US Democratic primaries and the power of nightmares

The tone in Berlin is completely different from what one reads in the US press.
..."The candidate is nevertheless unsettling because he remains strangely intangible, elastic and hollow".
"George W. Bush played the nice guy too. And look what happened."

However, everyone agrees that Hillary hasn't got political talent.
One explanation I offered on a smart article about the Iowa victory was that US citizens were probably overcoming years of fear and finally domesticating their fears by electing a black man with a Muslim father.

In the wake of Obama’s early breakthrough in the primaries I let my imagination wander and I had this intuition: what if the fear mongering against Blacks and Muslims, added to an old culture of fear in the US, is producing exactly the contrary of what it is meant to produce; people getting tired from being fearful, and getting tired from hearing stories about this different mystified other, will elect a nice version of this other to lead them ? That’s a powerful antidote to fear. O.K. I am only being intuitive and irrational here…but today’s politics in the US is all about irrationality and in irrationality there is unpredictability of behaviour…For now, I like to think that this is what motivated the voters in Iowa.

Reading the press from Berlin, I still think that Obama's choice is irrational, not because he is Black but because he is unexperienced and charming. And I think we should not underestimate the power of irrational choices in Politics when campaign are led by a one word slogan and thirty seconds commercials. Another irrational factor might be the power of self-congratulation to lift up the spirits of a nation defeated outside and inside by an immoral war, an immoral leadership and poor economic perspectives.

Obama's double magic

NH Primary: Fear of recession boosting Obama and Edwards.