The Daily Novel

 With Hilary, who is now my wife, and was then working with me as a researcher, we allowed ourselves a brief holiday in Saratoga, not much more than a weekend. We thought of Adelaide’s Lament in Guys and Dolls:

 When they get on that train to Niagara
And she can hear church bells chime
The compartment is air conditioned
And the moon sublime
Then they get off at Saratoga for the fourteenth time!
A person can develop la grippe,

Then we settled down, in the old Times Newspapers of Great Britain offices on the corner of 42nd Street and Third Avenue, to the hardest work of a lifetime.

The result was a book, published as An American Melodrama, that changed my life. It made a lot of money, though not for me. I was working on the staff of the Sunday Times, and the paper owned the rights and took the profits. But ever since I have been hired by publishers in New York to write a string of books about American history and politics. But the election also changed life for 300 million Americans too.

 We were in our early 30s then, and capable of working in a way that gives me nightmares even to remember. We had to get the book out before Teddy White, the reigning champion for election books, did. We had an extra reason for beating him. White came up to me at a friend’s house and said, unprovoked, “So you are one of the three wise monkeys who think if you type enough you write Shakespeare?”

We typed, all right. I and my two co-authors, Lew Chester and Bruce Page, produced a book of 789 pages in about six weeks. We frequently wrote all night. I remember one particular evening when, after 12 hours at the typewriter, we staggered out of the office and walked up Third Avenue in the snow into P.J. Clarke’s bar, a classic New York Irish watering hole, where the waiters wore green aprons and you peed on blocks of ice in the gents. We stayed there until four a.m., first eating, then drinking, and at all times arguing, before slumping into bed for a few hours and then back to the typewriter in the morning.

That Heraklean labour was the culmination of a year covering what was the most exciting and the most important American presidential election — until this one.

 1968 began with all the interest on the Democratic side. Succeeding the murdered Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had thrown his titanic energy into passing the civil rights bill of 1964. He followed it with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he signed it he murmured to an aide, “There goes the South”, and that when the Solid South, Democratic ever since Lincoln freed the slaves, turned Republican.

 Johnson tried to end poverty in America, and committed America to victory n Vietnam. By early 1967, he was deeply unpopular. Surreptitiously at first, then more boldly Democrat operatives were looking for a plausible candidate to challenge Johnson. They talked to John Kenneth Galbraith, but he was foreign-born, in Canada. They talked to Martin Luther King, but he would not do it. They canvassed liberal senators, but none would risk their career against an incumbent president who seemed invincible, until they persuaded senator Eugene McCarty to run.

 McCarthy (who had nothing but Irish blood and Catholic faith in common with the other McCarthy, senator Joe) was a liberal Catholic, a poet, and an unpredictable politician. My colleagues, freshly arrived from London, saw him as a man of the Left, and it was true that many of the most idealistic young people in America joined his “Children’s Crusade”. I knew, however, because I had been working in Washington before, that McCarthy had infuriated liberals by his systematic cosying up to the big oil and gas interests.

 The great question for the American Left was whether Bob Kennedy, who notoriously detested Lyndon Johnson (a book about their relationship was accurately entitled “Mutual Contempt”) would enter the race. If he did, he would be a stronger candidate than McCarthy, an obvious fact which McCarthy’s supporters, some of them close friends of mine, hated to hear.

Then, on March 12, a psephological bomb exploded. In the New Hampshire primary, which normally an incumbent president would have been expected to win easily if he even bothered to enter, President Johnson got 49 per cent of the vote. And senator Gene McCarthy got 42 per cent.

Nineteen days later, Lyndon Johnson inserted two sentences at the end of a nation-wide television speech. “I have concluded”, he said, “that I should not allow the presidency to be involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. Accordingly I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president”.

After soul-searching, cold calculation and many changes of mind, Bob Kennedy entered the race. I went with him to California, when he first sussed out his chances. I tried to describe the extraordinary yearning for the crowds who surrounded him when he spoke from the back of a flatbed truck. In a pyramid of uplifted arms. I was with him again on June 4, when he won the California primary, and looked set to win first the Democratic nomination, and very possibly the election. I was in the hall when he gave his last speech, and I and a colleague were due to interview him, when he was murdered in the adjoining hallway by a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan.

What we largely ignored in the excitement of that tumultuous election, was the real import of the 1968 election.

 It was Richard Nixon who won. And Nixon’s victory marked the end of 35 years of Democratic hegemony in American politics, and the beginning of 40 years of the conservative Republican ascendancy.

To be sure, Nixon’s domestic policy turned out to be more liberal than many expected. But Nixon won, in 1968 and far more decisively four years later, in large part because of his “southern strategy”: by appealing, that is, to white southerners to abandon their Democratic inheritance and vote Republican.

 Six years after his 1968 victory, Nixon was gone, just ahead of impeachment. The immediate result was a brief recovery for the Democrats. But then came Ronald Reagan, a more robustly ideological conservative. Only when Bill Clinton, parroting Reagan’s language about the end of the need for strong government, but also insisting that it was “the economy, stupid”, took advantage of George H. W. Bush’s failure to read the national mood, did a Democrat return to the White House.

 This year, forty years after 1968, the issue was whether the conservative ascendancy would end. Was this what the political scientists call a defining election? Now a Republican administration had got the nation into a disastrous war, had shown itself comically incompetent in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, had favoured its rich constituency with unfair tax breaks in a shameless way?

 For months, it seemed as if an opportunity for decisive, ideological change, would be missed. Senator Barack Obama called for change. It was his slogan. But in practice, as he competed for votes with senator Hillary Clinton, just like senators McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968, the election seemed bogged down in technicalities. Who could raise the most money? Who could spend it most effectually in caricaturing the policies and the personality of the rival?

Then like Nixon in 1968, after the disaster of senator Goldwater, the Republican overwhelmed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, senator John McCain rose from the ashes. Now, days before the vote on November 4, senator Obama is ten percentage points ahead. Republican economics have brought the American economy and the world economy to the very brink of catastrophe. Now all that can save the conservative ascendancy is crass innuendo with coded racism from senator McCain’s desperate running-mate.

 Will it work? Will we see a “Bradley effect”? That is the name, drawn from the fate of a black mayor of Los Angeles, who led in the polls and lost on the hustings, for the American voters who will tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but don’t when they or pull the lever of a voting machine. Poor Tom Bradley is not the only example of that sadly prevalent electoral habit.

So, forty years after Dick Nixon came up on the rails to pip Hubert Humphrey, once again the American electorate faces a choice between ideological optimism — what Barack Obama calls “the audacity of hope” — and shameful, surreptitious racism. It has happened too often before in American elections, local, state and national.

Will Barack Obama make it to Niagara, so to speak? Will the nuptials take place? Or are we going to get off at Saratoga, for the fourteenth time?

In other words, as poor Adelaide sang,

“Just from worrying if the wedding is on or off
A person can develop a bad, bad cough.

We - that is most human beings living their lives, while the stock markets are crashing - go into this weekend, fearing that the world may be facing a crisis comparable to the Great Crash of 1929, which led to a world-wide recession for several years. Because the stock markets have gone on falling despite what has been done to deal with the financial crisis.

This financial crisis - like that of 1929 - is due to the combination of the volatile stock markets and the influence of the mass media, who magnify what is happening on the stock markets. So people everywhere become fearful, withdrawing their money from the banks. And also by doing nothing. Because of the uncertainties. Not buying new houses. Not buying new cars. So The Guardian today tells me that both of the high priests of American consumer capitalism, General Motors and Ford, are thought to be in danger of going bust!

The facts are that in 1929 America was governed by the Hoover administration, which reacted by looking after the tax-payers’ money. The recession was not stemmed until Franklin Roosevelt took charge in 1932, and pumped government money into the economy.

Three years after the Great Crash.

In the last few weeks governments, including the present administration of George W Bush and the British Labour government and the EC leadership, have shown that they have learnt the lessons of the 1929 crash.

But the stock markets are continuing to plunge. Because the public are fearful. And because, amongst the financiers, with their huge bonuses on top of their salaries, are selling shares short.

They are still trying to make money, out of the current debacle. By speculating in the hope that they can make their fortunes, out of a situation which frightens the average citizen out of their wits.

That is why we are all in for a fearful weekend.

But the reality is that the behaviour of Governments in the last few days, has shown that Governments - and their advisers, who include a lot of people who have studied the reasons for the 1929 Crash - say that our present situation is quite different.

The world is not collapsing. American consumer capitalism is not dead. But it needs continual reform. So that the dreams of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush are not a stable basis for builiding the world of 2008.

The world will only have to wait a few weeks - not three years - to find a viable solution to today’s problems.

On November 4 the US votes for a new President. They can either vote in Barack Obama, who is an admirer of Franklin D Roosevelt. Or they can vote in John McCain, who thinks that his war experience fits him to be President, because some upstart like the President of Iran, or the inheritor of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin, might launch their military might against the US.

Possible.

But not very likely.

The real threat is that stock market panics will push voters to panic as well.

The world, as we know it, is not collapsing.

But it requires clear headedness on the part of our leaders. And an understanding of the economic verities.

And that is where John McCain is woefully inadequate. Barack Obama, although years younger, has read it all in books. And in books written by the scholars of the world.

We are currently facing a PANIC.

Because far too many people have believed in the dreams of Thatcher and Reagan. That we could live a Hollywood dream in which everyone lived happily ever after. If only they worshipped at the shrine of the unregulated free market.

The lesson of the Great Crash of 1929, is that the free market, despite its manifold advantages, needs regulation.

I rest my case.

This is the good news, which should be listened to, against the clamour of the media focus on the collapse of capitalism as we know it.

The banks of the world are bust. Because they have encouraged people to buy what they cannot afford.

Thereby betraying what I was told was the duty of the banker. To tell his client what was prudent, rather than what he might achieve if the dice rolled his way.

The unregulated financial economy, pushed by Thatcher and supported by Reagan, is now seen to be a Hollywood dream.

Now, the banks, and the whole world, is faciing a tomorrow, which may be worse.

At least temporarily.

So throughout the world the banks, in order to survive, had had to rely on governments.

It will take a long time for the economists to come up with a theory to explain this. John Maynard Keynes explained the 1929 crash. But the bankers since then, have discredided him.

They thought that the economy of ever increasing goodies was possible.

But they are now bust.

Surviving with Government money.

Not Thatcherite free enterprise capitalism. But a Democrat New New Deal. And Gordon Brown’s version of New Labour.

At the time of re-writing this the stock markets are still sliding. But come next week maybe they will realise that the present crisis may lead to a better regulated world, in which governments and businessmen work better together to steer us away from boom and bust economics.

Just picked this up from the blog of Adrian Monck, the young upstart who is now head of journalism at City University, London. In his blog Monck extracts from an article written by one of the Bradford and Bingley companies written as recently as last May.

It is chilling in its complacency. This is the lot who have just been bailed out by the Government, who have been selling their services to tell people where to put their life savings.

Far be it from me to suggest that readers should trust journalists.

But we are living in an age when Lehmann Brothers have joined the bread line. Which unlike Bradford and Bingley is a firm at the heart of American consumer capitalism.

What the bankers are saying to each other now - in my view rather belatedly - is that the world is facing a crisis, probably the most serious since the 1930s. The minority Republican administration of George W Bush, has survived by pumping money into the US economy, which is Democratic policy, not Republican.

It is now reaping the famine. And governments and bankers around the world are thinking up ways to stop the panic, which can turn a financial crisis into a world-wide depression.

They may get it right. But on the other hand they may not.

The economic thinking which enabled President Franklin Roosevelt to take the US and the world out of the 1930s depression was that of a British economist, John Maynard Keynes who was married to a ballet dancer.

Keynes’ seminal work, was ‘The Economic Consequences of the War’, meaning the First World War.

The voices of today’s economists who have been pointiing to the economic consequences of the Iraq war, have been drowned by the babble of the many economists employed by governments and big business.

Individually, the journalists are quite as untrustworthy as human beings as the bankers and the politicians. But the journalist’s job is to report what those in power are saying, and to compare that with what they said and did in the recent past.

So in today’s conditions we need journalists. As individuals, what they have to say is no better, or worse, than what is said by those who hold the reins of power. But collectively they deserve to be listened to.

The first of the Presidential debates in the US ended in a draw. Although it was supposed to be about Foreign Policy in fact the state of the economy took up quite a lot of the time. Not whether McCain could do better than Obama, if the US was faced with an attack from Putin’s Russia, Iran or the new China or the new North Korea. Which are all possible.

But not very likely.

But the debate reflected the situation in the US where many Americans are in danger of losing their jobs and their homes. And at a time when most of the power players in the world, and particularly China, have learnt how to turn American consumer capitallism to their advantage. And so they will suffer if the US economy collapses.

Just see how many products you buy are made in China?

The voice of the economist tellling us this is drowned in the Babel of our media age. But he must be there somewhere.

And maybe some journalist will find him.

Or her.

Quite suddenly, in the last few weeks, most of the pundits on both sides of the pond, have started to say that what we are facing now is the worst financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929, which led to world-wide depression lasting five or six years. In which many people in Britain and America had difficulty in finding enough money for basic necessities, let alone tbe products of consumer capitalism.

This time around the crisis has been in the housing market in both countries. Financial institutions have fuelled the dreams of people’s wishes to buy better houses for themselves, and become capitalists themselves by borrowing money to buy houses to let. Now they are in trouble, because they borrowed more money than they could afford.

And now the property market is plunging. Because people are being charged more for mortgages, if they can get them. And at the same time interest rates are being cut. So the banks (if they have not gone bust) are earing more by a widening gap between the rate at which they borrow and the rate at which they lend.

But some ordinary folk are losing their homes and others, who went in for buying to let, are in severe financial difficulty.

‘Ordinary folk’ for the purposes of this blog, includes pretty well everyone in Britain and America who is not super rich. For them, the purchase of a house is a much bigger spend than anything else in their lifetime. However much they know about finance they cannot regard it just as a property investment. They are buying a home, and for many where the home is, and when they have to buy it, is determined by forces quite outside their control.

Currently I am buying a flat in London to replace our rented flat. In the full knowledge that whatever I pay is likely to be more - maybe much more - than what the flat will sell for in the next two or three years. Maybe more than that. But if I hang around I might be dead before the bottom of the market.

Later on tonight, when I am in bed, the first of the television debates between the Obama and McCain will be taking place. Most of the pundits say that what happens in this first debate often determines the result of the election. Today’s debate is supposed to be about foreign policy.

But the pundits are also saying that American voters are more than ever concerned about the economy. Whatever either candidate says tonight will be said against a background of financial markets in chaos. So voters, and viewers all over the world, will be looking for clues about how well each candidate will do when it comes to managing a financial crisis.

Notsomuch as which candidate is tough and experienced enough to stand up to Putin, Iran or South Korea. But which candidate is asute enough to prevent the stock market panic pushing the world into a long recession.

The New York Post, which for most of its history has backed the Democrats, has come out for John McCain in an editorial judgment delivered two months before polling day. Although this is not Rupert Murdoch’s most important newspaper the fact that it has come out so early so emphatically can be taken as an indication of the way Murdoch is leaning. The Wall Street Journal, his latest acquisition, has not yet declared itself, but since it has been mostly Republican, and has a strong Republican readership, it is likely to vote for McCain as well. Fox News, Murdoch’s television channel has been noticeable for its many anti-Obama slanted stories.

The London Times has provided in its news reports and from its columnmists some fuel for both sides, but my impression is that as the weeks have gone by it is veering towards McCain.

The Washington Post and the New York Times has provided plenty of ammunition for the Democrats, particularly by pointing out Sarah Palin’s short-comings, like this story in the Post today which alleges she has been cheating on her expenses.

And on this side of the pond The Guardian has been providing plenty to cheer up the Democrats, notably this story by Gary Younge today. It is an analysis of the state by state polling results. These demonstrate a big lead by Obama in the most important states whereas the national polls are showing only a narrow lead for Obama. As Younge points out, since the President is elected by the sum of the votes of the states, not by the nationwide popular vote, this could make all the difference.

But Younge still thinks the election will be close, because, as he says, the polls are notoriously unreliable and the experts disagree as to how they should be interpreted.

Make no mistake about it.  Sarah Palin electrified the Democratic Convention in her 36 minute speech yesterday and dominated the prime time television screens. No matter that her speech was crafted by the Republican speech writers, she made it her own, and delivered it with great panache. Her opening quip brought the house down.

What’s the difference between hockey mum and a pit bull. Lipstick.

As she delivered the punch line, she drew her hand across her lips and smiled. And then she proceeded to cut Barack Obama’s throat.  Belittling his experience as a community organiser in Chicago, compared with her own as a small town mayor. Turning his own jibe alleging that John McCain would not follow Osama bin Laden into his cave, by saying Obama wants to offer him a place at table.

She is more Annie Oakley than Margaret Thatcher. She shoots from the hip better than most of the boys, but underneath she has a heart of gold, bringing up her disabled child, standing by her daughter who has failed to follow her own injunction about no sex before marriage. And watching the convention scene yesterday it was like a Hollywood movie with the enormous McCain and Palin families hugging each other with abandon.

The main thrust of the attack was on the Democrats as the party of the elite and she included the media as part of that elite. She portrayed herself,  accurately,  as the outsider, the woman from the small town and the small state, who understood the people of America better than those who had spent most of their lives in Washington.

This line of attack is full of contradictions. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is very much a Washington insider, but then so is John McCain.  And although Barack Obama can be portrayed as a member of the East Coast elite, given that he has spent most of his working life as a teacher at Harvard, the fact that he comes from a background quite as humble as that of Palin is self-evident.

And the Republicans cannot have it both ways. Their attack on Obama for most of this campaign, and again yesterday, is that Obama lacks experience. That he is new to Washington and has not yet managed to get any new laws passed in his short time as a Senator in Washington. Moreover, the Republicans have continually tried to portray Obama and his wife, Michelle, as somehow not fully American, which taps into racial prejudices. In other words he is the ultimate outsider.

They cannot have it both ways.

Yesterday’s speech makes it clear that Palin is going to be a big factor in this campaign. And what her speech makes clear is the battle in one very important sense is going to between her and Barack Obama.

There are huge differences between them. And those differences are about belief and policies. Obama is on the left of his party.  Palin is part of the right wing moral minority which brought George Bush to power.  Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who defeated Ted Heath and reshaped the Conservative Party in her own image, Palin stands for another four years of Bushism.

John McCain may yet come to regret that he did not push harder for his friend, Joe Lieberman, or go along with one of safer Republican leaders.

Photograph: Associated Press

Yesterday the battle royal for the presidency of the United States was put on hold as New Orleans was evacuated in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Karpova. President George Bush cancelled his scheduled visit to the opening day of the Republican Party convention in Minneapolis St Pauls in order to concentrate on helping the City to avoid the loss of lives which resulted from Hurricane Katrina. The new generation of attack dogs on the internet, however, did not obey the cease fire.  They revealed that the 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin,  was pregnant.  The McCain campaign admitted later in the day that the story was true.

Barack Obama, far from using this strategy to taunt his opponents, declared that the issue was off-limits. He said that his own mother was only 18 when he was conceived. That speech will spike the guns of those in his team who might want to use this news to pillory Palin’s extreme pro-life stance: she is against abortion, even in those cases where a woman has become pregnant as a result of rape or incest.

Obama’s speech, of course, will do nothing to inhibit the terriers of the media. And we can expect to see photographs  of the steadily going bulge in the Palin daughters belly as the campaign approaches. And speculation as to whether a shotgun marriage will be arranged before polling day.

This is a good time to review the use of dirty tricks in this campaign, and the role of the press in such campaigns.

Thus far most of the dirty tricks have come from the Republican side. The nastiest of them has come from the Republican side.  Several  of the most right-wing US media , including the Murdoch-owned Fox News, have continually referred to Obama as Barack Hussain Obama. Journalistic convention is to write Barack Obama at the first mention, and use Obama on subsequent mentions. There are exceptions to this when there might be confusion. As in the case of the present US President, who has to be George W Bush to differeniate him from his father, George Bush, and his brother, Jed Bush, the Governor of Florida.  And  John Kennedy was occasionally referred to as John F Kennedy, because of all those other Kennedy’s, ilke his father, a prominent businessman and Ambassador to London during the second world war, and his brother, Senator Edward Kennedy.

There is no doubt, therefore, that the persistent use of Hussain had been politically motivated. And that the bias has been put in by the editors and owners of the media. It does not require a leak from Obama insiders to know that his middle name is Hussain.

There is also little doubt that this simple word usage has been devastatingly effective. Several journalists have found in recent weeks that many American voters they have questioned think Obama is a Muslim. This extraordinary, given the daily media coverage in the winter, after the inflammatory remarks made by Obama’s Christian Pastor Wright. During that time Obama made a major speech, when instead of denouncing  Wright as a wicked man, said how grateful he had been to him for his guidance when he was a young man. (He also made it clear that he disagreed profoundly with the inflammatory comments.)

The point is that all America and all the world knew in detail about Obama’s regular Christian church attendance.  But the memories of ordinary voters, who have many other things to think about, are short.  And the probability is that this single word insertion in media coverage has been a major factor in the dwindling of Obama’s lead in the opinion polls to nothing in recent months.

On the Democratic side the most spectacular use of dirty tricks happened just before Christmas, when the New York Times reported that John McCain had had an affair with a leading Washington lobbyist, a handsome blonde woman. Their article emerged after a four month investigation. It went off like damp squib because both McCain and the woman concerned denied they had gone to bed together. And the New York Times was unable to prove that McCain had improperly exerted pressure to advance the business interests of the lobbyist.  So the rest of the media slaughtered the New York Times for publishing an unproven story.

My point here is that this potentially lethal blow beneath the belt was delivered not because the New York Times was manipulated by the Democratic Campaign, but because of bias and passions of the New York Times journalists involved. At that time the New York Times was passionately committed to the election the Hilary Clinton, and had been since the start of the campaign.

Those passions were again evident last week when the New York Times,  on the day before the Democratic Convention was due to have the roll call for the presidential candidate,  followed the likes of Fox News by referring to Barack Hussain Obama. Even though by that time it was clear that Hilary was not even going to be vice president, the partisanship of some New York Times staffers shone through.

Those passions are still evident now.  And now that both the Clintons have made it clear they are backing Barack Obama, they are aimed at John McCain.

The most detailed critique of  McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was in their article on Saturday.  That article backed by some journalistic digging in Alaska, emphasised that Palin was under investigation for allegedly using her power to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job. They also asserted that Obama’s first choice was Senator Joe Lieberman, and that he had only given up at the last minute, because Republican Party leaders and fund-raisers refused to have Lieberman, because he is an independent Democrat, and worse, he is strongly pro-abortion.

In rebuttal, the McCain campaign asserted that Palin’s name had been high on the list since last February, when McCain met her for the first time – for fifteen minutes.  Which was enough for him to decide that she was his soul mate. The rebuttal  explained that, although as the New York Times reported, Bush had only had a short telephone conversation with her before she was suddenly summoned to meet him last Wednesday.  But their story was that McCain had all his options open right until the last minute. Lieberman was only one of several candidates being considered.

Now the New York Times is Jewish, and from time to time this bias shows, more than most newspapers it strives not to distort the facts.  We shall probably have to wait for the historians to tell us whether this New York Times article resulted from their bias. Or resulted from knowledge they had but could not disclose. They are close to Lieberman. So it is not beyond the bounds of possibility their assertion that Lieberman was the first choice came from a hint from him -  strictly on an off-the-record basis.

To summarise. The media has had, and will continue to have, an influence on this election.  Second, the biases within the media are quite as strong as elsewhere, and these include the biases of journalists as well as owners.  Third, that although journalists get caught up in the heat of the battle,  most of the serious newspapers are still guided by the facts their reporters unearth, even when those facts do not fit in with the opinions of  proprietors and staffers.

And now for something entirely different……. A short while ago John McCain produced the biggest surprise so far in this presidential campaign, by choosing Sarah Palin, the 44 year old Governor of Alaska as his running mate. it is probable that far more Americans have heard of Kentish Town’s favourite comedian, Michael Palin, than have heard of Sarah.

She has been Governor of Alaska for just two years. Alaska is one of America’s newest states and almost as remote from Washington as Hawaii. And in this campaign the Republicans have been using Obama’s time spent in Hawaii as part of their attack stategy to brand him as someone with little experience of the centres of power. None of the heavy weight media commentators I have read rated Sarah Palin as a serious possibility.

However, Russ Limburgh the right-wing news pundit has been running an energetic ландшафтDraft Palin campaign. She brings youth and charm to the ticket. And she has been very popular in her two-year Governorship.

She is a staunch conservative on all those issues close to the hearts of right-wing Christian fundamentalists who have kept George Bush in power for eight years. According to Limburg:

Her stances on gay marriage, capital punishment, abortion and gun control will appeal to many of the conservatives McCain turned off and into Romney’s arms. She could make them feel better about coming out to vote for McCain.

And, of course, she may pick up some of the women who would have voted for Hilary Clinton, despite the fact that her policies are at the other end of the political spectrum.

It is a bold and brave choice. But it has its downside.

The announcement was made on McCain’s 72nd birthday. He looks in great shape but I have an old friend who tripped over the telephone cord in his study and broke two of his knees at exactly the same age. All of us oldies have brittle bones. So Sarah Palin will truly be a heart beat away from the White House if McCain wins.

This will make it much more difficult for the Republicans to attack Obama for his lack of experience, when their vice-presidential candidate has even less experience. And it will enable Obama to build on the attack strategy that he used in his acceptance speech. He was somewhat unfair to brand McCain, who has taken some notable independent stances, as 90 per cent George Bush’s twin. It will be much easier now he has chosen who is a true Bush sister.

Her experience of foreign policy appears to be zilch.

But she undoubedly has charisma. And the experience of being a Governor, even for a short time, is better training for being the nation’s chief executive, than being a Senator.

And she looks to me to be an extremely feisty woman. She is tough-minded but combines it with an entirely feminine charm.

Obama has based his campaign on the American dream, echoing the Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream speech’ of 1963. And raising a chord with all those American novels which demonstrated that the dream has not yet been realised.

But the truth is there is more than one American dream.

As I wrote yesterday this election gives Americans a clear choice between two radically different policies. Sadly to some Americans Luther King’s dream is their nightmare.

Photo: Matt Sullivan/Reuters

In the last two days Barack Obama has demonstrated beyond all doubt that he is ready and capable of leading America. On Wednesday the unity of the Democratic Party was restored with a remarkable speech by the former President Bill Clinton who in the space of a few minutes healed his own psyche as well as the splits in his party. Gone was the disgruntled Bill of the campaign trail. He began by expressing his deep disappointment that his candidate, Hilary Clinton, had lost the battle for the nomination. It was candid expression of his own feelings. He did not have to add that he was also disappointed because her election would have given him another four years in the White House. He then went on praise Obama’s character and abilities. It was an unmistabeable handing of the torch of leadership to the next generation. Both Clintons stood smiling, cheering and clapping as the convention moved to elect Obama by acclamation. It showed a quite exceptional generosity of spirit on the part of both Clintons. And it came on top of the endorsement by Senator Edward Kennedy, who got up from his sick bed to throw his weight behind Obama on the opening day of the conference.

Obama could not hoped for anything from the leaders of his won party.

He then went on demonstrate what he can do, in what many people thought was such a move so bold that it was rash. Instead of making his speech to 15,000 Democratic party activists in the Convention Hall he booked a football stadium with space for 75,000 people. He erected a stage, which was in fact a mock-up of the White House. But many media commentators, egged on by the Republicans, said that it looked like a Greek temple and that Obama was suffering from that well known disease the Greeks called hubris.

The only Presidential candidate was has done this before was John F Kennedy in 1959. Kennedy’s bold move was rated a success, even though he filled only half the 30,000 capacity. In fact, according to every report I have read 84,000 people turned up. I still find this astonishing. It does not prove that Obama can run the country but it sure shows that he has a remarkable capacity for organisation as well as inspiration.

And although he is an avid user of the new techoogies, web sites, emailing and texting as well television, it shows that he understands that face to face is still the best way to win hearts and minds and votes.

As promised the speech concentrated on the economy. And, as also he follewed the advice of those of his team, who had been urging him to attack McCain. Which he did by making a portraying him as an honest man who did not understand the need for America to change the policies of the last eight years and asserting that McCain was 90 per cent in favour of the policies of George W Bush.

He made his policies clear, but did not show how he was going to achieve them. He made the extraordinary claim that he was going to free America from imported oil in ten years. It is a claim that may come back to haunt him. But maybe it is possible for America to switch to renewable energy. After America has plenty of wide open spaces and mountains for wind turbines and many hot deserts ideal for solar energy.

But he made his politiccal position even clearer than it was before. He will help the poor and tax the rich. He reminded Democrats they were the party of Roosevelt as well as Kennedy and Clinton. Roosevelt’s New Deal was possible because Wall Street had been crippled by the Great Crash of 1929 and by the ensuing long depression. In 2008, although the American economy is in very poor shape, Wall Street and many big businesses are doing exceptionally well.

In this election Americans are being offered a very clear choice between the right and left. I imagine that McCain will have no trouble at all raising the millions he needs to fight his campaign.

The question is no longer whether Obama is ready to be President.

It is whether America is ready for a President like Barack Obama.

(My link for Obama’s complete speech is to the Huffington Post. None of the main newsaper and BBC sites I checked this morning had the full speech on video, although they did carry the prepared text circulated a few hours before the speech was delivered. But I recommend that readers watch the complete video.)