A NO-BRAINER: WHO FOLLOWS the NO-BRAINER?

It’s a mug who predicts election results – who predicts pretty much anything in this cockamamie world. But after Barack Obama’s speech and John McCain’s left-field pick of a vice presidential candidate who, at first blush, looked a mistake on every count, it was hard to resist the feeling that we’d witnessed the 48 hours that sealed the presidency.

Now I’m less sure. The American electorate is a terribly conservative animal. It doesn’t follow inspiration with great zeal. The legend of Jack Kennedy has obscured the fact that he almost didn’t win the electoral battle of 1960 with Richard Nixon. This conservatism, paradoxically, may be McCain’s greatest fear and why he chose the governor of Alaska, to shore up the conservative core vote. As it is too late for him to shrug off his image as a “mavrick”– to quote a prominent banner at the convention – McCain is only being realistic if he glories in that image. Sarah Palin brings to his ticket all those certainties he cannot so persuasively call down: small-town blinkers, God, apple pie and the American way.

That she is a woman will, it seems to me, pay diminishing returns (and anyway alienate as many reactionaries as it delights), unless the Democrats – and especially bluff Joe Biden in the televised vice presidential debate – make the mistake of patronising her. But to suggest that Palin offers a home for the disaffected Hillary vote is absurd and the most patronising notion of all, that the “women’s vote” is some monolith that blindly supports a female candidature. Senator Clinton’s electorate in the primaries will not have contained very many bear-hunting, evangelical, pro-drilling anti-abortionists. Such women would already be Republicans. Besides, Palin may be a successful woman but she’s no sister. “This is America” she told the convention “and every woman can walk through every door of opportunity”. Oh, get real, Sarah.

Beyond the party faithful, her hockey mom/PTA shtik won’t have legs. In fact, she’s exhausted it already, unless no one is steering her away from self-parody, her greatest danger. Saturday Night Live would have a field day with her, especially if they could get some witty high-profile guest to do her: Sandra Bullock, say. And what is with the hippie names of her children: Bristol, Track, Summer, Liberty, Joaquin, Rain and River? That’s begging for parody. There is something completely weird about the way the boy who got her daughter up the duff has been embraced and brought into the Republican fold like he’s some war hero. But there’s no mileage for the Democrats in a god-fearing woman’s daughter having an illegitimate child these days. If Dick Cheney could smile through his daughter’s lesbianism, they all know that ‘family’ stuff is off-limits, even, it seems, Mr Palin’s drink-driving conviction.

In her convention speech, Governor Palin said something wholly false and unworthy and the Democrats should nail her for it: “Here’s how I look at the choice Americans face in this election: in politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers and then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change”. That kind of reversal is an age-old rhetorical trick that sounds smart because it sounds poetically precise. The Democrats should challenge her to spell out exactly what (and who) she means by it, if indeed she means anything at all. She has no lack of chutzpah: she can be taken down a peg or two.

I’ve looked at Palin’s speech because in many ways it is the most important one. Obama and McCain both reached some 40 million viewers, astonishing ratings that give some evidence of the degree to which the race has compelled the public. Fewer Americans watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the final of American Idol or this year’s Oscars. But Palin attracted almost as high figures, far more than Biden or indeed either Clinton.

She is the surprise package of this election, someone none of us had heard of a week ago and now can’t ignore. If she becomes deputy to a president of 72 who has a history of skin cancer, she could herself be president before we know it. That’s one of the craziest aspects of the American system. It is almost true that anyone can be president. It is at least true that you don’t have to spend decades building bases and forming alliances like you do in most countries (admittedly in some of those countries the groundwork you do is in the military rather than the political world, before you lead a coup).

Good sense still clings to Obama making it. It remains clear that he galvanises audiences both in the flesh and on the screen. He speaks well: his convention speech was feisty, combative, ambitious, elegant and yes, inspirational. “It’s about you” he cried and McCain, presumably consciously in his own speech, echoed that: “I work for you”. McCain’s speech was far less accomplished and far less excitingly delivered, for all the ballyhoo in the hall. (I wondered if people were periodically chanting “Judas” but I think it was “hero”, a puerile chant. They were probably the same people who set out to undermine John Kerry’s military service credentials four years ago).

McCain comes across as too genial, so that his protestations of strength and courage seem to be protesting too much. But then maybe Americans like that and that’s why they elected Ronald Reagan and George W Bush rather than Jimmy Carter for a second term, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Kerry. To someone like me – a socialist sceptic – the signs that the Republican crowd held up looked pretty feeble: “Straight Talk”. It’s hardly “Give ‘em Hell, Harry”.

I still think it will be astonishing if McCain wins. It still sure is Obama’s to lose. But here’s a hostage that McCain offered to fortune, to be put by and read back to him if he does serve a term: “I’m not in the habit of breaking promises to my country and neither is Governor Palin. And when we tell you we’re going to change Washington and stop leaving our country’s problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count on it”. Well, many a new president, formerly a bit of a “mavrick”, has ridden a high horse into DC and soon found that actually there’s more power on the hill and in the departments and the lawyers’ offices and the lobbyists’ rollerdex and, especially, the financiers’ clout than he had ever imagined. And that goes for Obama as well as McCain. And once again you remember that, for all the talk about the president being “the most powerful man in the world”, nobody governs save by consent and most of that consent comes from the vested interests and the international capital that the candidates think they’re going into government to tame.