Tuesday morning (GMT) and it isn’t over until the big one warbles.

Despite the polls, there are still a lot of unknowns — I’m not going to do a Donald Rumsfeld here, but I could. Apart from the so-called Bradley Effect, which may have lost some of its force, there’s also what I call, The Last Minute Panic Syndrome, which occurs when voters enter the polling station and think, “What do we know about this man? Can we trust that he’ll be up to it in these dangerous times?”

Don’t underestimate the latter — Bill Clinton (self-serving as ever) suggested that Obama is aware of it himself and obsessively phones every expert he can lay his hands on.

To declare an interest: before the primaries, I predicted here that John McCain would win. That was because I couldn’t see anyone better out there at the time.

It’s different now, of course. Barack Obama is definitely the quantum leap candidate, suggesting millennial change, at the very least in appearances and attitudes. If he isn’t elected, it will seem like a postponement of the inevitable, and, to many, an opportunity lost. There could be violence on the streets if it’s close.

My reservations about him are that he has unnervingly small experience, especially at this time of economic meltdown and other military dangers facing all of us. The world today is every bit as unstable as it was in 1914, 1930 and 1939. In comparison, 9/11 seems like a minor local incident — and look how Bush mishandled that.

Obama’s voting record in the Senate suggests he’s closer to Gordon Brown politically than any comparable American. Believe me, that is not a good sign. He may have a much stronger intellect that “W,” but in the present crisis conditions, any intellect is like an ice cube in a volcano.

But it has to be one or the other, McCain or Obama. Everyone else has been eliminated. The Veeps are all but forgotten in this moment of decision — even the gutsy Sarah Palin.

I’m not going to resile from my earlier prediction of McCain, although I know it could seem ridiculous by morning. The Mac may be back, but does he have the key to the croft?

If Obama does win, I predict he will bitterly disappoint his fervent evangelists who believe the world will change the moment he takes the oath. The appearance of the world may change, but the fundamentals will remain.

The next decade will be more like the 1930s than the 1980s. Obama himself may conclude in retrospect that he was unlucky to win when he did.

The conundrum though is, could he have reached the White House at any other time?

John Evans

When Sarah Palin came bounding into the world’s consciousness this week, like Annie Oakley riding shotgun on the Deadwood stage, those of us who don’t read the Guardian gave a big cheer. America had its own Margaret Thatcher at last.

Sarah Palin and mischievous daughter at her elbow

Since then the Rottweilers of the Left have been out to savage her every thought and action, even her family is not out of bounds. Barack Obama went 15 points ahead in the polls. It looked like John McCain had made a game-over error of judgement.

But, just as you could never keep Margaret Thatcher down for more than a moment, back came the exuberant Palin with a speech and a performance that left the Republican Convention in paroxysms of delight.

A heartbeat from the Presidency? Bring it on!

Already, she has developed such momentum that quiet-man Obama and his grey Kinnochio sidekick haven’t a hope in Hades of stopping her. This Alaskan pipeline goes all the way to the White House.

I’ve been forecasting a John McCain win in Syntagma since February and, although I’m not claiming victory yet, I’m more confident than ever that it’s hovering over the bag.

The Clintons must be livid. Hillary may have met her Nemesis — the woman who will become America’s first female President. Poetic justice is washing over Washington.

Now what does this tell us about the plight of the British grey ghost, Gordon Brown?

He would never have done what McCain did this week: chance everything on one bold throw of the dice. Fortune favours the brave and Gordon was not born to break the bank at Monte Carlo.

In extremis, the gambler’s instinct is the only card he has left to play. Fail to deploy it and the party’s over. McCain played his deftly and now looks a good bet for Pennsylvania Avenue in January.

Brown could go with dignity, of course, but not with honour, as Charles Clarke suggested yesterday. He has blown whatever honour he had when he signed the country away to a foreign power, against the wishes of its people, and ratted on his promise of a referendum he knew he would lose.

A recent university study suggests that people who daydream are more creative than those who don’t. Their reveries make new and unusual connections in their minds, releasing many more possibilities for action. Accountant types who spend their time studying statistics and facts limit themselves to what has been prepared for them.

The fact is, Gordon Brown doesn’t do brown studies — an old term for a reverie. He’s no daydream believer, so his words and decisions always lack originality, zing and bounce.

John McCain revealed this week that he can wave his wand and make magic. He’s got his opponents in a spin and they know it. His gamble has paydirt written all over it.

Gordon Brown should sit at John McCain’s feet and seek the mojo that makes a man a leader.

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He came, he lingered awhile, then he left. I know he was here because I had a glimpse of him in Horseguards Parade with Gordon Brown, and saying a few words outside Number 10.

Oh, and he had a photo-op with David Cameron — the next Prime Minister — beside Big Ben (right), when Cameron presented him with a CD by The Smiths, apparently called “The Queen is Dead” — a very strange choice for a Tory leader.

But it was that kind of visit. Barack Obama was at pains not to look like a President-in-waiting to the folks back home, while presenting himself as just that to the foreign dignitaries he met. A weird psychological balancing act by any standards.

So how did he do?

About as well as he could have done in the circumstances. A black man as a potential President is a new experience for everyone. We all assessed him in our own way. I was struck by how unlike other black American politicians he is. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson both had that Alabama feel about them. A bit downtrodden, slightly angry, and from the other side of the tracks.

Obama is not like that at all. He comes across as an urbane, Harvard-educated, East-Coast liberal. There’s an elegance and poise about him that suggests he’s comfortable in his own skin, and not a trace of resentment against anyone. He reminded me of a typical English gentleman — without the accent.

I’m not too taken with his platform speaking style, though. It begins to grate a little after a while. His delivery is in short bursts of well-prepared sound-bites with a falling cadence at the end of many sentences and phrases. The predictability of this creates a mannerism which detracts from his meaning.

I much preferred Hillary Clinton’s style, particularly in the final speech of her campaign which, if you removed the over-done feminism and the achingly-Left liberalism, was of true Presidential calibre.

The final impression I had was that only Obama’s politics stand in his way now. If his voting record in the Senate is anything to go by, he may be just beyond the pale of electability to most Americans.

It’s certainly all to play for. McCain is a solid, if unexciting, candidate. It will take a real touch of class from Obama to beat him.

Remember the old song that begins: “Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, So let’s sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again.”?

You don’t need to be a grumpy old puritan to be thankful that a decade of overindulgence, bubble following bubble, and preening egos fed by Cheshire cat politicians whose every error is concealed by good economic tidings, is finally and emphatically over. But can we really squeeze some happy juice from the remaining husks of our collapsing economies and even Western civilization itself?

You bet we can. We’ll start small — just to get you in the mood.

Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, a brewing and hotels business, is quoted thus in today’s UK Telegraph : “… throughout East Anglia we are seeing fewer cars on the roads … That’s just one example. There are fewer people going to pubs and they are also spending on different things.”

Isn’t that what almost everyone has been working towards for years — fewer cars on the roads? And is he hinting at a curtailment of binge drinking, which has become a serious social problem in Britain? Coming from a brewer, that must carry weight.

In England, we were recently informed that unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe, thanks to the EU, and the same from the rest of the world, thanks to the Newish Labour government, would double our population in 30-40 years. Considering our population density is already ten times that of the United States, four times France’s and three times Germany’s, that would be a disaster and leave the country unrecognizable even to its own.

Now the word on the street is that half the East Europeans have left as employment dries up and the exchange rate becomes less favourable for them to send money home. The same is beginning to happen with all immigration as the government tightens up on benefits and entry restrictions, mainly, one surmises, to save money.

Better still, the twin projects of a government lacking coherence and competence, while simultaneously pursuing programmes of social engineering unparalleled outside the old communist world, are now exposed as lethal and highly unrewarding. Gordon Brown, a shambling, frightened figure these days, embodies the imminent death of this unhealthy movement. And it took the collapse of the economy to do it. We may regard that as a small price to pay.

I’m guessing that similar scenarios can be found in most other Western countries. In America, for example, where a liberal-left Presidential candidate has a real chance of victory, will a hard-pressed people vote for an untried, although worthy, man whose sketchy manifesto to date closely resembles Blair’s and Brown’s of a decade ago? Won’t they prefer the experience of an older man offering more of a hair shirt approach to the nation’s finances?

The greatest benefit of recessions is that they shake out the incompetent and the wasteful. Companies that should never have received the support of banks or private equity firms fall apart under the weight of highly-leveraged debt. It causes much hardship, of course, but it brings us collectively back to earth and to honest and careful accounting.

Foolhardy projects, like the euro-currency zone and the EU constitution, are revealed for what they are: the expensive fantasies of puffed-up politicians. They may just survive, unfortunately, but they will not be taken seriously in future, and the likelihood is that they won’t exist in ten years.

And what of all those little luxuries we’ve got used to during the past decade of higher disposable incomes? I always did prefer a measure of ebony tea in a cracked mug to a latte in a supercool coffee shop.

We may have had access to all manner of entertainments across a dizzying array of platforms, but in our exuberance we just didn’t notice that most of it was not very good.

Let’s face it, the good times are only really great in retrospect. As one who lived through the 1980s boomtimes in London, I recall them with some relish. On closer inspection, though, I can dimly remember the frustrations and problems too. What on earth did I do with all that money?

As a certain French general used to say, every weakness in your position can be turned to your advantage. That’s the spirit in which I approach the coming era of austerity.

How about you?

America’s Presidential election could be decided by which of the three big isms — racism, sexism and ageism — the country is least susceptible to.

The three remaining runners are a woman, a black man, and an oldie of 71. It’s a bit like the cast of characters in a satirical comic strip. Whatever happened to the seven boring dwarfs of recent memory?

The opening salvo of questions, though, is quite simple :

1. Do Americans want the Clintons back in the White House?
I would wager a big cigar that they don’t.

2. Is John McCain too old?
The country that re-elected Ronald Reagan is not going to be put off by a man of 70.

3. Will America go with Obama’s hard-Left internationalist agenda?
Apart from a few white supremacists, I don’t think this election will turn on race. Obama cuts across many traditional boundaries in the population and has an intellectual stature that suggests it will not. But in the campaign proper, his policies will increasingly be examined.

I understand that Obama has refused to pledge allegiance to his country. The American President is not just a head of government, like the British Prime Minister, but a Head of State, like the Queen. How can a man who refuses to pledge allegiance to his country become Head of State?

His wife seems to have given the game away when she claimed she has never been proud of her country — until now, that is, when she has a chance of living in the White House. In an American context, that could open up a chasm of resentment.

Obama’s policies remind me of New Labour in Britain : high public spending on social services, an internationalism that puts one’s country second, and a creepy social Marxism. As we have discovered, that’s a lethal mixture that progressively destroys the social and economic fabric of the nation.

Policywise, Obama seems to be like all the other Democrat losers of recent times — McGovern, Dukakis, Kerry, etc. In the end, he may well conjure up the same fate.

In a year that’s made for the Democrats, their two, admittedly impressive, candidates are likely to eliminate themselves by recent memories of past imperfections on the one hand, and an excessive zeal for the lost world of the sub-Marx master plan on the other.

This may just leave the field open for the galloping oldie. I must say, McCain would be my first choice if I had a vote. He’s a world away from the Neocon head-bangers who have dominated the White House in recent years, and his policy agenda is one of measured consideration rather than overturning the tables of the temple.

McCain is a genuine war hero. He spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam under extremes of torture. He won’t send American boys into battle unless it’s absolutely necessary. And, having a simple pride in his country, he won’t precipitately withdraw them either.

Oil was the real story of Iraq, and that essential commodity is still to be fought for. McCain is not going to leave the Middle East to Al Qaeda.

As for his economic policies, they can’t possibly be worse than Obama’s or Clinton’s — or even the strange excesses of George W Bush.

His master stroke would be to declare that he expects only to stand for one term because of his age — but will consider his options toward the end of a first term. He might also pick a genuine Presidential figure as his running mate in case of accidents.

My guess is that he will win in a tight finish. But not so tight that we again become absorbed by the hanging chads of Florida.