having had the presidency “stolen” from him by the courts actually will play right into Donald Trump’s narrative.

There are a couple of other points to be made here, too. Gore isn’t known for scintillating wit and charm on the campaign trail, either. Don’t forget that he managed to lose his home state of Tennessee in 2000; had he carried it, Florida wouldn’t have mattered. Also, Gore spent the 2000 election running away from the Clintons and their stench of corruption. How does he explain getting in bed with them now, after the e-mail scandal and the pay-for-play arrangements between State and the Clinton Foundation? (Maybe selling out to Qatar’s oil barons has given him more moral flexibility.)

This isn’t a matter of “getting the band back together.” It’s an act of desperation.