The President Elect

I have refrained from commenting on the US election until now.

I have to say that I didn't regard either candidate as someone I would choose for president. I recall Bob Hope talking of an earlier contest with the words , "The evil of two lessers." That was what I felt. As time has gone on I have warmed to the personality of John McCain - it was a pity it did not emerge earlier, but then we were relying on the BBC for coverage. I would still feel that he is too old. Obama is still a complete unknown to me. I know no more than I did months ago.

Barack Obama I regard worryingly. His lack of experience to deal with difficult issues like Iran, the wars and international terrorism makes me anxious. His party jibed that Sarah Palin was only one heartbeat away from power and was inexperienced , whereas he has only to survive until January to have it, and he too is very inexperienced.

Obama has a good rhetorical style, though it does tend to be of one kind - for a crowded open air meeting. What he will be like on the more intimate circumstances of an address on television, I have no idea.

Perhaps my largest single anxiety is that we do not know what his policies will be, apart from asides about redistribution and medicare, all we know is that he is for change.

And the Americans have bought the message of change. They have bought it with their hearts rather than their minds. They really feel that he is going to change the US and also the wider world. In many ways it is 1997 over again, with Tony Blair making vague promises to all and sundry, some promises conflicting, which the British people bought, and to be honest some are still glad they bought. The British electors wanted change, any change, from the disappointing later years of the Conservatives.

So I think that Obama will have a honeymoon period, and with control of both houses he will have little excuse if he fails. The Clintons tried to do something about the poor, - in fact in some ways the sub-prime crisis resulted from his attempts to help the poor, and they tried and failed to produce a universal system of health care. All this over eight years, - Obama will begin with a recession and the fall-out from the credit crunch. If he manages to deal with this reasonably quickly, he must then turn to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then global warning. He would be a superman if simultaneously he revolutionised health care and re-distributed from rich to poor, or rather from middle rich to poor.

I wish him well, but I have niggling doubts whether he will be able to make good his promises. The Democrats in their euphoria, like NuLabour, feel that irreversible change has happened and that they will be in power for 25 years. It will take some solid groundwork by the Republicans to get back in the next 8 years. There was disunity, and McCain the outsider did not always get the support he needed. They will have to re-group from a position of powerlessness.