“ What if” history is usually no more than a parlour game, the domain of historical novelists or historians unhappy with the facts. But the might-have-been presidency of Al Gore is different, because it so very nearly was, and because it may yet be.

Two years ago America was still lost in a nightmare blizzard of chad, which finally ended when George W. Bush won the presidency by 538 votes in Florida and a single vote in the Supreme Court. Gore assembled more votes than any Democratic presidential candidate in history, more than any Republican bar Ronald Reagan, and more than his opponent. Gore himself still does not talk about “losing” the election, but rather “conceding” it. To his more ardent supporters, he is the rightful President.

“You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category,” Gore has been heard to remark.

After two years as a semi-recluse, Gore has now shaved off his beard and re-emerged. This month he and Tipper toured the major monuments of the US media, from Barbara Walters to Larry King, nominally to promote their new books about The American Family, in reality to test his comeback potential. At the same time he has laid into his once and perhaps future rival with rather more venom and energy than he ever displayed on the campaign trail.

Gore is positioning himself for another shot at the presidency, and though he says he will make a decision on whether to run in January, his language and interview schedule suggest a campaign that has already begun. It seems reasonable to wonder, then, what America and the world would be like today if 270 Floridians had voted the other way, and President Gore was in the White House.

Two things seem certain: the West would be even more deeply involved in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein would be sleeping better at night.

Gore argues that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda represent a significantly greater threat than Saddam and his arsenal. Bush’s decision to shift attention to Iraq is, he says, an “historic mistake”. Immediately after September 11, the former Vice-President was strongly supportive of Bush’s war on terrorism. “I think he really came into his own as President,” he declared of his former rival. But if he were President, Gore now insists, the focus would still be firmly on al-Qaeda and the terrorist threat, and he has made Afghanistan, now one of the key fault-lines between Right and Left in the US, his key pre-campaign issue. “The warlords are back in control, the Taleban is back in and, for a variety of reasons, al-Qaeda is back at full strength and Osama is back making his threats against the US.”

Gore has thus positioned himself to take maximum political advantage if Afghanistan falls apart again, if there is another terrorist attack, or if the looming conflict with Iraq goes awry.

The other plank of Gore’s shadow presidency is a mantra of economic and environmental doom. “The country is in dramatically worse shape,” he insists. “The country is headed in the wrong direction economically, environmentally, in our healthcare policy and in our foreign policy.”

Had Gore been defeated more convincingly, his re-emergence as “the President you could have had” would be dismissed as sour grapes, a dish the US electorate particularly dislikes. But the very narrowness of the result, the lingering sense that he won and lost simultaneously, gives Gore a latitude that a more straightforward loser would never have.

While playing on his “emotional mandate” as the third category candidate, Gore has been careful to indicate that a 2004 bid would be very different from the last: less cautious, more personal, and further to the left, for new Gore is much more liberal than the one almost elected in 2000.

Gore was one of the few Democrats to vote for the first President Bush’s war with Iraq, but strongly opposes that of his son; he has embraced a plan to finance US healthcare through taxes that is far more radical than anything even Hillary Clinton dreamt up, disastrously, in 1994. Gore has also hinted that he may choose Mrs Clinton as a running-mate.

This retooled Gore presents a major conundrum for the Democratic Party. Many Democrats feel that his performance in 2000 was as chunkily wooden as the Ark but much less buoyant, that he had his chance and fluffed it. Almost half the members of the Democratic National Committee would prefer he did not run again. But polls show that among the rank and file of the party, still smarting from the Florida recount debacle, he has five times the support of any other potential Democratic candidate. Gore has re-emerged at a time when his party is in disarray, badly wounded from a defeat in the mid-term elections; that defeat cannot not be laid at his door.

The polls say that if Bush and Gore faced off today, the Democrat would be crushed. But as the Bush dynasty knows only too painfully, an earlier George Bush fought a successful war halfway through his first term and emerged on a wave of popularity, only to crash when the electorate switched its attention to an ailing economy.

Gore would not have the advantage of incumbency this time around, and yet because of the anomalous way he was not elected, he has a residual political purchase that is unique, and incalculable. Gore is said to have been changed by his experience of defeat, just as Bush has certainly grown in the office he won by the skin of his teeth.

A George Bush-Al Gore contest would be the mother of all grudge matches, an extraordinary clash between the man who is President in the White House, and the man who is President in his own mind.

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