A new slant on the US presidential race

Washington

I was watching President Barack Obama address the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, last week with a veteran journalist who has covered presidential election campaigns since the 1970s, and was hoping to pick his political brain and figure out what was going on and what was going to happen.

Didn't the 2016 presidential campaign remind him of the 1980 race to the White House, I wondered - pointing out that now, like then, the American economy was stagnant, wages weren't growing and the US was being humiliated by bad guys worldwide. The conventional wisdom then was that America was in decline and the Soviet Union and the radical Ayatollahs in Tehran were on the march. And there was no doubt that Americans were in a bad mood and very pessimistic about the future.