catastrophe in the next 15 years.

Obama's subservience to the US military has been evinced numerous times, most recently when he confided last week to David Brooks, one of the New York Times's profuse stable of neo-con columnists, that "the [US] generals are light years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough."

What about Wall Street, whose leading bankers have devastated middle-income America with the subprime scams? Obama has been tactful, meanwhile hauling in hefty campaign contributions from these same bankers. Healthcare? No relief for America's 45 million uninsured from Obama, who has a programme unreservedly deferential to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

What about labour and the right to form a union, ­ something virtually impossible to do in America today, where it's (barely) legal to go on strike but almost entirely illegal to win one. Seldom has a Democrat won the nomination with less IOUs to organised labour than Obama.

But surely Obama prevailed over Hillary in large part because she voted for the war in Iraq and he didn't. This year Obama's statements on the war have been carefully hedged. McCain will have a tough time painting him into a corner as a peacenik without himself sounding like a crazed warmonger (which he frequently does). The war in Iraq is not popular in America, but the antiwar movement is effectively dead.

The only politically unorthodox item on Obama's record is that he has a black skin. As he runs against an elderly, unstable Republican candidate whose own mottled epidermis raises constant uneasy questions about possible battles with cancer, Obama should thank Bush 1 for making a black man chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and putting Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court, and Bush 2 for making Condoleezza Rice secretary of state.

And he should thank the Republican Party for nominating a candidate weaker by far than any he might have dreamed of only six months ago.