With all the recent talk on the political future of Al "Comeback" Gore, it was inevitable that comparisons would be made between the man some want to run for US president in 2008 and the man who's president now.
Mr Gore has alluded to these himself, making a mock presidential speech on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago in which he said his success in taking on climate change meant glaciers were "now on the attack" and had captured parts of the northern US.
Yes, it's another bout of Bush v Gore - and now pundits are getting involved, pitting Mr Bush's low approval ratings against praise for Mr Gore's film on global warming (and, we hope, his forthcoming appearance at the Guardian Hay Festival).
The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby argues that the record of George Bush and the Republicans in congress has created "a hunger for a leader with diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out basic facts".
Margaret Carlson, a writer for Bloomberg, questions whether the concept of likeability - which candidate voters would like to go to a barbecue with - is such "a wise basis for choosing a president".
The Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum comments: "Six years too late, but whatever".
There is a sort of dramatic balance here too. A series of recent polls have shown the proportions of US voters who have a favourable impression of their president (in other words, those who like him) has dropped by one-third since the weeks after the 2004 election.
Among the best recent writing on Mr Gore is an engaging New York Magazine interview and article, which suggests criticism of Mr Bush, and fear among some Democrats of a Hillary Clinton run for the White House, have put the spotlight on Mr Gore, whose film shows him - in contrast to the 2000 presidential campaign - as "passionate, funny, full of conviction [and] free of contrivance".
Writer John Heilemann notes that these qualities are not only to be found in Mr Gore's screen appearance.
Eleven years ago, I wrote a story about Gore in which I remarked that "what any sensible person does in anticipation of a sustained piece of oratory by Al Gore" is "order another cup of coffee - black." So I can't help but laugh when Gore arrives for the first of our conversations carrying a dainty white cup, walks silently over, waiterlike, and intones, "I understand, sir, you take it black."
The image of Mr Gore as wooden, humourless and the kind of person to claim to have invented the internet was always a little unfair.
But whether he runs in 2008 or not, the fact that both the man and his film are being well-received marks an important comeback.
It was not always this way. A New Yorker profile and interview from 2004, around the early-to-mid point of his rehabilitation, documents his well-honed line in self-depreciation ("Hello. I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States") but also that in the months after his 2000 defeat he "seemed to let himself go, dropping out of sight [...] He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap tugged down low."
