I think this is my favourite photo from the US presidential election. Do I feel sorry for these fine, upstanding supporters of the Republican Party? Not for one cotton-pickin minute!
These are just a few of the people who tried time and again to undermine Barack Obama in his first term. They claimed he wasn't American-born and therefore not entitled to be president. Donald Trump demanded Obama's birth certificate be made public and still refused to accept it was real when it was published. And still the attacks went on: Obama was a socialist, a dictator, a Nazi, a Muslim, a communist, a Kenyan! They were so determined to oppose the introduction of Obama's healthcare plan that they told the US public our NHS allowed doctors to let elderly people die. They built up a war chest of billions of dollars to fight his re-election - sums of money beyond the reach of almost all US citizens.
But guess what? The Republicans lost. Again. Obama is back for 4 more years. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned by the Republican Party. They have been so unable to come up with credible candidates for office that they offered US citizens Mitt Romney, a man for whom the word flip-flopping was invented.
And this was his vice president:
The Republican Party has steadily driven US politics further and further to the right so much so that the expression 'lunatic fringe' now seems to describe the mainstream members of the party. Can the party recover? Only if it takes steps to appeal to women, blacks, Latinos, young people, the poor.
Why am I so interested in US politics? Because here in the UK we have a government partly formed from people who seem to imagine everything Amurrican is good and worth imitating. I hope a shift closer to the centre by the Republican Party will help the Conservatives to re-think their approach to - for example - healthcare, education, social security. Because I live in a part of the UK that is largely out of step with the present government.
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