Conservatives argue that the competitive nature of the race proved yet again that America, beneath the discontented surface, remains a conservative or at least a centre-right nation. But is this "centre-right" description justified? Not any longer when it comes to social mores. The election of the first black president - who happens to be a brilliant and unabashed intellectual with a left-wing record on the environment, healthcare, abortion and gun control - will surely transform social attitudes and redirect the bias of the Supreme Court. His victory inflicts a crushing defeat on the Nixon-Reagan coalition of xenophobic working-class social conservatives and tax-allergic small businessmen. Anatole Kaletsky The Times
Full article: The not-so-strange birth of liberal America

The crowd in Grant Park - scene of one of the most bruising chapters in recent US political history, the Chicago riots of 1968 - stood rapt, says Jonathan Freedland. They listened as Obama seemed to steel them for a collective effort unseen since the days of FDR. That crystallised a sense that had been building about Obama in the final weeks of his campaign: that he aspires to be not just a successful politician who wins elections, but a genuine leader - ready to steer his people through an onslaught of troubles. In this speech, and with his victory, Barack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
Full article: Barack Obama's election victory brings a new dawn of leadership
Alexander Cockburn: America is eager to stand tall once again
In pictures: World cheers Obama victory

So, in one of those bizarre jokes that history sometimes plays, says Janet Daley, the United States is apparently about to choose as president the most inexperienced, untried and virtually unknowable (because there is so little to know) candidate who has ever run for that office at a time of unquantifiable international risk and unprecedented economic instability: a candidate who, as Bill Clinton revealed in a wonderfully back-handed "tribute", responded to the banking collapse by ringing every expert he could find (including Bill) to ask them what he should be saying. Janet Daley Daily Telegraph
Full article: Barack Obama victory will hurt US firms - and world economy
How election night will unfold

Just 40 years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House, says Johann Hari. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964. The country is capable of many crimes - but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 presidents of the US could have owned the 44th president as a piece of property? Johann Hari The Independent
Full article: In the age of transformation, Obama's time has come
US Election: Obama team ahead in the polls but fearful of complacency

Sell Obamas now, says Simon Jenkins. They are overpriced and the forward market has gone crazy. If he becomes president, the bubble will burst, I guess in the spring of next year. To millions of Americans he will seem like a messiah. There are millions whom he can only disappoint. Abroad, this leader would have to end not one war but two, and bring sanity to an American diplomacy that is chaotic in an arc of instability from eastern Europe to the Himalayas. The anticipation that he will be a harbinger of peace, friendship and economic salvation is probably greater than for any American since Roosevelt. The burden of expectation is awesome and unrealistic. The qualities of charisma and rhetoric that Obama brings to this task may be a match for it. His declared policies are not. Simon Jenkins The Guardian
Full article: Obama stock is overpriced, and a crash could really hurt
US Election latest: Obama's poll lead narrows

Barack Obama has the kind of cryptic detachment that is an asset to any chairman, writes Timothy Garton Ash. Personally, he seems centred and rooted. You feel this is a man who knows who he is. Not because he has always known who he is, like the heir to "a long line of McCains", but because for a long time he didn't - and then worked it out for himself the hard way, through the search recorded in the autobiographical Dreams From My Father. He has, so to speak, the rootedness of the uprooted. He has also cut some of the waffle that we heard earlier in the campaign. Timothy Garton Ash The Guardian
Full article: The more Obama is tested, the more he shows his presidential mettle
Alexander Cockburn: Would McCain survive a full term?

If Obama wins, then it will be simply fatuous to claim that there are no black role models in politics or government, because there is no higher role model than the President of the United States. If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance-culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it. If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America's claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.  Boris Johnson Daily Telegraph
Full article: Barack Obama: Why I believe he should be the next President
Prophet Obama smites King McCain
People: Boris Johnson backs Obama

America, the country that the world loves to think of as an irredeemable hell of gun-toting, government-hating, Bible-clutching, gas-guzzling right wingers, is about to have the most left-wing government in what used to be called the industrialised world, writes Gerard Baker. This week in Canada, voters re-elected a Conservative Government. Canadians, whom most Americans regard as welfare-loving, diversity-promoting, irreligious, gay-embracing peaceniks from the frozen wastes, will soon look on with interest as their neighbours down south experiment, like newly liberated teenagers, with all sorts of weird economic and political substances. In Europe, Conservatives rule in Germany France and Italy, and despite the miraculous recent apparitions of the Dark Lord Mandelson of the Manipulative Genius and Saint Gordon of Perpetual Financial Succour, the Tories still look likely to take over within the next two years. Gerard Baker The Times
Full article: Change is coming, whatever the voters want
America enters a new Depression
In pictures: America's Depression

Political consultants warned that John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis had all gone down because they had let their Republican opponents punch them and punch them again, writes Jonathan Freedland. Yet in this debate, Barack Obama plainly ignored that advice. McCain kept coming at him - attacking him for his relationship with an "old washed-up terrorist", accusing him of "class warfare", branding him an "extremist" on abortion - but Obama did not do what the conventional wisdom of campaigns past said he should. Sure, he politely tried to set the record straight, but only gently. And not once did he throw a punch back. When asked whether Sarah Palin was qualified to be president, he said it was up to the American people – and then praised her energy as a campaigner. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
Full article: The end of attack politics
Alexander Cockburn: Barack Obama has already surrendered his ability to bring about meaningful change
Third debate goes to Obama as McCain goes OTT with Joe the Plumber

John McCain does look very old indeed, says Michael Tomasky. He sounds old, even more than he looks old. You can hear him wheezing. That whistle every time he makes an 'S' sound. That's an old American stock character in the movies and sitcoms of my youth. The man whose lawn has just been trampled by a young mischief-maker and who storms (such as a septuagenarian can storm) out of the house yelling, "I'll get you, sonny!" and the S in "sonny" sounds like the air shooting through the gaps in the teeth. So maybe he just comes across like that and there's nothing to be done about it. Michael Tomasky The Guardian
Full article: Obama vs McCain: Round three
Houses repossessed, soup kitchens, homeless shelters: America's Depression in pictures

The fact that regular people were asking most of the questions was bound to make it very hard for John McCain to pivot away from talking to a regular voter about his or her economic problems to saying, "and oh, by the way, let me tell you about Bill Ayers" and so on, writes Michael Tomasky. Add to that the fact that the stock market has lost 850 points in the last two days. The voter-questioners – far preferable to journalists – wanted answers to actual problems. There were no culture war questions – not one, about abortion or the Supreme Court or anything of the sort. And there was no room for McCain to hoist the red flags that so excite his base. There was a lot of jabbing back and forth, in fact too much of it, on both candidates' parts. And it didn't work for either candidate. Michael Tomasky Guardian Unlimited
Full article: What wasn't said in Nashville
Candidates fiddle while America burns

A New York University study recently found that it "is more likely an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls", writes Johann Hari. But in the name of this paltry risk, the Republicans are effectively stripping millions of people - overwhelmingly black and Democrats - of their vote. For example, in Indiana - a crucial swing state - Republicans have passed a law requiring voters to bring an official government document bearing their photograph to the polling station. But a study by the University of Wisconsin found that 53 per cent of black adults didn't have a passport or driving licence, compared to 15 per cent of white people. So they can't vote unless they travel for hours (often without a car) to a sparse government registry and queue for half a day to get the correct documentation. Johann Hari The Independent
Full article: Barack beware... they're out to get you
Will McCain use the economic crisis as an excuse to sack Sarah Palin?

Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century, says Gerard Baker. When the votes are counted his people might ruefully conclude that the victor is not Barack Obama or John McCain. The real winner will be Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or some now happily anonymous figure whose star will rise in the next four turbulent years. Previous periods of apparently existential crisis in the US have certainly produced one-term disasters: James Buchanan in 1857, Herbert Hoover in 1929, Jimmy Carter in 1977 spring unpleasantly to mind. But the genius of America is that apocalyptic challenges have also, in time, produced the men to match them: Abraham Lincoln in 1861, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Ronald Reagan in 1981. Gerard Baker The Times
Full article: This is the election you wouldn't want to win
Presidential TV debate back on

Here's the real problem with Mr Obama: the jarring gap between his promises of change and his status quo performance, writes Gerard Baker. There are just too many contradictions between the eloquent poetry of the man's stirring rhetoric and the dull, familiar prose of his political record. It's been remarked that the biggest difference between Americans and Europeans is religion: ignorant Americans cling to faith; enlightened Europeans long ago embraced the liberating power of reason. Yet here's an odd thing about this election. Europeans are asking Americans to take a leap of faith, to break the chains of empiricism and embrace the possibility of the imagination. The fact is that a vote for Mr Obama demands uncritical subservience to the irrational, anti-empirical proposition that the past holds no clues about the future, that promise is wholly detached from experience. Gerard Baker The Times
Full article: Barack Obama the speechmaker is being rumbled
Alexander Cockburn: Democrats panic in the face of Palin-mania

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change, says Jonathan Freedland. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for. And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
The world's verdict will be harsh if the US rejects the man it yearns for
Sarah Palin's turn for a disaster pastor
US Election: World poll backs Obama for the White House by four to one

The American cultural divide has always existed, but in its present form it dates from the 1960s, when some conservative politicians figured out how to exploit liberalism's support for minorities and other contentious causes, says Michael Tomasky. George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, did it superbly. But no one was better at it than Richard Nixon. As author Rick Perlstein argues in his book Nixonland, Nixon took all this personally. At his college, there was a society that dubbed itself the Franklins - well-heeled, urbane and mostly liberal. He started his own society called the Orthogonians (a Latin portmanteau meaning, basically, "straight shooters"). These were the unfashionable students, whose chief rallying tenet was resentment of the Franklins. When he attained power, Nixon did his best to divide the country into Franklins and Orthogonians. Our 'blue' and 'red' Americas are, in essence, these two groups. Michael Tomasky The Guardian
Full article: America is dissatisfied - and that's good news for Obama
US Election: Sarah Palin 'affair': big media stays quiet as lover named

The viciousness of the attacks on Sarah Palin is a testimony to the degree of panic her appointment has generated in Leftist circles, writes Janet Daley. According to the official feminist sisterhood (which was taken over by the totalitarian Marxist tendency long ago) you can represent the views of Women only if you accept the tenets of their ideology. Ergo, Mrs Palin is not a Woman Candidate. Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a "grocer's daughter" by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent "ordinary people". Janet Daley Daily Telegraph
Full article: Sarah Palin gets the spiteful Margaret Thatcher treatment
Alexander Cockburn's verdict on the Boadicea of the Backwoods
Christopher Hitchens: What's right about America

So sick are we in Britain, writes Alice Miles, with our centre left-centre right politicians of the centre, not one daring to have a view out of line with the very thin consensus that passes for acceptable opinion here, that we stand stunned by a woman who opposes abortion and shoots moose; who believes in creationism and drilling for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge; who supports the aerial shooting of wolves and opposes same-sex marriage; who says to hell with the kids and just get back to work; who even campaigned against saving polar bears! Could you be less politically correct than suing the Federal Government to prevent it making polar bears an endangered species because the move would restrict oil drilling? Nothing like Mrs Palin has, or could ever, be seen in the British political system. Alice Miles The Times
In pictures: Sarah Palin's life
Bush and Lieberman promote McCain, 'a great American'
Full article: Sarah Palin: a loveable woman, but an appalling candidate

Governor Sarah Palin believes in honest government and cutting waste; she does not believe in gay marriages, she supports the "right to life" rather than the "right to choose", writes William Rees-Mogg. She is even a Darwin-sceptic and supports the teaching of creationism. She calls herself a "hockey mom"; like Margaret Thatcher, she seems to combine basic conservative simplicities with a will of iron. Most of her beliefs are regarded as obscurantist by modern America. Yet one should remember that there are more "hockey moms" in the United States than there are Harvard graduates. The cultural elite on the two coasts is highly significant; it dominates in the media, in academia and usually in politics. Yet conservatives can win elections because there are so many of them. They are the voters of the heartland, whom New Yorkers fly over on their way to Los Angeles. William Rees-Mogg The Times
Full article: Sarah Palin has just 65 days to prove herself
Sarah: How a Small Town Girl Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on its Ear

Obama made his speech not about him but about his audience, writes Michael Tomasky. He gave away some of his power this night and gave it to the people. This to me was the single most important thing about the speech. The main victory Thursday night was that he successfully made the night not about him in a way that could feed into the Celebrity/Messiah/The One/He Who Makes the Clouds Part narrative that the McCain camp has so successfully deployed. Obama also addressed questions about his resume and experience, albeit indirectly. But he dealt with the questions about his preparedness and seriousness less with words than with demeanor. He did not look like a guy Thursday night whom Putin could push around and did not sound like a guy who couldn't run the army. Michael Tomasky Guardian Unlimited
Full article: Just the right speech
Alexander Cockburn: Barack Obama still needs all the help he can get

The maxim that "oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them" is not just a journalistic cliché, says Anatole Kaletsky. It is a profound statement about democracy. If the Republicans can get their candidate re-elected to the White House after all their failures of the past eight years - after the military misadventures, the geopolitical blunders, the economic mishaps and the mismanagement of natural disasters - America will be perilously close to the point when democracy ceases to perform its most essential function of disciplining political power. Accountability - not personality or rhetoric or colour or age or gender - should be the overriding issue in this election. The Democrats - with their naively high-minded focus on Mr Obama's alleged achievements instead of the Bush Administration's manifest blunders - do not yet seem to have understood this. Anatole Kaletsky The Times
Full article: Americans must give the Republicans a good kicking on November 4
In pictures: The Democrats in Denver

You have to go back to the Beatles' first US tour to find a transatlantic trip freighted with the sort of pregnant excitement that attends the one Barack Obama is about to make next week. Just like the Beatles, Mr Obama is a prodigiously talented revolutionary, the tribune of a rising generation. He hasn't claimed to be more popular than Jesus yet, but looking at the latest opinion polls in secular Europe, it might just be plausible. As even his opponent, John McCain, graciously put it this week, Obama’s star quality suggests there is still something about America that can inspire the rest of the world. The rise of Senator Obama is a reminder of what the rest of the world still admires - sometimes very grudgingly - about America: a constant capacity to renew itself. Gerard Baker The Times
Full article: Hysteria alert: Barack Obama starts world tour
Mud refuses to stick on Obama and McCain

It's a little worrying that John McCain says: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should..." McCain, writes Johann Hari, relies on advice from Phil Gramm, whose legislation on deregulation created both the Enron scandal and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Gramm became McCain's "best friend in politics" when they linked arms to stop Hillary Clinton's 1993 push to extend healthcare to poor Americans. He calls for "ruthlessly" slashing government spending – but only focuses on spending on the poor. When he was told paying for healthcare plunged many 80-year-olds into poverty, he said: "Most of us don't have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them." Johann Hari The Independent
Full article: We have everything to fear from McCain

Presidential candidates always have to shift towards the centre after a primary campaign, writes Jonathan Freedland. But Obama is not just any candidate. "You can't do it if you've run as Gandhi," says Leon Wieseltier. He contrasts Obama with the Bill Clinton of 1992. Both men offered to transcend the old categories of left and right, but Clinton did so by promising to be ideologically flexible. Obama's implicit promise is that he is above left and right, not because he is pragmatic so much as because he is morally good. In this context, says Wieseltier, U-turns are much less tolerable: "They compromise his radiance." There are other contrasts. Bill Clinton could finesse shifts by wrapping them in the language of policy detail; Obama is the very opposite of a policy wonk. He operates at 30,000 feet, somewhere in the rhetorical stratosphere.   Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
A Reagan of the Left? Not much chance

Both candidates for the American presidency have written strange, searching books, writes Johann Hari. Yet Obama, with Dreams From My Father ended up writing a complex story of colonised people – while McCain's Faith of My Fathers is a simple celebration of the coloniser. Obama can imagine the mentality of the boy in Basra whose father has vanished into an occupiers' prison, because it happened to his father and grandfather too at the hands of the British in Kenya. McCain's dad believed that Nixon and Kissinger should have bombed more civilians in Vietnam, with less restraint. (They killed three million.) So he believes that the natives only ever learn "to behave themselves" at the end of a big stick. So now we have to ask: which ghostly father will America choose?
Johann Hari The Independent
US Election: Clinton and Obama finally talk

There has not been such a stubborn refusal to die in high politics since the end of Rasputin, says Simon Heffer. Many have seen it as pig-headed and destructive: and typical of a bullying, arrogant, slimy, dishonest and manipulative political culture that ruled in the White House from 1993 to 2001, when her husband was president. That is Mrs Clinton's main problem, and has been her undoing. Her style is that of 1990s machine politics. Her views are those of 1990s "third way" Leftism, with their emphasis on the power of the state and extended welfarism and their ignorance of real economics. Her rhetoric is tailored to appeal to the cohorts of organised blue-collar labour who are her power base, and she speaks stiltedly and rather patronisingly in their tongue.

Simon Heffer Daily Telegraph

At the start of the year, it seemed as if 2008 would pit two ideologically similar figures against each other, writes Jonathan Freedland. That's not how it looks now. Nowhere is the gap between them clearer or wider than on the question that matters most to the global electorate watching this battle: US foreign policy. McCain calls Obama the Hamas candidate and an appeaser; Obama says McCain offers nothing more than a third term of the Bush presidency. Can Obama brand McCain as a crotchety, Meldrew-ish version of the discredited Dubya? Or can McCain cast Obama as a naive novice who belongs in the student seminar room? The phoney - if gripping - war is now all but over. The decisive conflict is about to begin. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
US Election: Obama claims victory but Clinton holds off formal concession

Is Hillary Clinton the victim of a Vast Misogynist Conspiracy, asks Gerard Baker? Have her efforts to breach the ultimate glass ceiling in the world's labour market been destroyed - as in the end we're told all women's efforts inevitably are destroyed - by a lethal combination of sneering chauvinism and locker-room clubbiness? No, the principal reason voters give for not liking Senator Clinton is that they don't trust her, that they sense that someone who would do or say anything to get elected is not someone who should be entrusted with the presidency. Hers is a voice that explicitly appeals to white working-class solidarity and implicitly suggests that people outside that demographic cannot be president. It plays on the worst populist instincts of Americans, issuing threats to obliterate Iran and attacking the Chinese for poisoning Americans with toxic toys.

Gerard Baker The Times

Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet. It's fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama, everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley. You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week's Newsweek, which was entitled 'The O Team'. This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama's campaign reads a little like a cross between Father Alban Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang. Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. Gerald Baker The Times
Election latest: Bush slur unites Obama and Hillary

With Clinton out of the way, things will get interesting again, says Gerard Baker. McCain and Obama are an interesting contrast – for one thing 25 years is the widest ever age difference between the two main parties' candidates. Will the race be dominated by politics or personality? The politics of 2008 clearly favour the Democratic nominee. The country is ready for change, unhappy with economic stagnation, desperate for an end to the war in Iraq. In the congressional elections that will accompany the presidential one, it is already clear that the Republicans could be headed for a defeat of historic proportions. But the presidential contest is as much about the characters of the candidates as it is about the politics, and that is why Mr McCain has a chance. Voters will have to weigh the general haziness of Mr Obama's background, his odd connections, perhaps for some his race, certainly his inexperience, against Mr McCain's heroic life story, his age and his famously short temper.  Gerard Baker The Times
Alexander Cockburn: It's all but over for Hillary Clinton

Does Hillary Clinton keep going? In a - victory? concession? – speech that started on a deeply graceless note (crowing about a win in Indiana that was by no means settled at the moment she was speaking) but did improve from there, writes Michael Tomasky, Clinton alternatively indicated that she was going to continue fighting tooth and nail for the Democratic nomination and that she was mentally preparing herself to start burying the hatchet and accepting that she will not be her party's nominee. As of Tuesday morning, most people were expecting a narrow Obama win in North Carolina and a handy Clinton victory in Indiana. But just the opposite happened, and dramatically so. Her campaign had been building up expectations that they had Obama on the run and the momentum was all her way. Now she has no momentum. Or, as it happens, money. Michael Tomasky Guardian Unlimited
It's all but over for Hillary Clinton

There's been a paradox at the heart of the Obama campaign, and it goes like this, writes Michael Tomasky. He has been, for millions of voters, a great inspirational leader, with a unique talent for defining the historical moment; but at the same time, in many ways, he hasn't been a very good day-to-day campaigner. Campaigns must have Big Themes, sure. But at ground level they are largely about controlling the daily and weekly grind of issues. Now think of the issues that have been front and centre since Clinton started her run in early March. They've included the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta); preparedness to be commander-in-chief; the federal gas tax; and, of course, the lamentable Jeremiah Wright. On all four, Obama has been back on his heels, answering criticisms.
Michael Tomasky The Guardian
American Election 2008

The longer the Democratic race goes on, the more obvious it appears that each candidate is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed, says Gerard Baker. Until about a month ago Barack Obama had done a brilliant job of presenting himself as a transcendent figure, the mixed-race candidate with bipartisan appeal who promised to heal the historic and modern rifts in American life. But the mask has slipped. He has revealed himself to be a member of that special subset of the party's liberal elite - a well-educated man with a serious superiority complex. As for Hillary: Obliterate Iran! Here comes Osama bin Laden! I love duck hunting! I can do shots and beer at the same time! It's hard to know what's worse - expressing condescending views about the working class or pretending to be one of them. The Democratic campaign is simply disappearing in the enveloping vapidity of the candidates' making. Gerard Baker The Times

The Pennsylvania primary underlined the fear that senior Democrats have long been aware of, but have never dared to express in public, says Anatole Kaletsky: America may not yet be ready to elect a black President. Worst of all, it has created conditions for the possible election victory of a militarily belligerent and economically unqualified Republican candidate who supports many of President Bush's worst policies. That Mrs Clinton will now carry on with her campaign is not just probable but essential. For the voting in Pennsylvania confirms that she has a much better chance than Mr Obama of winning the White House for the Democrats. Anatole Kaletsky The Times

To Americans, a candidate's stance on foreign policy is a proxy for his or her character, says Simon Jenkins. And war is generally seen as a necessary part of life. The mistakes made by America in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen from Washington as accidents in necessary wars, as they might have been in Britain in the 19th century. And they seem very, very far away. Obama's weakness is that he seems unknown, not quite American, exotic, elitist, intelligent. He can write his own books, but can he hack his own war? His capacity to transform America's self-image and world image is colossal. But to do so he must confront America's atavistic love affair with war, and that will be hard.   Simon Jenkins The Guardian
Alexander Cockburn: Hillary soldiers on
US Election 2008 latest

Obama’s sneering comments about the small-town working class might end his chance of power, says Janet Daley. Unlike in Britain, where the opinions of ordinary people are held in pretty much open contempt, in the US (which takes mass democracy very seriously indeed) they are treated with immense, electorally significant respect. That is why Mr Obama's remarks were jaw-dropping stuff in the course of a presidential election: no politician with serious ambitions ever, ever insults the great mass of small-town, working-class America. What Mr Obama did was to alienate, perhaps irrevocably, the constituency known as "Reagan Democrats", which is made up of much the same sort of voters who made it possible for Margaret Thatcher to win three election victories: working-class people who understood that their best interests were not served by Left-wing paternalism or class war but by the freeing up of economic opportunity. Janet Daley Daily Telegraph

For no obvious reason Hillary Clinton once claimed her parents named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, even though she was born more than five years before the mountaineer's ascent of Everest, when he was known by almost no one outside New Zealand, says Gerard Baker. In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire [on a visit to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996]. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent. Gerard Baker The Times
Three blind mice vie for the presidency

There is not one American president to be voted into office but two, says Simon Jenkins. One belongs to domestic America but the other belongs to the world. The first president is America's business, the one most voters have in mind. The globalised president is a different matter. This leader must represent America's values - and consequent actions - everywhere that is touched by American policy. Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Israelis, Pakistanis, Colombians, Brazilians, Russians, Chinese have no means of saying yes or no to decisions taken in Washington that may intimately affect their families, their security, their jobs and prospects. Nobody accounts to them or invites them to any caucus. Few of them enjoy democratic privileges even in their own countries. Yet the next president of the United States can mean life or death. Simon Jenkins Sunday Times
People: Why Samantha Power was forced to resign
US election blog

The matter of maturity and experience is John McCain's biggest gift to the Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination, notes Anatole Kaletsky. An Obama-McCain contest would be seen as a match of inexperience against old age. Mr Obama hopes to win this competition by invoking the spirit of John F. Kennedy. What he forgets, however, is that Kennedy was swept to power on the crest of the baby boom, when the largest group of voters was in its twenties. Today these boomers are in their sixties or seventies - and will not take kindly to the charge that Mr McCain is too old to be president. Given the high propensity to vote among the elderly, this election will not be decided by a baby boom but by a senility surge. Anatole Kaletsky The Times
US election blog

Not many would bet on Hillary, once nominated, beating McCain, says Jonathan Freedland. The simple presence of her name on the ballot would unite and galvanise Republicans more effectively than anything McCain could say or do himself. Obama by contrast could reframe the entire contest, presenting McCain as, yes, a great hero - but from an era that has passed. Yet to have that chance he has to first win the nomination, and that might be harder for him than would be winning the presidency itself. Going negative erodes his defining positive message; doing nothing allows Hillary to paint him as weak, potential snack-food for the waiting wolves of the Republican party. So this is the Democrats' plight. In a year that should be theirs, they are caught between a potential winner who can't seem to win - and a probable loser who just refuses to lose. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
Alexander Cockburn: a great day for John McCain

Obama has to find a way to seize the offensive again, says Michael Tomasky. The Clinton campaign has shown that they'll hit hard and nothing is out of bounds. The Obama campaign can't quite go there. A man attacking a woman risks looking like a bully and making Clinton look "vulnerable", which is her sweet spot. The result is that a couple of Clinton's basic themes have gone inexplicably unchallenged. She really shouldn't be able to get away with counting 35 years of her adult life as valuable experience while reducing Obama's adult life to "one speech". But changing the dynamic of this conversation means that Obama has to start digging inside those 35 years, say her years at the Rose Law Firm, which weren't precisely the most civically uplifting of her life. Michael Tomasky Guardian Unlimited
McCain sews up nominations as Democrats self-destruct

The same morally simple narrative that hails Barack Obama as Luke Skywalker, bursting out of America's Death Star, is beginning to portray John McCain as a kind of Darth Vader, says Gerard Baker. There's a danger that the presidential contest will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist. Instead of being the welcome break with America's recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi. Gerard Baker The Times
The mushroom cloud that hangs over McCain
US Election 2008

Barack Obama's wife said that the success of her husband's campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country, writes Gerard Baker. This reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. Though he talks with great eloquence about the future, Obama sounds for all the world like one of the long line of Democrats from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis, who became history by espousing policies and striking a rhetorical pose that was well out of the mainstream of American politics. Gerard Baker The Times
Obama and the West Wing
Obama surges past floundering Clinton

John McCain will be 72 come polling day, notes Tim Hames The chance that he might die in office is there and will be discussed. Whoever he selects to be a potential VP has to be perceived as capable of serving as commander-in-chief at a moment's notice. An old-fashioned, tactical vice-presidential pick will not therefore be sufficient. Alighting on a man who rejects the theory of evolution (Mike Huckabee) will not do, nor will taking a Governor like Charlie Crist or Tim Pawlenty, just because they might help to carry their home state. America has a long tradition of looking to military leaders in times of turmoil. McCain should be audacious, bold and reach for a man who will reinforce his assertion that national security is the central theme in this election. That choice should be General David Petraeus, the greatest military thinker of his generation. Tim Hames The Times
US Election 2008

Consider the exit poll from California, says Gerard Baker. Hillary Clinton's largest single demographic voting bloc was those who did not complete a high school education, where she won 82 per cent, against just 15 per cent for Barack Obama. Among voters whose voting choice is not based on identity politics, Mr Obama's supporters are the latte liberals. These are the people for whom Starbucks, with its $5 cups of coffee and fancy bakeries, is not just a consumer choice but a lifestyle. They not only have the money. They share the values. They live by all those little quotes on the side of Starbucks cups about community service and global warming. For these voters the defining emotion is hope. Mrs Clinton is the candidate of what might be called Dunkin' Donut Democrats. They do not have money to waste on multiple-hyphenated coffee drinks. Gerard Baker The Times
Romney out of race, Huckabee next?

The very symbolism of selecting a female president or a black president demands that the office-holder be above scandal. Hillary Clinton is not. The Clinton and Obama speeches on Tuesday night were worlds apart: one smug and plodding, one soaring and at ease. In Bill's time, the ruthlessness of the Clinton machine was softened by his genuine interest in people. But Mrs Clinton doesn't seem to like people so much. She says that she toughed it out against Republican attacks over many years, unlike the callow Obama. But "better the devil you know" seems a gauche sales pitch when the country seems to yearn for a new politics, and Mr Obama's offer of a jump into the dark is lit by braziers of hope. Camilla Cavendish The Times
Alexander Cockburn: Super Tuesday plunges both parties into civil war
US Election special

Obama's Super Tuesday-night speech quite literally told a story, almost a biblical narrative, about change spreading across the land. About how "what began as a whisper in Springfield soon carried across the cornfields of Iowa, where farmers and factory workers, students and seniors stood up in numbers we have never seen before". Stirring stuff. But there's another way to tell the same story. It would go something like this: "What began as a whisper on YouTube soon carried across the tall sheets of the New York Times…" The medium is not the message, but media and politicians are locked in a systemic clinch, out of which a triumphant narrative is eventually born. Timothy Garton Ash The Guardian
Barack Obama and the rule of three

Super Tuesday in America was also Fat Tuesday, but if anyone was expecting to gorge on the fruits of a decisive victory in the US presidential race they were out of luck. For the Democrats, it looked more like a slightly delayed Groundhog Day – yet another day that failed to resolve the tussle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the tightest battle for the party’s nomination in several decades. On the Republican side, the contest edged closer towards what has seemed nearly inevitable for the last couple of weeks – the steady, somewhat reluctant coronation of John McCain. Mitt Romney’s failure represents a stunning defeat not just for him but for the archpriests of the conservative movement. Gerard Baker Times Online
Super Tuesday plunges both parties into civil war

Being instinctively connected to the hopes of a generation is a much bigger thing than experience, writes Andrew O’Hagan. What Barack Obama delivered in 2004 wasn't just a speech, it was a clarion call, and it made people feel America could be dignified again. Obama loves his country, but he knows it has become a war-mongering nation in a state of corporate stupefaction. Ordinary people don't feel proud, they don't feel spoken to, they don't feel included, and Obama knows how to make people feel that change is an essential part of growth. He is a young yet old kind of Democrat for a new kind of age, which is why people talk of Kennedy when they hear him. He can inspire people to consider not only their rights but their responsibilities. Andrew O’Hagan Daily Telegraph
American Election 2008

The belief that both Obama and McCain have a serious problem in that they are "outsiders" - mavericks who have rebelled against the expectations of their party machines and faithful foot soldiers – is a misconception, says Janet Daley. In Britain to be a maverick or a chronic rebel is seen as a sign of immaturity at best, and instability at worst. To be unclubbable, to fail to play the game, is fatal to high ambition: at best, the perennial outsider who will not compromise his personal principles can survive on the margins, as a sideshow to the main event. But in the US, such bloody-minded individualism is seen as having the right stuff: this is, after all, a nation of rebellious colonials and intrepid migrants. When the outsider status is applied to Washington, it is particularly potent. Janet Daley Daily Telegraph
People: Maria Shriver turns out for Obama

Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and even Mahatma Gandhi: the figures with whom Barack Obama is compared are worrying ones, writes William Rees-Mogg. All four were charismatic figures who claimed to lead their nations in a new and idealistic way. What they also had in common is that they were assassinated. Such men attract the hatred of those who fear and resent their influence. When General Colin Powell was offered the Republican nomination in 1996, his wife persuaded him to reject it, on the grounds that he would be exposed to the assassination threat. Mrs Powell may have been right. The role of the first black president of the United States will be a dangerous one. William Rees-Mogg The Times
US Election 2008
Caroline passes on the sword of Camelot

The Clinton relationship, according to Sally Bedell Smith's For Love of Politics is less like a traditional marriage and more like a vast and successful corporation that dominates the business of American politics, writes Gerard Baker. For eight years Bill was the President and Chief Executive Officer while Hillary was the top manager. When he left office, Hillary moved up to the CEO's suite and Bill took over as non-executive chairman. Now, the country is being invited to accept another takeover offer from Clinton Incorporated. And so when the upstart young black senator from Illinois attempted to lead something of a shareholders' revolt against the proposal, he met the full force of the Clintons' wrath. Bill Clinton has been unleashed on the Obama candidacy like an ageing but still ferocious pitbull let loose on an elegant but slightly diffident Great Dane. Gerard Baker The Times

A lazy, hazy myth has arisen out of the mists of New Hampshire and South Carolina, writes Johann Hari. Across the pan-Atlantic press, the grizzled 71-year-old Vietnam vet, John McCain, is being billed as the Republican liberals can live with. He is "a bipartisan progressive", "a principled hard liberal", "a decent man" – in the words of liberal newspapers. But McCain has distinguished himself most as an über-hawk on foreign policy. To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: at a recent rally, he sang "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," to the tune of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann. He says North Korea should be threatened with "extinction". McCain has mostly opposed using US power for humanitarian goals, jeering at proposals to intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia – but he is very keen to use it for great power imperialism. Johann Hari The Independent
US Election 2008 blog

Conservatives in America are suffering from a psychosis, a McCain Derangement Syndrome, writes Gerard Baker. Last week a writer in the National Review said that Mr McCain was not a conservative because he opposes torture of terrorist suspects. Quite how the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower came to erect a "Torturers Only" sign at its gate will be a matter for historians. Gerard Baker The Times
US Election 2008: The First Post blog

The thin catalogue of complaints against the Clinton campaign from the Obama campaign were unfounded, manipulative and self-indulgent, writes Alice Miles. At best they called into question the oversensitivity of Mr Obama, at worst they showed him willing to play a divisive race card that is damaging the entire Democratic Party and tarnishing a great and historic electoral contest for the centre Left. The whole episode shows that he isn't tough enough for the White House. For since when has referring to somebody's past admitted drug use - if indeed the Clinton campaign ever intended to do that, which is far from clear - been a racial slur? It is the Obama campaign who are equating drugs with blacks, not the Clinton one. Alice Miles The Times
Democrats race for black vote

The Democratic primary battle looks like all the other contests from the past 30 years, writes Gerard Baker. These have tended to be between one candidate, the idealist, the outsider, leading an insurgency against the pragmatist, the party establishment. It was Edward Kennedy against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Gary Hart against Walter Mondale in 1984, Jesse Jackson against Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bill Bradley against Al Gore in 2000 and Howard Dean against John Kerry in 2004. Every time the pragmatist has won. Though Obama differs from previous insurgents from the party’s Left, and appeals to moderates and even Republicans, the result in New Hampshire is an ominous indication that he’ll struggle to take on a candidate who can so effectively mobilise the party’s traditional base. Gerard Baker The Times
US Election 2008: news, analysis and virals from the campaign

The two parties are engaged in a kind of double blind-date, says Jonathan Freedland. Democrats and Republicans are picking a candidate with no idea who that person will face come November. In 2004 Democrats knew they needed someone to take on George Bush and that fact led, in part, to their selection of John Kerry. Now both sides are squaring up against a question mark. If John McCain becomes the Republican nominee, Obama would surely look woefully inexperienced against him. But in a direct contest McCain’s candid, man-against-the-machine style would contrast well with the often robotic, technocratic Clinton, too. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
Election Blog

In the space of just 24 hours - a huge number of voters, thousands of them, changed their minds. Why? It was mostly a rebellion by women voters against the media, says Michael Tomasky. Most major media outlets had written Clinton's obituary and could barely conceal their joy in doing so. And voters, especially women voters, said: not so fast. This has happened before. In the fall of 2000, she debated her opponent in the race for the New York senate seat she won that year. The opponent, Rick Lazio, strode over to her podium and wagged his finger in her face. The media loved the moment, thought Lazio looked tough and declared him the winner. In reporting with glee on Clinton's alleged comeuppance, they helped drive voters, mostly but not wholly women, into Clinton's camp. Michael Tomasky Guardian Unlimited
Women to the rescue as Hillary bounces back

So Barack Obama is described (like Reagan) as making Americans feel good about themselves, as though the US was electing a therapist, not a president, says David Aaronovitch. It's an appropriate guide, maybe, for choosing a constitutional monarch or a symbolic president, in which the glad-handling, ambassadorial role is the most important. Presidents, however, inherits a world full of Musharrafs, Ahmadinejads, climate changes, economic slowdowns, unemployment, housing slumps and other problems unsusceptible to therapeutic generational transcendence. David Aaronovitch The Times
New Hampshire debates: who said what

For most Americans, writes Tim Hames, the Republican bun-fight at the Iowa caucuses was a spat between some Baptist hick they had barely heard of and a millionaire Mormon who was faintly more familiar. If the Democrats were playing pure Hollywood – a kind of Nicole Kidman takes on Will Smith epic – then all the Republicans were serving up to the nation was The Dukes of Hazard versus the Osmonds. Tim Hames The Times
US Election 2008

The Republicans, writes Johann Hari, will vote for men with wildly conflicting visions to be their candidate for President: the plastic Mormon-marketeering of Mitt Romney, the theocratic fever of Mike Huckabee, the near-anarchism of Ron Paul. After seven years of Bush, American conservatism is coming apart at the seams, dazed and foggy about where to go now. Johann Hari The Independent
Election Notes

Hillary Clinton has become, at 60, absolutely formidable, writes Timothy Garton-Ash. Superbly briefed on every issue, almost word perfect, scarcely ever putting a foot wrong, tried and tested as few human beings have been. At a cattle auction site in Ames, Iowa, the other day, she joked that they could "look inside [her] mouth", as farmers do with cattle, if it helped them to make up their minds. And the truth is that if anyone in the world has been "looked inside the mouth", it is the Clintons. Timothy Garton-Ash The Guardian
Race for the White House: the candidates

It's pretty astonishing really, writes Michael Tomasky. We're at the tail end of a failed presidency, and the people running to succeed it are promising to continue its failed policies. The Republican party has three interest groups – the neocons run foreign policy, the theocons run social policy and the radical anti-taxers run domestic policy. Until forces inside the Grand Old Party rise up to challenge these interests, any Republican administration will be roughly as conservative as Bush. Michael Tomasky The Guardian
Notes on the US Presidential Election

2008 will be a vintage year for US presidential politics, writes Jonathan Freedland. Weirdly, the main candidates are all deeply flawed. Obama is young and inexperienced; Edwards, with his $400 haircut, has an authenticity problem; Hillary is seen as establishment and robotic. Among the Republicans, McCain, at 70, is old and an advocate of an unpopular war in Iraq. Giuliani has led a Technicolor personal life that might alienate him from a family-values electorate. Mitt Romney is a Mormon seeking evangelical votes. Then there's warm, folksy Mick Huckabee, who suggested in 1992 that people with AIDS should be quarantined. Whoever wins, there should be a move away from the Bush era, overshadowed by the war on terror, towards a politics that examines different questions and transcends old partisan dividing lines. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
'Oprah effect' leaves Democrat voters cold

"People of Britain: congratulations are in order. You have now joined ferret owners, sidewalk artists... publicly funded attorneys for poor people... a couple of innocent black men shot dead by the police... and of course, Hillary Clinton as objects of Rudy Giuliani's demagoguery and wrath." Giuliani's claims that only 44 per cent survived prostate cancer under socialised medicine, lifted from a faulty seven-year-old article in a conservative medical journal, show a man who lies with staggering impunity. "And immunity, because in a culture where a sense of history is largely limited to remembering certain stirring television images," he is the mayor Americans recall running from the rubble of September 11. Giuliani is "Dick Cheney with better aim. Consider yourself warned". Michael Tomasky Guardian

"Having spent a lifetime insisting that women should be treated exactly the same as men, Mrs Clinton has been quite brilliant at exploiting her femininity… Now she's under attack from a whole gang of men, and tactically speaking it's a no-lose situation for her. If her opponents play tough, she can shrink and look like the intimidated woman beset by brutal men. If they treat her with kid gloves - all gallant forbearance and courtly deference - she can open up a can of whoop-ass on them as eagerly as a dockside bully." Maybe she picked up a trick or two from Margaret Thatcher, who "could beguile any opponent with her feminine wiles even as she demonstrated repeatedly that she was the proud owner of the largest pair of steel balls in the Cabinet". Gerard Baker The Times
Hillary's short fuse

Who should one support in the US election? "I hum and I brood and then to my amazement a face seems to form in my mind's eye. She's got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital; and as I snap out of my trance I slap my forehead in astonishment. How can I possibly want Hillary?" Did she not play the role of First Lady "like a mixture between Cherie Blair and Lady Macbeth, stamping her heel, bawling out subordinates and frisbeeing ashtrays at her erring husband?" Her husband's the reason to back her: "I somehow feel that with Bill at her side, with all his experience, and with his well-stocked mind spooling through the options, America is less likely to do something rash and counter-productive." Boris Johnson Daily Telegraph
Pic of the Day

Whether or not it was arson, the Californian fires only spread so far because of the exceptional drought. So will this push climate change up the American political agenda? The problem is that presidential candidates need the backing of the oil companies. Giuliani is fuelling his campaign by backing controversial oil-drilling in Alaska. "Even Al Gore had to beg for cash from Exxon-Mobil and Chevron in order to run for president, and he neutered his environmentalism accordingly…Dirty money in US politics is leading to dirty smoke-streaked skies across California." Johann Hari The Independent
California burning

"Have Americans tired of conservatism, or have they merely tired of corrupt and incompetent conservatism?"  The answer to this question may provide evidence of the type of broader historical shift that occurred in Britain in 1945, or when Reagan was voted into the White House by a landslide in 1980.  "Movement conservatism", born in the 1950s, has led to governance that most average people enjoyed.  Reagan cut taxes, stared down the Russkies and created a sense of patriotism. Newt Gingrich, in the House of Representatives, cleaned out the "Augean stables of Democratic Washington."  Then came Bush. The results of the 2008 elections will judge between his failures and the deeper failings of the ideology that he represents. Michael Tomasky The Guardian

"While the Democratic race is turning into an extended coronation for the Sun Queen, the Republican contest is a fog of competitive chaos." Though the party looks certain to face heavy defeat next year, candidates keep coming forward: it may be "the first known case in political history of rats auditioning to take the helm of a sinking ship." The problem is, there's little evidence of fresh thinking within the Republican Party. "They seem to be staking everything on the assumption that, as unpopular as their party may be, voters will come flocking back when they start contemplating the imminent presidency of Hillary Clinton." Gerard Baker The Times