The Story of Power

Barack Obama has a good Al Gore story. Sometime after the 2000 election, Obama called on a corporate executive in a big office with a terrific view of midtown Manhattan. The businessman had been an ardent Gore supporter, and the former vice president had recently asked him to consider investing in a startup television venture. "It was strange," the executive told Obama. "Here he was, a former vice president, a man who had just a few months earlier been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn't help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn't Al Gore, former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on." Obama, recounting the anecdote in "The Audacity of Hope," notes: "A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall." And, in Gore's case, the climb back up the cliff, to a Nobel Peace Prize and global eminence. Obama, who is now arguably the most powerful man in the world, understands that power is a fluid thing, and has been since the first caveman threw a rock at another caveman.

TOP 50 MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD IN 2008
1: Barack Obama
2: Hu Jintao
3: Nicolas Sarkozy
4-5-6: Economic Triumvirate
7: Gordon Brown
8: Angela Merkel
9: Vladimir Putin
10: Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud
11: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
12: Kim Jong Il
13-14: The Clintons
15: Timothy Geithner
16: Gen. David Petraeus
17: Sonia Gandhi
18: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
19: Warren Buffett
20: Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani
21: Nuri al-Maliki
22-23: The Philanthropists
24: Nancy Pelosi
25: Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
26: Mike Duke
27: Rahm Emanuel
28: Eric Schmidt
29: Jamie Dimon
30-31: Friends of Barack
32: Dominique Strauss-Kahn
33: Rex Tillerson
34: Steve Jobs
35: John Lasseter
36: Michael Bloomberg
37: Pope Benedict XVI
38: Katsuaki Watanabe
39: Rupert Murdoch
40: Jeff Bezos
41: Shahrukh Khan
42: Osama bin Laden
43: Hassan Nasrallah
44: Dr. Margaret Chan
45: Carlos Slim Helú
46: The Dalai Lama
47: Oprah Winfrey
48: Amr Khaled
49: E. A. Adeboye
50: Jim Rogers


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