My race for the White House starts here

We'll come momentarily to Obama's discovery that it's not all fun being president, but first a word about your correspondent. Though the US Constitution seemingly blocks my path at this time, I took the first necessary step in my own quest for the White House by becoming a citizen of the United States at approximately 10am, Pacific time, on Wednesday, June 17, in the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California.

To my immediate left in the vast art deco theater was a Moroccan, to my right a Salvadoran and around us another 956 candidates for citizenship from 98 countries, all of us holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn that since our final, successful interview with immigration officials, we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party.

Each time, starting with Afghanistan, US Citizenship and Immigration Service agent Randy Ricks announced a country, the cohort from that nation stood up. It was easy to see that China, India, the Philippines and Salvador were strongly represented. A handful of Zambians brought us to the end of the roster and we were all on our feet.

My own path to American citizenship began with a Green Card in 1973

We raised our right hands and collectively swore that we "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty" and that we would "bear arms on behalf of the United States", or perform "work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law."

The phrase rang a bell. In World War Two in Britain, so my mother Patricia would recall from time to time, cats patrolling warehouses to guard against mice where food was stored would get extra rations for performing work of national importance.

Minutes later I was outside on the sidewalk, registering to vote, albeit declining to state which party I would favour.

My own path to citizenship began with a Green Card in 1973, allowing me to work for the Village Voice in New York and to be a legal resident. The man who helped me get that card was Ed Koch, at that time a supposedly liberal US congressman living, then as now, in Greenwich Village.

A few years later, in 1977, he ran for mayor of New York City and I wrote some harsh things about him since he was heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch and the Post and was running on a law and order platform, meaning 'lock up the blacks'.

Ed was always a petty man, and this trait was well displayed the night he won. An interviewer asked him what his "worst moment" in the race had been and he promptly said in his trademark squeaky whine, "the attack by Alexander Cockburn in the Voice... To think I got him his Green Card!" In that race there had been slurs a lot nastier than any I made. If you walked around Queens in that campaign you'd see 'Vote for Cuomo, not the homo', scrawled on plenty of walls.

There were others with thin skins. In my Voice column I made fun of a New Yorker writer, a woman dispensing lethal doses of tedium on an almost weekly basis. I didn't know that her lover was a New Jersey congressman powerful on the Immigration and Naturalisation subcommittee. Within days I was the object of a probe by the INS.

A resident alien perches on a frail branch. That New Jersey congressman could have pressured the INS to put me on the watchlist, meaning the next time I returned to the US I could have found the door slammed in my face.

In the mid-1980s a nutball colonel called Oliver North working in the White House for Ronald Reagan re-activated a national system of prison camps for Lefties from a blueprint that had sat in government filing cabinets ever since the Palmer raids in the Red Scare following World War One. Dick Cheney most certainly dusted it off after 2001. It was on North's plan,