Christopher Caldwell

Two Sundays ago, I was sitting in the café in the Borders on L Street in Washington, a table away from a couple of middle-aged black men who were discussing politics over cups of coffee and great piles of books. One of them, wearing a black T-shirt with a Union logo on it and the kind of motley pillbox hat that was popular during the Afrocentric clothing fad of the early 1990s, raised his voice. ‘If they steal it,’ he said, ‘brothers is gonna riot.’ The ‘they’ were Republicans. It was the presidential election and the diagnosis was unsurprising. The belief is widespread among Democrats of all hues, views and regions that Republicans never win elections legitimately. They must either lie to the public or manipulate the vote.

Taking issue with the Americans’ Francophobia Washington DC On the night of the Arsenal-Barcelona match, I was on the train between Manchester and London when something happened that would be inexplicable to my American compatriots. Two English couples, aged about 60, sat across the aisle. They were what Americans would call middle-class, and they were tidily dressed: sweaters and ties for the men, sweaters and necklaces for the women. They were discussing the first Barcelona goal when one of the men loudly broke wind. This is not the part that is outside the American experience. It was rather that the guy followed up with a triumphant burst of laughter. His companions joined him. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ ‘Oh, you’re terrible!’ and ‘Oh, stop!

Washington In early April a silver-haired lady held up a placard at an Iraq war protest that has since been replicated on bumper stickers across America and blogs all over cyberspace. ‘Will Someone Please Give George W. Bush a B*** Job,’ the sign read, ‘So We Can Impeach Him?’ For partisan Democrats — at least those still smarting over the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about his office sex life — the sign’s appeal lay in its combination of low humour and righteous embitterment. But the embitterment predominates over the humour. Should Democrats win back the House of Representatives next fall, as appears more and more likely, the humour will fall away, and Bush will be impeached — whether he gets what Clinton got or not.

Washington DC George W. Bush announced during his State of the Union message that America and its allies will disarm Iraq with or without the UN. If America, as appears increasingly likely, gets war, it will be thanks in large part to Tony Blair and Britain. But what will Tony Blair and Britain get thanks to America? A typical American would answer (a) that's the wrong question, and (b) quite a lot. If Tony Blair is America's poodle, then his yap is being heard. Britain stands higher in US estimation than at any time since 1945. Recent opinion polls yield results that could make an American question whether Britain was a foreign country at all.