America Letter:In New York this week, Al Gore was answering the question he is asked everywhere these days and, as usual, he was leaving his questioners less than satisfied.
"Some people here have heard me answer this question enough times that I worry about being repetitious," he said.
"It's true that I haven't completely ruled it out, I don't think it's necessary to do that. I don't expect to run, so I don't know how to answer that question. Maybe at some point in the future I will have some interest in doing that again. But I don't feel that right now."
Speculation about Gore's presidential ambitions received a boost this week with the publication of his new book The Assault on Reason, a powerful attack on George Bush's presidency and on the media culture in the United States.
The former vice-president's Oscar-winning documentary on climate change An Inconvenient Truth has already given him a higher profile than most declared candidates for the presidency.
Among Democrats, he polls in third place - behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama but ahead of John Edwards - and his book tour is likely to push his popularity further upwards. Gore is also nominated for a Nobel peace prize, which will be awarded late this year - just in time for a late entry into the primary race, if he is so inclined.
If it is a campaign book, however, The Assault on Reason is highly unusual in its erudition - the German philosopher Juergen Habermas makes a number of appearances - and in its uncompromising tone. Gore's analysis of Bush's rejection of "reality-based politics" and the relationship between the president's faith and his political beliefs is refreshingly cool but nonetheless devastating.
"The truth about this particular brand of faith-based politics is that President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged . . . Make no mistake: It is the president's reactionary ideology, not his religious faith, that is the source of his troubling inflexibility. Whatever his religious views, President Bush has such an absolute certainty in the validity of his rigid right-wing ideology that he does not feel the same desire that many of us would in gathering facts relevant to the questions at hand," he writes.
Although the book documents in embarrassing detail the most glaring failures of the Bush administration, Gore is more interested in the political climate that allowed the president to effect such an apparently radical change in the US outlook.
He suggests that, because most Americans receive their news from television, that medium's preoccupation with celebrity and sensation has left the public uninformed and unable to participate properly in the democratic life of the nation.
Gore dismisses the print media as increasingly irrelevant but sees hope in the interactivity of the internet, although he worries about data that shows that many people who are online are watching television at the same time.
Some of Gore's criticism of the media's role in the run-up to the Iraq war echoes that of veteran journalist Bill Moyers in Buying the War, a PBS documentary broadcast last month.
Moyers was merciless in exposing the craven approach TV executives took towards the administration after 9/11 but he also documented the key role newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post played in setting the agenda for others.
The only heroes to emerge from Moyers' film were John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers, who used old-fashioned journalistic methods to question the administration's claims before the war. Although Knight Ridder papers - mostly city papers throughout the US - had more readers than the national dailies, they were not part of the "national conversation" in Washington and their reporting was mostly ignored.
Gore believes that the key to revitalising America's democracy lies in connecting citizens to a public forum through the internet but Moyers showed that traditional journalism can still find its way to the truth - even if it cannot persuade everyone to listen.
