Less than two weeks before the elections, do you think Obama has victory in his pocket? And do you believe in a blowout victory?

We are ruled by political opinion polls and they would indicate that Obama has a really good chance of winning, but sometimes strange things happen and you can’t be sure until after the election. But he is ahead in the polls and you can just see from where McCain is concentrating his campaign that he’s having to narrow his focus, whereas Obama is broadening it in terms of the number of states targeted. You have Obama campaigning in a lot of states where Bush won in 2004 and you have McCain pulling out from states like Michigan and Wisconsin where Republicans at least have been competitive in the past. It looks favorable for Obama but I doubt there will be a big victory. The Democrats are going to win the Congress by wide margins though.

Do you think that if Obama wins it will be also, or mainly, because of the impact of the financial crisis on the campaign?

Of course the crisis was important, but I think McCain had already done something that would have hurt him eventually. He nominated as his Vice president this woman, Sarah Palin, who has no apparent qualifications to be president. The way opinion polls go in America is that people initially reacts in terms of popularity and excitement, but then as the elections get closer things like experience became more central. I thought that would have hurt him eventually, but it’s happening more quickly than I thought. It also took away the main issue that he had with Obama which was experience. So I think that was a disastrous choice. The financial crisis hurts McCain because he has trouble talking about it, he doesn’t know anything about the subject and he is very awkward when he discusses it, as if reading from somebody’s else script – and he probably is. McCain has had weaknesses that would have been apparent even without the financial crisis but I think that what the sheer length of the campaign has done is to bring out certain positive qualities in Obama – his calmness, his ability to stay above the fray, his intelligence – which are very important at a time like this. On the other hand McCain has shown anger, hotheadedness, lack of reflection in terms of the way he goes about things even on foreign policy…So I think the financial stuff has made a difficult situation nearly impossible for him.

You have written a lot about the issue of race, will it matter on Election day?

The issue of race is still there but it can be overcome and here’s how: voters can figure, well, there are certain things I don’t like about the guy but we are at a time when we need a Democrat, we need somebody who’s saying the kind of things he’s saying. That seems to be what’s happening. You see it in the Midwest, there are polls in which Obama is almost tied with McCain in states like West Virginia where the race factor was really important in the primaries and where it would have seemed to me that it was impossible for a black guy to win that state. At it might still be and it will still be a factor but I think it’s getting topped by the economy.
Then there is foreign policy, which is important in a kind of perverse way because as the economy gets worse people become even more worried about getting involved in new foreign adventures, especially costly one. So McCain was going to run on the surge, but I think the Iraq war remains as unpopular as ever and voters are very wary of electing somebody who will get us involved in new wars.

We are at the end of a very long campaign. Did you like it or did you expect more from the candidates?

I think those of us who followed McCain before and have written about him expected more from him, while he’s run just a gutter and irresponsible campaign. With commercial like the one which says “who is Barack Obama?”, where the answer is that he is a kind of African terrorist or something, McCain has encouraged racist reactions. For people like me who admired McCain, this has been a tremendous disappointment. If it had been George W. Bush or somebody like him it wouldn’t have been a surprise. There was a joke about McCain, we used to say that the media was his base – and it was absolutely true – but he has lost it, there is a lot of hostility toward him now and it shows in the coverage.

What about Obama?

Obama’s campaign has been very difficult to cover for a lot of reporters because they keep things very close to their vest. It’s hard to know what they’re doing but, again, his coolness and his calm during the last month has surely impressed me and it shows up even in conservatives commentaries on him, by people like Charles Krauthammer who says he is a first class temperament. I think he is “one people over” but we have to see, when he becomes president there could be a tremendous period of disillusionment.

With two wars, and the worst economic crisis since the Thirties, it could be easy to disappoint the voters. Do you think Obama will have to change his reforms agenda?

I hope not because I think myself that to get out of this recession we are going to need a lot of spending, we need big deficit instead of surpluses. I think all this talking about balancing the budget and cutting programs is just nonsense, it is just Herbert Hoover talk and it is distracting to me that the press encourages that. Infact we are going to have to stimulate consumer demand. I would like to see him go full speed ahead with national health insurance, put a lot of money into bridges, schools, electric cars. He’s going to have a Democratic Congress which is committed to that, he is not gonna have a divided government and he’s not going to have the kind of Democrats that Jimmy Carter had in 1976 when the party still had a lot of southern conservatives. Next one is going to be like a Roosevelt 1930s Democratic congress, it’s going to be to the left of him, so I would expect that the Congress would push him.

And he also has a huge movement to rely on…

We’ll see about that. I would expect that the Labour movement would revive somewhat if we really are facing the kind of economic crisis that seems to be on the rising. That would be more important than his movement.

What kind of team do you think Obama will appoint?

He’ll appoint some Republicans for sure. There is a big push in Washington to get him to keep Bob Gates as Secretary of defense and from my point of view that could be very sensible, because we are going to have to wind down in Iraq and he doesn’t want to be in the same position as Bill Clinton was in 1993 when he had this kind of antagonistic relation with the military that made it very hard for him to do anything. That would be a very smart move, if I was him I would put a Republican in a position like that. Not as attorney general but Secretary of defense is fine.

Do you think Hillary Clinton will have a place in a possible Obama’s administration?

I really don’t think so.