The Root web page,  frontpages an article by Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, under the headline, ‘I am not voting for Obama because he is black…..’  The headline and sub-head at the top of the article is:

Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave. 

By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com

The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.

which I am beginning And unsurprisingly, since it comes from a doughty fighter from that band of feminists who believe that the personal is political, the first few hundred words are about Alice Walker, not Barack Obama.

Here are some of the first few paragraphs. Before you read them, remember that Alice Walker was born 79 years after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative,  Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as “Miss” when they reached the age of twelve.)  …….

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.  They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night.  She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn:  not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain.  Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming.  During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve.  Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn’t pay it to a nigger.  That before she’d pay a nigger that much money she’d milk the dairy cows herself.

Walker broke out of slavery with the help of an education at Sarah Lawrence, an elite women’s college, where she able to converse on equal terms with white women, who these days are eager to pay money to buy her books.

Having told the reader where she is coming from, she then moves on to Obama:

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better.   It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him.  Cannot see what he carries in his being.  Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black,  white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me. When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required.  Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change

America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change

America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

What I have quoted is only a small part of what Walker has to say. Click this link to read the whole thing on The Root web page, whom I must thank for the picture.

After the pre-Spring sunshine of the Easter Bank holiday the weather has turned seriously nasty down here in Lyme Bay. The wind howled around our bungalow all night, even waking me, who slept through raids by Hitler’s Luttwaffe. (Factual note: I was not under hostile fire. By the time the planes reached Wolverhampton they had unloaded nearly all their bombs. The noise came from the drone of the plane engines and the shots fired by the pom pom guns based at the air field behind our house.)

By the time we sallied down to the beach around 10 AM in drizzling rain the wind had dropped. But the waves were still battering the beach. Sweeping in, withdrawing, then coming in again to land powerful blows on the crumbling cliffs. An impressive show of strength. But although it was near high tide, the waves did not reach the line of driftwood and assorted debris on the beach, which marks the advance of the real storm just under two weeks ago, when the wind reached Gale Force 12. That night the sea flooded the car park and the hurled the debris inland as far as the footbridge over the River Char.

There was one brave surfer struggling to mount the waves. What he lacked in skill he made up for in tenacity. Time and time again he pulled himself upright and rode the crest of a big wave, only to plunge frum sight when the next wave smacked him down.

By the time we had walked back to the cafe, the sun was had broken through and it was warm enough to sit outside for coffee.

This is the life, I thought. And remembering that this blog is part of the manic depressive diary, which is intended to reveal what it is like being an MD, it occurred to me that I have not been seriously depressed since I moved here nearly eight months ago.

Forget shrinks. Forget pills.

They are puny compared with the healing powers of the sea and the shore.

It all looks very cosy. Michael Bloomberg, billionaire businessman and Mayor of New York, introducing Barack Obama, would-be President of the US of A. But in the speech that followed on the US economy Obama pledged himself to a solution, which sounds very much like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a combination of pumping money into the economy to help the victims of the US housing crisis and tougher regulations on the financial community, to reduce the risk of something the sub-prime crisis happening again.

The encounter prompted the sleuths at CNN to put out a story speculating that Bloomberg might be a candidate for for Vice-President on the Obama ticket. The Washington Post (to whom thanks for the pic above) was more sceptical. They pointed out that Bloomberg was not in favour of regulation of the business community.

But the meeting does mean something as does the warmth of the encounter. In the last few weeks both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have been wooing Bloomberg. And the least that can be said is that Bloomberg has not yet pledged his troth to either of them.

So what Bloomberg is up to is precisely what he said in his speech last February, when he declared that he definitely was not standing for the Presidency himself, but he would be studying the proposals of all the candidates before deciding who to support. He must now be relishing the result of his lonely hearts style ad. Like some nubile babe who puts her pic on the internet in her quest for a rich husband, he is being courted by three most eligible suitors.

Back in February I wrote here that, despite his announcment, he might change his mind, particularly if the Republicans were not unified behind one strong candidate. The Draft Bloomberg campaign was still hopeful then that he would stand. Just now when I checked draftbloomberg.com was off the air. So probably they have now given up on getting their man the top job.

The London Times is also floating the idea of an Obama/Bloomberg ticket. In their report of Obama’s economic speech, their chief American correspondent, Gerald Baker, noted that Obama was still being bruised by the re-circulation of his pastor’s virulent anti-semitic comments. Bloomberg on the ticket would help Obama get the Jewish vote, Baker opined.

I don’t rule out the possibility of Bloomberg taking some role on an Obama ticket, but the first priority for Obama is to get the votes and active working support of the Clinton team. That still seems a long way off.

Which brings me to the second part of my questioning headline. What is Rupert Murdoch up to? In another story in the London Times today, Baker deals with Hillary Clinton’s mistake in reporting she had landed in Bosnia in the midst of sniper fire. The Times headline, ‘Hillary Clinton; fibber in chief” accuarately reflects the tone of the article. In it Baker dredges up an old lie she told some years ago. She claimed then that her parents had named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest. In fact she was born five years before anyone had heard of Sir Edmund Hillary, apart from a small number of New Zealand mountineers.

Baker’s story is a hatchet job par excellence. And if one believes that journalists on The Times do not knowingly go against their master’s voice, then the story is a clear message from Rupert to Hillary to give up on climbing the biggest mountain of her career.

Throughout this campaign The Times has mostly reported favourably on Obama. And I don’t think that is because Murdoch thinks that Obama would be an easier candidate for the Republicans to beat. But The Times gave very high praise indeed for McCain’s views on the Iraq war on his recent visit to London. Murdoch warms to his measured hawkishness and dislikes the dove-like noises made by Obama and Hillary Clinton.

So at this stage of the game it is apparent that both these powerful businessmen are keeping their powder dry. But it is equally clear that they both think Obama might be a good thing for America in its present troubled state.

Small wonder, with friends like these, that the poor white vaters don’t warm to Obama.

The Clinton campaign upped the ante in the US Presidential campaign yesterday. According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Clinton aides attacked the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for urging the super delegates to vote for the candidate who won a majority of the pledged delegates.

The NYT tops its article with the picture above, which reminded me of one of the many paradoxes of this campaign. Polosi last year became the first ever woman to become the Speaker which was a tonic to all those who feared that the US was not ready to elect a woman to the highest office in the land. Because the majorrity who voted for her knew, that not only were they voting for a new Speaker, but they were voting for the person who would immediately become the President, if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were assassinated.

Pelosi did not urge people to vote for Obama. Since she became Speaker she has accepted the constitutional responsibilies which the job entails. So, although a Democrat, she has not used her powerful position to torpedo the legislation Bush has been introducing, much to the disappontment of many of her fellow Democrats.

 Neither has she used her position to support throw her weight behind a particular candidate for the next President. So why has she now spoken out for Obama?

Well, actually she hasn’t. If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post in full, you discover that the Clinton aides were attacking Pelosi for remarks made in an interview with ABC television news ten days ago, which did not attract much attention. Because Pelosi, in answering questions, was saying what many others have been saying that the will of the voters should not be overturned.

Assessing the will of the voters is quite a complex question, not easily dealt with in sound bites. The votes for the pledged delegates in the primaries and the causcases are showing a majority for Obama, and most insiders believe that when the final vote is counted Obama will have a majority. But whether it will be a commanding lead is still far from certain. And some of the pledged voters are able to alter their votes at a later stage.

So the reason the Clinton campaign hit at Pelosi yesterday probably had more to do with the need for them to take back the initiative after the Gallop Poll showing Obama leading and the withdrawal Hillary Clinton had to make yesterday about her claim to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996. She had to make the withdrawal because someone at CBS News had dredged up from their archives the film of the landing, which showed it to be trouble free.

Today’s Washington Post carries a story which reports that in the previous year a Congressional delegation did land there under sniper fire and that the report of that event sounded quite like Hillary’s account of her own experience. As the Post writes laconically, the event did happen, but not to Hillary.

How this kind of story plays with the US electorate is a matter for conjecture. The Washington Post does not editorialise. But my own view is that Hillary’s claim that she landed under sniper fire was the kind of lie, which in my experience every human being tells about events long ago. We remember the past imperfectly and facts of what actually happened get mixed up with feelings as well as thoughts.

It seems entirely likely that Hillary feared for her life and as the plane came into land was remembering the experience of the Congressinal delegation the year before. Even if she had not read the report, she knew the risk she was taking flying into a war torn region. So there is no doubting her courage. Her claim is now exposed as a lie. But probably not a deliberate lie. More a memory trick in recalling what for her was a moment of great stress.

Barack Obama has recovered from the blow to his presidential hopes, struck by the recycling of  of his pastor’s ‘God Damn America’ sermons, on many of the nation’s television screens. This led to him losing his lead over Hillary Clinton in the opinion polls. Last week’s Gallup poll showed Hillary with 49 per cent support compared  with only 42 per cent for him. Yesterday, the first after his statesmanlike speech, extensively reported here and elsewhere, showed he had bounced back, with 48 per cent against 48 per cent for Hillary.

Still a close race, but it means that once again Obama looks the front runner.

So the newspapers and the weather forecasters were not entirley wrong about the bank holiday. Snow fell in Colchester yesterday, according to my youngest daughter. We ventured out at lunchtime despite a stiff wind on the hills and a threatening dark black sky and even met a brief hailstorm on the road to Lyme Regis. But down the hill in the bay it was sheltered and sea was stroking the beach, not dashing over the Cobb. The only blight on the Easter Bonnet Parade, now in its fortieth year, was the few drops of rain which fell just as the Red Hatted Laides were lining up to receive their prize.

Your intrepid reporter could not find a single goose pimple on the near 200 bare legs of the Drum Majorettes. They came from all age groups, if you include the minders keeping them in line. The youngest, a girl aged about 5, who brought up the rear, was an authentic lookalike of the baby of the von Trapp family in the Sound of Music. She had the personality to go with it. So I stopped my ears, shutting out the awful music coming from the sound system on the loudspeaker van, and listened in my head to Eidelweiss, hearing instead the voices of Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and those up and coming stars playing the rest of the family.

And the sun came out. So the grandchildren spent a couple of hours playing on the beach. But as honest reporter I have to say it was not quite warm enough to tempt any swimmers into the sea.

But Arctic it wasn’t.

Today was even better. On the top of Golden Cap there was only a slight breeze. The sun was hot as summer in South West England. And the visibility was so good that I could almost count the grains of sand on Chesil Beech.

And the path up the hill was quite crowded. We were not alone in ignoring the forecasts of the chilliest Easter of the century.

HELP. As you can see I am having trouble getting my pictures from Photoshop into the blog, both with sizing and the wrap around and even with moving them once I get them there. If any user of the WordPress program who says this could give me some crisp advice I would be grateful. My email is bob@thedailynovel.com.

The pic by the way is the view from Golden Cap looking towards Chesil Beach in the distance. Taken today by my eldest daughter, Holly. There as another to come of those majorettes if I can only manage to move it in without distorting the picture.

This evening I went to the dinner table full of brotherly love for my brother-in-law. I had just discovered that his team, Watford, had drawn 1 all against Plymouth Argyle, and that, my team, Wolverhampton Wanderers had drawn 3 all against Queens Park Rangers. Both teams have been drawing a lot lately. And although they are rivals for promotion to the Premier League, the way they are playing at present makes it likely that both teams will remain in what is ludicrously called the Championship but is actually the Second Division. In the harsh world of 2008 nothing but the Premier League rates. Even the BBC, which still aspires to be a Public Service broadcaster, on a Saturday night goes straight on from what has happened in the Premier League to the scores in Scottish football.

When I was a teenage football fan, the BBC on a Saturday night gave all the scores in the three English divisions, before they got on to the Scottish results. These days to find out how the Wolves have done, I have to go to my computer, or wait for the Sunday newspapers.

Tonight I thought we can share our sorrows. But at the dinner table football soon lost out to talk about food. Because my eldest daughter, Holly, had produced a fish soup, comprising locally caught mussels and pollock. Which was much lauded by all who ate it.

Janet found the pollock better than cod. Holly said that we should not eat any cod because cod had been over-fished. This led to a discussion of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who has been fighting a campaign to get Dorset folk to demand free range chicken at the Axminster Tesco. And also to eat at his River Cottage restaurant, which according to my wife, requires you to fork out £60 a head.

At the mention of the name, Roger exploded.

 ’Can’t stand the man. Whenever he comes on the television I turn it off. So arrogant. But he knows nothing about farming.’

Roger, who reads The Times every day, told us that a lot of the so-called organic produce was a con. Which The Times has apparently demonstrated in several cases. When challenged by my daughter, Holly, he moved to talking from his own personal experience.

For most of his working life Roger looked after pigs. Daily. Until the time he had to hand them over to the man whose job it was to kill them, so we could eat our Sunday roast pork. He did not like it, and when the new technology moved to raising pigs in much the same way as battery chickens, he liked it even less. But Roger continued to work, to care for his pigs, and do his best to make their brief lives comfortable.

Roger fell foul of the ‘new farming’. The farmer complained that Roger was spending too much time making the pigs’ lives comfortable. His job was to get them to the slaughterhouse as quickly as possible.

The ferocity of Roger’s explosion surprised me. Because HFW, whom I call Fingerstall for short, does, I think, care for the animals, as well as for the environment. But, Roger, however much he regretted the move to condemning pigs to a similar life to battery chickens, was also aware, that most human beings could not, and cannot, afford free range and organic produce. Because, as an agricultural labourer he was earning about the same as a teenage shop assistant at Tesco.

And I can well understand that when Fingerstall comes on the box, whatever he says will jar with anyone who has not had an Etonian education, or been to one of the other top drawer British private schools, like Harrow or Winchester. The accent makes them think, this bloke as arrogant.

It is not the content, it is the music. They were educated to rule the world. And, my God, it shows in the way they speak. Since I have met Fingerstall, I don’t think he is really like that. I think he cares for the animals. And that he cares for the human beings, whose well-being would be improved if they ate organic.

But the reality  of the Dorset, where mention of Fingerstall, brings most dinner tables to the verge of fisticuffs, is that only a minority of the population can afford the luxury of not shopping at Tesco. Many of the mostly well-to-do middle class incomers, who have come here because of the awe-inspiring scenery and the healthy sea air, are all for him.

The battles at the dinner tables are probably quite as fierce at the dinner tables of the long-time residents, when those residents who have gone away to university and come back to tell their parents they should change their ways.

Fingerstall is aware of the problem. His much publicised recent BBC series of television programmes, was an effort to get the Axminster Tesco supermarket to provide free range at a price the less well off can afford. And he has made some sort of difference, so that Tesco store at Axminster, now apologgises to customers if they do not have free range chicken available today.

But Fingerstall is not perfect. According to my daughter, who was stoutly defending him tonight, against the on-slaught from my brother-in-law. Too many of his inner team managing his various enterprises down here in deepest Dorset, are people he has brought from London

Never let your life be governed by what you read in the newspapers, particularly if it is about the weather. We were warned in print and on the television news that we were in for an Arctic bank holiday. Today, for the sceond day running, the sun has been shining in Lyme Bay. True, there was a brief snow flurry on the coast road from Bridport. And we ate lunch to a wind symphony at high volume, and watched the ferns waving vigorously in the garden.

But this afternoon, anoraked, scarved and ear muffed, we sallied forth the beach, The cafe was doing a roaring trade from the custom of those like us, who had not stayed in to watch the telly. There was plenty of debris around produced by Monday’s storm, which flooded the car park. But this afternoon most of the beach was sheltered from the wind. The waves were lapping gently over the pebbles, not dashing against the rocks. And it was warm enough to sit and stare for ten minutes or so.

As I write this just before 6 PM, the sun is still shining. Portland Bill is clearly visible and the clouds in the sky are white and fluffy and lit by the evening sun.

Last night it was cold. But the family was so moved by the full moon, which made the ocean look like a pool of very light grey lead from our vantage point up the hill, that they went down to the beach after dinner. I missed out, partly because I was a bit tired, and partly because someone has to do the baby sitting.

There are still two days to go. So there is still time for the forecasters to be half right. But don’t let them put you off if you are planning a day out. And even if it does turn seriously colder, I doubt that you or me are in danger of getting frostbite.

Yesterday must have been about the most depressing Good Friday ever in the life of Barack Obama. One opinion poll showed that voters in the last big state, Pennsylvania, which votes on 22 April was now showing Hillary Clinton at 56 per cent and Obama at 30 per cent. Another shawe that even in North Carolina, which Obama was expected to win comfortably, Hillary has edged ahead with 43 per cent of the votes compared to Obama’s 42 per cent.

This is a huge switch around. A week ago Obama looked the front runner likely to win the Democratic nomination and the Presidency. But in the last few days Obama has been crucified because of his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, whose inflammory sermons had been quoted in the all the media, including hundreds of web sites.

This despite the fact that Obama made a speech on Tuesday is one of the bravest I have seen by any US Presidential candidate. In that speech he deplored Wright’s rabble rousing extremism and made it crystal clear how far away that was from his own views. But he diid not pour shit on his old spiritual adviser. Obama did what Christians are supposed to do. He attacked the sin not the sinner. And he pointed out that this sometimes ranting rabble rouser, had many good points. And that he had spent his life caring for people who needed caring for.

Not only that he used this speech to pull together the essentials of his platform. He explained to the voters what he intended to when he got into power. And why.

That speech will lose him some votes. Because he makes it clear that he is not only not a Wright thinker he is not a right thinker. In American terms he is leftish. Translated into British politics that puts him close to the Liberal Demcrats, to people like David Cameron and Ted Heath from the British Conservatives. He is a long way from Clement Attlee, but his thinking has many similarities to that of Hugh Gaitskill and John Smith. Both of whom, if they had not died so tragically young, would have made a much better job at making Labour electable than Tony Blair.

The importance and quality of that speech was immediately recognised by the New York Times (and this blog). Somewhat belatedy The Guardian has also recognised its importance. It is the first leader in this morning’s paper.

It has a ludicrous headline (Language lessons), but the first paragraph gets to the essence of it.

Barack Obama has already established himself as an extraordinary politician. But his speech on Tuesday may have been the most important of the US presidential campaign, and not only for Americans. This is a large claim for a speech made as the Iraq war enters its sixth year and the world financial system teeters on the edge….But race remains the scar across the face of America; the politics of difference existed long before and will exist long after these crises have been resolved.

Since I wrote my previous blog on Obama’ speech, the threat of a serious recession in the US and in Britain has become even clearer with the examination of the collapse of the New York investment bank, Bear Stearns. Most of the analysis puts the blame full square on the banks, for encouraging many to buy houses they could not afford, based on assumptions that the boom would go on forever. The banks fuelled the boom by lending money to each other.

All the banks were doing some of what caused the collapse of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. And now the bubble has been pricked they are covering their losses, partly by keeping mortgage rates high, even though the central banks have cut interest rates.

Worse than that, though the banks are now mostly doing their best to repair the damage, some big speculators have been adding to the chaos. They drove down the share price of a much bigger bank, HBoS (which owns the Bank of Scotland and the Halifax Building Society), fuelling fears that it was also in danger of collapse.

Obama is not anti-capitalism and he is not against big business but he is critical of the excesses of the financial system. He is a Democrat in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And what most of the analysts  say about our present crisis is that it is the result of the mad drive for deregualtion launched by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America. The challenge, then and now, is how to find ways of regulating the private sector without stifulling initiave and enterprise.

Obama makes it clear that he wants to have a go at this. And he wants to have ago at doing something about what I think is the major scar on American consumer capitalism and American democracy. While the rich have got richer the poor have got poorer. And the poor mostly don’t vote, although they have the right to. A disportionate number of the American poor are non-white, but there are also plenty of poor whites, particularly in the old industrial heartlands.

Americans now buy Toyotas instead of Fords. And the big US motor companies make most of the car abroad. So the skilled workers have no-one who wants to use their skills. (Norman Tebbitt, would no doubt have told them to get on their bikes and go to Malaysisa.)

As the question of whether Obama will rise again. You won’t find the answer by going to church tomorrow.

The answer will be delivered by the US electorate next November. Will more of the listen to his speeches and read them in full? Or will they be swayed by the sound bites delivered by the mass media?

That will be the real test for US democracy.