White woman v black man. One's got problems

By late tonight (Iranian gunboats permitting) Barack Obama could be the surf-away leader for the Democratic presidential nomination - carried there not so much on a wave, as in a gush. How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics - either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.

Mr Obama, wrote the usually super-sour Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, offers Americans “a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent West Wing sort of president”, and the struggle between him and Hillary Clinton is a battle between Love and Hate with Mrs C representing the other thing.

Andrew Sullivan, a well-known US-based liberal-right blogger, opined post-Iowa that “sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?”. In his view Mr Obama “has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back”. “A man who pardons the original sin of the slave and who holds up a mirror to America in which she is beautiful, multiracial and pragmatic,” commented a French newspaper.

Other writers projected into the Iowa caucus victory nothing less than an end to the “culture wars” and now tedious conflict between the opposing strands of the baby-boomer generation: the Haight-Ashbury hippies and the Rush Limbaugh rednecks. One usually sober Britisher seemed to suggest that the responsibility for the hatreds that have divided Americans socially rested almost entirely with two families: the Bushes and the Clintons. Now, with the help of galvanised youth, Mr Obama could transcend all this.

The parade is under the window and the urge is strong. Let's just remind ourselves that the youth didn't get Howard Dean there in 2004, won't vote in anything like the numbers their parents will, and the population is ageing. And let's put in a word for Hillary here, who - it seems to me - herself transcended all this '60s polarisation some time ago. Not that it matters, because it has become obvious in the past few days that its not just the Right that hates Mrs Clinton. These days even her good answers when debating are criticised - no, mocked - for their supposed stridency.

When it comes to choosing people to rule over us, I have long suspected misogyny was even stronger than racism. Iowa has never elected a woman in a congressional or gubernatorial election. So sure, you can have the safe, smily, “witty”, mixed-race guy, but let's not go for the scary woman. Who wants to be pussy-whipped by a Glenn Close or Meryl Streep career bitch every time there's a State of the Union address? Shouldn't they really (oh, whisper it) be at home with the kids?

Then there is what might be thought of as the Blair-Brown dichotomy. As the early Tony Blair was (and David Cameron, to a lesser extent is), Mr Obama can be loaded with just about any expectation or hope. He's a changer, he's a healer, he's a radical, he's a moderate, he suspends the normal rules of politics. In this sense his great advantage is that no one knows what he is, and we are all therefore free to create our own Obama. Mrs Clinton's disadvantage turns out to be definition, because we all understand exactly what she is. In America, as here, we demand authenticity but we rarely reward it at election time, much preferring ambiguity.

So Mr Obama is described (like Reagan) as making Americans feel good about themselves, as though the US was electing a therapist, not a president. It's an appropriate guide, maybe, for choosing a constitutional monarch or a symbolic president, in which the glad-handing, ambassadorial role is the most important. Presidents, however, inherit a world full of Musharrafs, Ahmadinejads, climate changes, economic slowdowns, unemployment, housing slumps and other problems unsusceptible to therapeutic generational transcendence.

Unsusceptible, too, to waving the word “change” over it all. “I will end the war in Iraq,” Mr Obama states in his platform. “I will finish the fight against al-Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.”

How will he end the war in Iraq? What does he even mean by the phrase? Of course, he means he'll end it only for the Americans by “beginning immediately to remove our troops”. He will accomplish this by withdrawing “one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” But, in sunny expectation of the Iraq he will unilaterally leave behind, “he will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al-Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al-Qaeda”.

Where, you might ask, are the Iraqis in all this? And if this dogmatic determination not to recognise the successes of the recent troop surge is insufficient ground to suspect Mr Obama of overoptimism, then try: “Obama will secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years.”

Let,s not hold recent stupidities uttered by Mr Obama's principal foreign affairs spokesman on the issue of Pakistan against Barack himself. As president I am sure he'd fire the man. And if his domestic platform seems to consist of no tax rises (except, of course, for the very wealthy), an endless series of spending commitments, all finished off with the promise to obey “pay-as-you-go budgeting rules”, then at least we can hope that all this will be ironed out during the campaign.

But though Mr Obama has made one rather pathetic concession to economic nationalism - his sponsorship of the 2007 Patriot Employer Act, which gives tax credit to companies that increase their employment in the US relative to foreign countries - he has been refreshingly free of the populism that has disfigured this election. Unlike John Edwards on the Left and Mike Huckabee on the Right, Mr Obama has generally eschewed protectionism, has rejected anti-immigration policies, and - Iraq notwithstanding - is no isolationist.

Imperfect as she is, Hillary Clinton is also on the side of the global angels, and is super-competent and super-serious about the presidency. If she were loved, if she were a man, there would be no question about who should be nominated. But if she can't get over the vagina thing, and it were Mr Obama in November, then I would happily take him against any Republican, except, maybe, John McCain. Just don't expect me to gush.