The Daily Novel

The American people will cast their votes next November, mostly after thinking through the issues and making up their own minds. But in the meantime they will be influenced by all the spinning and the dirty tricks campaigns which are alreaady in evidence. Obama has been hit by suggestions that he is a closet Muslim. Whereas, so far as I have been able to ascertain, he is a Christian, who attends his local church, not just because it is politically sensible for a politician seeking office in the US, which substantially bigger on church attendence than the UK.

So I half expected Obama to be in his local church this Sunday, with the television cameras allowed in to witness him humbly praying. In the event he hot-tailed it down south to worship in the church of Martin Luther King, with all the world’s media in attendence. Therein he paid homage to the most significent Black leader of recent America. And pledged himself to make real the dream that King had. A hugely powerful emotive message, because King, like Jack and Bobby Kennedy was struck down by an assassin’s bullet. And the vast majority of American voters now know, that Jack and Bobby were not killed by Soviet spies, but by home grown Americans.

So the message from Obama’s tactic gets home to white Americans as well as black Americans. To the majority of white Americans, who do not buy the conspiracy theories of the American right.

Hillary Clinton realises this as well. So while Obama was at his nearly all black service, she was shaking hands with a line of black Americans. By the time she got the last one of the line in the television clip I saw she was looking a bit strained.

But she should not be under-estimated. Neither should husband Bill. Most of the world would be happier with a Clinton retro administration than a replay of George W Bush. And the Clinton family dynamic plays well with US values. Their marriage has survived all the indignities of the Monica saga. To American men, Bill is not despised because he took advantage of what he was offered. And Hillary is mostly admired by women, because at the time she was fairly frank about her feelings, although she stood by him.

So the Clinton’s have a messy marriage. But one that has endured. And that fits the experience of most Americans, who no more believe in the Hollywood myths, than we do on our side of the Atlantic.