A hit!

A palpable hit! Charles Moore, in the Telegraph, carves the turkey that is the Commander in Chief of America's second hand dealers in ideas;

...people now see beyond the simple, wonderful fact that a black man can be elected president. Martin Luther King famously had a dream about the time when his own children would be judged not “by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. In the case of President Obama, this time has come.

And it turns out that his character is not that of a man who has emerged from nowhere to challenge the powerful few on behalf of the wretched of the earth. It is that of a media-savvy professor of an Ivy League university – comfortable with irony, more than comfortable with the sound of his own voice, confident that he knows a great deal more than most of us.

Which, as Moore recognizes, is the opposite of Mitt Romney who--as his practical accomplishments at Bain Capital, as Governor of Massachusetts and rescuer of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah--probably does know a great deal more than most of us.

Moore sees the crucial difference between Obama and Romney;

In Britain and, even more, in continental Europe, the people who bring their fellow citizens the news do not really see this. To them, Mr Obama’s combination of historically persecuted ethnicity and posh seminar tone is just perfect. It satisfies their mildly Left-wing consciences and fits in with their cultural assumptions. The chief of these is that the excesses of the West, especially of America, are the biggest problem in the world. Mr Obama comes as near to saying this as anyone trying to win American votes ever could. His “apology tour” to the Middle East early in his presidency remains, for the European elites, the best thing he has ever done. He is the anti-Americans’ American.

Mitt Romney is not. Although he is a moderate Republican, it is fascinating how profoundly he clashes culturally with Obama, and, a fortiori, with the European media and political classes.

The way Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did.  Romney has, from his background (especially his Mormonism) what

... is central to the story of the English-speaking peoples. Even today, it is what makes America new in each generation. Barack Obama does not believe in it – he does not even like it. Mitt Romney does.

 Next Tuesday we'll find out if a majority of Americans still like it.