Half-baked political commentary - a perfect start

Well then... first decision is whether this is going to be a public or private blog ... as in, do I let you guys know who I am and where I live? doesn't seem like a very good idea but then you can never assume that your identity isn't known by somebody, somewhere - so let's treat this like a diary that is likely to be left on a train and could be returned by a perfect stranger or the guy next door.

Topic for the day, all round the world, is the U.S. election. Now I have an instinctive bias toward the left side of politics - being a reasonably well-educated, reasonably comfortable, member of the sheltered middle-class in a lucky country, I can afford to be idealistic and favour political parties that say they will look after social justice ahead of purely economic concerns. Being cynical enough to describe myself like that, I hope you'll realise that I'm not likely to be too starry-eyed about politicians from either the right or the left!

But what's fascinating about this American election is the way it seems suddenly to have captured the popular imagination by virtue of one of the candidates being a man of African-American descent - not only is there a sense of history being made on racial grounds but, more broadly still, a sense that this candidate might actually represent the People, rather than the Powers that be. Not just black people, a whole range of ordinary people - working class, middle class; people are turning out in their millions to vote for a well-educated and youthful President whose persona signals a break from the past. To the outside and not particularly well-informed eye, it looks like an injection of demos into democracy and a shift from the kind of top-heavy plutocracy that both sides of politics in many western nations seem to favour.