Our favorite books of 2007: by John Nichols.

• Author: Nichols, John

One assumes that, before the year is done, all and sundry good citizens will have confirmed their worst fears about the abusive nature of the Bush-Cheney era by committing to memory the arguments of three exceptional books published in recent months: Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy , Progressive Editor Matt Rothschild's You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression , and Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights , by our late friend Molly Ivins and her able journalistic compatriot Lou Dubose.

Steeped in the details of the disaster that has just unfolded, voters will troop to the polls in 2008 with the purpose of undoing the damage done by a Presidency without character or compassion.

Unfortunately, the choice, as presented by our failed political system and the mainstream media that sustains it, will be a narrow one, as none of the frontrunners for the Presidency proposes anything akin to the radical change of course that will be required to get us out of the sorry state in which we find ourselves and our country.

To heal the spirit in such times, I will recommend two books that reveal more than we had previously known about men who might have been--or, more precisely, should have been--President.

The first of these is Russ Feingold, the true-blue progressive Democrat from Wisconsin who came to the precipice of campaigning for his party's Presidential nod but backed off when he determined that it was more important to devote his considerable skills to working in the current Congress to end the war, censure the President, and renew the rule of law. Author and essayist Sanford Horwitt's Feingold: A New Democratic Party is every bit as impressive as his enduring biography of...