We have a new conventional wisdom. Hillary is done for…again. The notion that Barack Obama has all but secured the Democratic nomination is hard to argue against.

For those of you who wish to see me discussing this in video format, here is the link.

One question I’m not asked on the video, is whether it is conceivable that Hillary will accept the number two spot on an Obama ticket?

I think she probably would: vice-president is more glamorous than Senator. But will she be offered it?

Obama’s people point out that - after a long campaign - the two candidates cordially loathe each other. They say he would prefer almost anybody rather than Hillary. But if Democractic grandees decide that the only way to heal the breach in the party is to have an Obama-Clinton ticket, they might just try and twist Senator Obama’s arm. He would resist, initially. But if the case were made repeatedly and insistently? Who knows, it just might happen.

American presidents are meant to have big ideas about the world: a “new frontier”, an “alliance for progress”, a “war on terror”. Unfortunately for the Democratic party the big idea that most animates their two would-be presidents – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – seems to be mutually assured destruction.

That has left the field open to Senator John McCain. The Republican is currently the only presidential candidate to champion a striking new idea about America’s role in the world. The world should pay attention, since the chances of Mr McCain winning the presidency are going up by the day.

Mr McCain’s big idea is for the formation of a “league of democracies” with America at its heart. In a recent speech in Los Angeles, he outlined a plan to “harness the vast power of more than 100 democracies”. This was not just a vague notion tossed out to fill a speech. Mr McCain has been banging on about the league of democracies – in public and in private – for more than a year. In another speech at the Hoover Institution last year, Mr McCain gave some concrete examples of what such a league might do. Essentially, it seems to be a means to get around the United Nations.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

This may be the laziest blog I have ever done. But I heartily recommend this splendid seven-minute video from Slate, summarising the Democratic presidential race so far.

And just to add a teensy bit of value of my own. I met a long-time Clinton adviser at an event in London today. His private take is that Obama has now locked up the nomination. Yes, the Reverend Wright stuff is incredibly damaging. But it’s too late to de-rail Obama now. He said that: “The Democratic elite decided a few weeks ago that Obama will be the nominee. And he will be. The trouble is that he can’t finish Clinton off. And that show’s he a weak candidate.”

I ran this past an Obama adviser whose reaction was - “We don’t think it’s over yet. We’ve thought that so many times. And we’ve been wrong.”

Why is the American presidential election such compelling viewing? Because it combines the formats of the games show, the talent contest, the television series and the sporting contest.

The early rounds of the primary elections have a structure that closely resembles The Weakest Link. We start with a large field of candidates. They are asked lots of questions on television. Then, one by one, the worst performers are eliminated.

The Weakest Link is one of the gentler games shows. As the election grinds onwards, it takes on aspects of some of the more desperate and humiliating talent contests, such as Girlicious and American Idol.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

I am delighted by this comment from “Paskalis” (a relative newcomer to the blog). So much so that I am lifting it out of the comments section on the Georgia post and giving it its very own entry.

I feel it would serve as an excellent epitaph for me. If there is not enough room on my tombstone for the entire comment, then I would accept just the second sentence:

“Your comments and insights are thoughtful, insightful and intelligent and have as much weight as a ripe banana on this planet of the apes.

“You have turned geopolitics into a parlour game for the enfeebled while the men are in another room smoking their cigars.”

A lively debate has broken out on the blog between Mary Cunningham and “Danny” about whether the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the current financial crisis. They go into much more detail than I am capable of, so I suggest that readers take a look.

But let me make one simple point. This crisis is taking place in the eighth year of the Bush presidency. It must have very deep roots indeed, for the Bush administration to bear no responsibility.

In my original post, I used the phrase that the crisis happened “on Bush’s watch”. As Samantha Power pointed out to me at our recent lunch, this is a highly ambiguous phrase. Power was wearing one of those irritating little charity bracelets. This was a green one, carrying the phrase - “Not on my watch.” She explained that this is apparently what President Bush had written in the margin of one of her own articles, on the Rwandan genocide.

But, said Power, nobody was quite sure what Bush had meant by this. Did he mean that he bore no responsibility for this terrible event, because it had all happened during the Clinton administration? Or was he promising that nothing like this would happen during the Bush presidency? Or had somebody simply placed the article on his watch - and it was a polite request for them to remove it?

Some people are good in a crisis. Unfortunately, President Bush isn’t one of them. His comments on the global financial crisis yesterday were the opposite of reassuring. The simian furrowing of the brow suggested deep confusion. The bland assertion that “our financial institutions are strong” defied credulity. He even thanked Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, for “working over the weekend”. Yes, that’s really going the extra mile, isn’t it?

Bush’s congratulations for Paulson have a nasty echo of his comments to the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, at the height of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco/tragedy - “Brownie, you are doing a heck of a job.”

Hurricane Katrina probably showcased Bush at his very worst. But, let’s face it, he didn’t exactly cover himself in glory on 9/11. It may have been the fault of the Secret Service, but the fact that the president simply disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the attack was pretty poor. True, Bush’s subsequent appearance with the New York firemen was effective. But, generally, this is not a man who exudes competence and leadership in a crisis.

As for the president’s legacy - what can one say? He was already likely to go down in history as one of the most ill-starred occupants of the Oval Office, because of the Iraq war. Now he risks having the next “great depression” on his watch. To combine the worst legacies of LBJ and Herbert Hoover - now that would be something.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday $27.95, 496 pages

Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t)
By Michael J. Gerson
Harper One $26.95, 320 pages

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again
By David Frum
Doubleday $24.95, 224 pages

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday $26, 336 pages

Ever since the “Reagan revolution”, conservative intellectuals have dominated the battle of ideas in American politics. But the success of Jonah Goldberg’s silly book, Liberal Fascism, suggests that American conservatism may now be in some intellectual trouble. The book has done well in the United States. It reached number three on The New York Times bestseller list. Yet it is dedicated to an absurd proposition – that American liberals are the direct ideological heirs of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. This is the kind of ya-boo politics that has deformed American talk radio for years. But it is depressing that you can get a bestseller out of such nonsense.

Goldberg is not a stupid man. A pundit and commentator, he writes fluently and occasionally amusingly – and he has read lots of books about fascism. The opening pages of his own work are a quasi-learned dissection of the central tenets of fascism. But the purpose of the book is not to understand fascism. It is to discredit American liberals. Goldberg piles example upon example, to draw harebrained comparisons between American liberals and fascists. Liberals buy organic food. But did you know that “Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey”? Well, I never.

Over the course of almost 500 pages, Liberal Fascism pursues a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead us to an overwhelmingly stupid question: “Was Bill Clinton a fascist president?” Surprisingly, the answer to this question is No. Clinton, it seems, wasn’t even good enough to deserve the label fascist: “To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified.”

The remainder of this book review essay can be read here. Comments can be made below.

Some people are too open for their own good. That was certainly how I felt after interviewing Samantha Power last week.

I had expected her, as a senior adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama, to be ultra-careful and to weigh every word. Not at all. She was open and amusing, willing to give long discursive answers on controversial subjects, happy to admit to doubts about her abilities to do a government job. I was charmed. But I left the lunch wondering whether she was really cut out for politics.

My doubts were swiftly and brutally borne out. Ms Power was on an exhausting book tour in Britain and giving scores of interviews. In one of them, with The Scotsman newspaper, she made an off-the-record comment suggesting Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, was a “monster”. Within hours she was forced to resign from the Obama campaign.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post your comments below.

So the race goes on. Hillary’s victories in Ohio and Texas are both embarrassing and pleasing for political pundits. Pleasing because this is fantastically exciting election - and now we well get some more of it. It’s like being told there will be an extra series of The Sopranos. Embarrassing - obviously - because once again the conventional wisdom has been turned on its head.

I did a BBC Radio programme yesterday morning in which it was all but assumed that the race was over - and it was clearly going to be Obama v McCain. To his credit my fellow guest, Robert Kagan, insisted that Hillary had a good shot of re-opening the race by winning both of last night’s primaries.

Since Kagan was right about that, let me also quote him on the question of presidential character and foreign policy. This is something that both the Clinton and McCain campaigns are going big on. McCain last night insisted that he is by far the most experienced candidate to deal with a foreign policy emergency. And the Clinton campaign has been running TV ads, showing Hillary answering an emergency 3am call at the White House. (more…)