As the toughest and longest battle for the most powerful job in the world - the US Presidency - draws to the close, neither the United States nor the world is any wiser as to who will top the polls. Despite the colossal setbacks pummelling the current Republican administration, polls suggest that their party's successor, Senator John McCain, has as much a chance of success as the squeaky clean Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama.

In my humble, non-American opinion, not since John F. Kennedy have the American people seen two leaders who have been truer to the spirit of the nation as envisaged by its forefathers. Sadly the chance to elect one was squandered in 2000 when Al Gore lost his bid for the Presidency, and the fate of the other remains to be seen. I speak here of Barack Obama.

You may accuse me here of being an unashamed Democrat, but as a Pakistani I refuse to take on that mantle. For me Al Gore's and Obama's appeal lies in their message and their rare ability to convey their thoughts lucidly on paper. The latter is an aptitude rarely possessed by the average politician. Obama's The Audacity of Hope and Al Gore's The Assault on Reason do a phenomenal job of assessing and addressing the state of their once-great nation in the immediate run up to this year's US presidential election. Both were number 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List - and this week, these two are being reviewed.

My only disappointment with Obama's experience is the lack thereof in the field of foreign relations. He still holds steadfast to the United States right to act unilaterally, but with the usual nods to multilateralism and the UN that most Democrats espouse. His opinions are tempered however due to his having grown up in Indonesia, and seen first-hand the growing distrust towards US foreign policy but there are no radical ideas or solutions that he is able to offer up for the challenges currently faced world over.
The Audacity of Hope is as good a window you will find into the soul of Barack Obama. It is incredibly well written and inspired piece of non-fiction. Obama comes across as a decent and intelligent human being with a great deal of empathy for his fellow citizens. His optimism stems from his faith in his nation and its institutions. Despite the magnitude of the problems facing him, should he be elected President of the United States, one can't help but believe that he will succeed in bringing about change.

The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-making by Al Gore
There's a passage in The Audacity of Hope about how failure taints a politician. Obama describes a meeting with a corporate executive who had been a big sponsor of Al Gore during the presidential elections in 2000. The executive spoke of how he would take Al Gore's calls at any time of the day and rearrange his busy schedule whenever he wanted to meet. "But suddenly, after the elections, when he walked in, I couldn't help feeling that the meeting was a chore... he was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money."

Al Gore doesn't know when to quit. Despite the odds stacked against him following his defeat in the American presidential elections of 2000, Gore went on to win the Noble Peace Prize in 2007 for his efforts in raising awareness of climate change. Clearly, for an enigmatic personality such as Gore's, slipping into obscurity like John Kerry and scores of other Presidential hopefuls before him was simply not an option.
After tirelessly travelling the globe to warn of the impending but 'Inconvenient Truth' the world faces today in the form of global warming, Al Gore is far less forgiving towards the American people than Obama and more likely to shake them into action with a few harsh words.

The Assault on Reason is written by a very angry man who has seen 8 years of the Bush administration relentlessly tear away at the fabric of the American nation. Gore has seen every manner of political device employed. From distraction to fear and religious dogma, Americans have been set against each other to make the assault on their individual freedoms all the more easier. Everything has been sacrificed at the altar of neo-conservatism: the environment has been compromised for greed, foreign relations has been destroyed in pursuit of a hegemonic world order and the future of the American nation has been put in peril to ensure prosperity for a few favoured individuals.

Al Gore's blistering account places him closer in proximity to Noam Chomsky then Barack Obama. He is the rebuking father, the ignored leader of a nation who has earned more credibility than presidents who have had the opportunity to serve it.

Al Gore has lost a great deal of faith in the American electorate and if his diagnosis of the current malaise is correct, we're unlikely to see a Democratic president elected to the office of President before the decade is out. However, with such a close race, it is hard to predict what may happen and what surprises are thrown into the mix (e.g. Sarah Palin, McCain's choice of Vice President) between now and November!