Justin Webb's America

A weekend of voting - and shopping

• Justin Webb
• 11 Feb 08, 03:42 AM GMT

This is best and wittiest take I have seen so far on the Maine victory for Obama and the Clinton spin of that and
the weekend's other setbacks for her campaign.

History will relate that the wheels came off the Clinton bus somewhere around the time she showed up in Florida for that fake victory speech (Florida delegates, remember, were not to be counted by the party because it was a rogue early primary and none of the candidates campaigned there) which even nervy CNN eventually came round to viewing as a bit fishy.

And was the bus sent careering over the ravine by this Sunday's Frank Rich column in the New York Times?

Rich is British. Not, so far as I know, by nationality, but by dint of his aggressive and occasionally tendentious not to say truth-embroidering style, which frankly as a Brit I find rather refreshing: it reminds me of columnists in the Old Country who can be relied on to search for facts to support a case only after making the case with both barrels blazing.

Anyway Rich is pretty devastating and (I am just guessing here) will have made some senior Clinton people pretty sick as they toyed with their kedgeree on Sunday morning.

Meanwhile I am back in DC after a weekend in New York during which I met almost the entire population of the UK, over for a quick shop.

Tourism is a funny kind of economic boon; it plainly works in the sense that it brings in money and boosts the service industries, but arguably (look at the UK over recent decades) it has a hollowing-out effect on the morale of a nation.

We want to exist at a deeper level than simply to be gawped at. Humans want to build things, create stuff. New York was not originally created for tourism neither can it be sustained by tourism. Manhattan is not America of course (my son's atlas says that New York is the "Cultural Capital" of the US - surely not?) but the influx of foreigners lured by cheap consumer goods almost all made in the Far East does not look to me like a sign that all is well with the US economy.

America should be expensive to visit; a shining shopping mall on a hill, not a bazaar. Not that I am complaining about the weakness of the dollar, I just hope the fabled ingenuity of American enterprise is up to the challenge of this century.

And that brings me to McCain/Huckabee.

I don't think so.

One knows nothing about economics (or so the Arizona senator used to say) and the other nothing about science (he alone among us is unrelated to the apes) - I cannot see a majority of Americans this year regarding that as progress, evolution, however charming the two men are.

Unless of course Hillary and Bill implode and take the whole Democratic Party down with them.

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