Matthew Norman: Passion, drama and democracy

You have the advantage of me. Obama gave his convention speech a few hours ago, framed by those curious Attic columns in a Denver grid iron stadium, and writing yesterday afternoon I haven't the foggiest what he said or, perhaps more significantly, how he said it... with the soaring, lyrical cadences of the preacher man; the cerebral guise of the law professor who spoke so brilliantly about race; as a hybrid of the two; or as someone else entirely.

I have my hopes and hunches, all outdated and doubtless ridiculed by events, but above all the suspicion that once the snap judgements – that the speech a) unquestionably clinched him the White House and b) blew his chances to smithereens – have come to look a shade hysterical, any sharp movement in the polls will evaporate and little, if anything, will have changed.

Admittedly no oration in memory has been so eagerly awaited. If Jesus Himself returned and set a date for Sermon of the Mount II: This Time It's For Keeps, the level of anticipation wouldn't come close. Yet however eloquent, stirring and epic, big set-piece speeches seem not to influence American elections much, let alone decide them. Politics, as Bill Clinton recently reminded us, is a brutal combat sport, and it is in the hand-to-hand battle of televised debates that all the transformative power lies.

Everyone is aware of the received wisdom that Richard Nixon's sweaty top lip cost him the White House in 1960, despite radio listeners scoring the bout in his favour, and everyone recalls Ronald Reagan's folksily condescending put down of Jimmy Carter ("Oh, there you go again") as the catalyst that began to turn a tight race into a rout. But who can remember a convention speech that radically affected an election, there being no element of combat in standing on a dais and spouting forth to your most fanatical supplicants?

One convention speech those of us lucky enough to watch it live will never forget is the one with which Barack Obama announced himself four years ago. If he dwelt on how unlikely it struck a black guy with a funny foreign name to be there then, perhaps it's worth briefly reflecting, inured to the bizarreness as we've become, on how utterly extraordinary it is that the ingénue of 2004 spoke a few hours ago as the favourite to win the presidency. It may also be worth reminding ourselves, so gloomy and defeatist has the aura around him become, that he is still an odds on change, albeit a less warm one than he was.

The cause of this modest but alarming decline is the subject of intense debate, and several theories are routinely advanced. There's the heightened relevance of John McCain's alleged foreign policy advantage since the eruption in Georgia; all the Republican attack ads; the refusal of the terminally pantsuited to accept Hillary's defeat; and those lingering doubts about the Obamas' apple pie Americanness which Michelle tried so hard to assuage this week. And then, of course, there is racism.

There may be something in some or all of these, but right now it doesn't feel like our place to be affecting too much outrage over the latter. When you live in the glasshouse in which Paul Boateng remains the most successful elected black politician in British history, you want to be cautious about throwing too many stones across the Atlantic. What is indicated, in fact, is a general sense of humility, hard though that emotion comes to Her Britannic Majesty's loyal subjects, because if there is one unavoidable lesson from the past year or so since, it is that the American political system is incomparably superior to our own.

Its limitations are enormous, as are those in every nation which confers the portentous title of "democracy" on the inevitably flawed process of choosing between two potential leaders every few years. But its strengths are colossal too, and chief among these is the sheer vibrancy. The passion with which the people of Iowa kick-started the merriment in early January has no more wavered than the high drama which crescendoed again this week, thanks to Hillary's well-rehearsed spontaneous storming of the stage to call for Obama's coronation by acclamation.

Whatever one might think of those Clintons, and a more chilling pair of amoral horrors you couldn't wish to encounter, they are immense characters. So, with his compelling personal history, is grouchy old John McCain. So too, beyond question, is Barack Obama. They are political titans, all of them, albeit everyone looks like a Gulliver when you live in a Lilliput like Britain, where a chap like David Miliband – a quite preposterous figure with his pipsqueak posturing in Ukraine – is regarded as a potential saviour of an atrophying ruling party.

If Barack Obama has made one serious mistake, with hindsight it was the grandstanding foreign tour that played so wonderfully outside the USA and so poorly within. Its failure domestically was due, I suspect, not so much because he came across as vainglorious and presumptuous, although to some degree he probably did, but more because of the sense it transmitted of Europeans telling Americans who they should make their president. They won't take that sort of advice from anyone, and rightly not. It is their affair whom they prefer, however much their preference impinges on the rest of the world, and a cussed "screw you, we'll vote for who we want" is a the perfectly healthy reflex reaction to perceived interference from beyond.

As much as anyone in Britain, I hope and pray they eventually go for Obama, and remain convinced they will, so long as he does no worse than very narrowly lose that indescribably crucial trio of TV debates. But it is not for any of us to lecture an impoverished dairy farmer in Wisconsin or a laid-off car plant worker in Detroit, or anyone else, as to which potential president is in his or her best interests. As the Democratic convention Barack Obama doubtless took by storm once again last night has underlined, a country that has allowed its political process to become as anaemic and schlerotic as ours has nothing to teach America about what passes for democracy, and everything to learn.

For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08

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