the cash register.

My friend strolled among the regulars sipping their coffee, most of them retired, and could find no takers. "Not one, and these were people who voted 100 per cent for Bush in 2004. They're angry." Why? After a terrible summer of soaring gas prices and plunging stock portfolios "a lot of them have lost their retirement funds and health savings". He added that all the talk about Obama's links to terror, to Islam, to bombers, has also had the effect of intimidating elderly Republicans from even putting McCain-Palin signs in their yards. They fear Obama's Islamic bully boys will come knocking on their doors.

My friend's experience in Landrum came amid the inglorious tailspin of the disastrous strategy of trying to sink Obama by hanging former Weatherman Bill Ayers round his neck.

When Republican consultants like Mary Matalin and Steve Schmidt first pondered this tactic in the late summer, it must have seemed to them like a no-brainer.

In the final weeks of Campaign 2008, Barack Hussein Obama would be hit with accusations (actually first aired by Hillary Clinton last April) of being an alien radical

with intimate ties to a man who had tried to blow up Congress and the Pentagon.

It might have worked, but for the fact which apparently escaped the notice of the McCain campaign – that Americans are entirely consumed by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. There has been a total disconnect between the financial hurricane hitting America and some archaeology about a Sixties radical sitting with Obama on the board of a non-profit foundation.

Across the three debates Obama has been the default winner, if only because McCain has been irritable and repetitive, a cranky old geezer. But has the Democrat taken command, persuading his vast audiences that amid the loom of adversity and ruin for many Americans he is prepared to lead and has a plan? The answer here is surely no. He's got less inspiring as the weeks tick by.

This election has advertised not only McCain's political ineptness, but also the absence of an effective third force in American politics, at a moment when the credibility of both parties and of both major candidates is open to sweeping challenge. Voters are disgusted with the entire system and the