Obama’s luck and the end of American liberalism

There's certainly no effective liberal, let alone left, presence in mainstream American politics any more. The political primary season, now in its final throes, has resoundingly buttressed this fact, albeit disguising the process by the crafty expedient of making a black man the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.

Take the scene in Portland, Oregon last Monday, on the eve of a vote in that north-western state which sent Barack Obama one step further in formally clinching the Democratic nomination. How did Hillary Clinton try to remind Oregonians of her claims to be the authentic representative of white working-class America, without whose votes no Democrat can ever win the White House?

She held a press conference in the upscale Portland suburb of Beaverton, in a subdivision where $500,000 homes have