Al Gore's recent appearance on Capitol Hill marked his dominance in Washington's debate about the science of global warming. It also raised a supremely important question about the state of political science in the US. Given the pain inflicted on the world by George Bush's faith-based presidency, are American voters ready for a knowledge-based presidency?
It's a question worth exploring in advance of the 2008 election, because Gore and several other prospective presidential candidates represent a re-appearance on the US campaign scene of an endangered breed - elected officials who have used their time in office to become expert in some aspect of domestic government or foreign relations.
Gore stands in a long line of Congressional figures who came to Washington intent on mastering one or more essential issues. His range was unusually broad - the environment, energy, communications technology and nuclear arms control.
As the Bush presidency winds down, one can feel the electorate holding its breath, as if to reassure itself it can will the centre into holding. In the political press, the opposition, and his own party, Bush's critics are restraining themselves in the belief that admitting how dangerous this man really is will diminish the nation's chances of safely running down the clock until Inauguration Day 2009.
American politics has been building up to Bush since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. He was part of a generation of forceful "conviction politicians" (Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mikhail Gorbachev in the former Soviet empire) that gave US voters an exaggerated reverence for leaders with strong beliefs. Reagan did value beliefs over facts, but luckily his strategic beliefs meshed almost perfectly with a moment of opportunity to remake cold war geopolitics.
Bill Clinton's noble effort to reform healthcare was knowledge-based, but its political collapse gave learning a bad name with half of the electorate, just as the country was seized with one of the religious manias that sweep America once or twice in every century. Thus was the stage set for the long night of Bush and his rigid belief in petroleum and prayer. US foreign policy became wars-for-oil, and its fiscal and environmental policy has been - to use the blunt and simple terms preferred by this White House - about preserving at all costs the wealth of Texans and Saudis.
What are the signs that America's disenchantment with knowledge and elected officials who possess it may be ending? Encouragingly, there are prospective political candidates in both parties who, whatever their individual flaws, have used their careers to acquire a body of knowledge about governance.
As a matter of courtesy, let's consider Gore first. Of all the American politicians I met during a long journalistic career, I believe Gore and Richard Nixon knew the most about all aspects of government and politics. (Knowledge, alas, can be morally neutral.) My bottom line on Gore is that he would be a competent president who fully grasped the choices before him. Will he run in 2008 if there's an opening? Remember what his father, the late senator Albert Gore, said when Gore went on the Democratic ticket in 2002: "He was raised for it."
What is striking about this presidential cycle is that for the first time in a long time, there are a number of plausible candidates in both parties who seem, at a minimum, informed enough for the top job. Certainly Hillary Clinton fits that description. She is a meticulous student of government who has used the Senate as a graduate school. On the Democratic side, one sees a similar seriousness of purpose in John Edwards and Barack Obama, although many Americans argue that the former is too liberal and the latter too young to be competitive. Such dismissals are as blinkered as the view that Clinton is too brittle.
Edwards feels a sympathy for the poor and the sick that hearkens back to Franklin Roosevelt, and in these stingy times that makes him a figure of respect. Although a newcomer, Obama has a gift for igniting a generous idealism among the young. Such is the promise of his future that a Gore-Obama dream ticket has emerged as a significant threat to Clinton's frontrunner status.
On the Republican side, John McCain and Chuck Hagel have used their Senate terms to educate themselves about national security issues. Neither of them would have stood by while his vice president and defence secretary ran amok in Iraq. Despite his personal idiosyncrasies, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is a seasoned executive, having run and to some extent reformed New York's City Hall. Though ideologically shifty, Mitt Romney crafted a successful financial career that did not depend entirely on his father's money, patronage and connections.
In regard to independent success and executive preparation, the talk of New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, as a presidential candidate is reasonable. His financial news company routed two power houses, Reuters and Dow Jones. His handling of New York's police and school system bespeak skill at managing encrusted bureaucracies. Like Giuliani, he thrives on running - or battling - large systems.
I'm not saying I would vote for all these candidates or that they are uniformly talented or even equal in their intelligence and preparation. But they do reach a threshold of competence and preparation that Bush did not, despite his family and educational credentials. His late and simplistic religious conversion, for example, has been a much stronger force in his presidency than his degrees from Yale and Harvard.
The vagaries of American politics and the unpredicted pressures of the presidency chasten one's optimism. But it is worth remembering that our most naturally gifted president, Abraham Lincoln, emerged after the horrid term of James Buchanan set the stage for the civil war. I am reliably informed that no less a presidential scholar than the late Arthur Schlesinger had tipped Bush as a challenger for Buchanan in the running for worst president ever.
None of us can say with certainty that Bush is simply a dullard, although that explains his regime of goofy tax cuts, corporate welfare and needless invasions. But we cannot deny what is self-evident from the past six years. We've given war a chance. Now, when it seems possible that one or both parties could allow it, let's give knowledge a chance.
· Howell Raines is a former editor of the New York Times and author of The One That Got Away